© 2016 Sarah F. Sahn
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© 2016 Sarah F. Sahn FANTASIES OF CITIZENSHIP: ADOLESCENCE AND TEMPORALITY IN YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE BY SARAH F. SAHN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English with a minor in Gender and Women’s Studies in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2016 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Richard T. Rodríguez, Chair Professor Stephanie Foote Associate Professor Kathleen McDowell Professor Kathryn Bond Stockton, University of Utah Abstract This project examines how the figure of the adolescent is represented, constructed, and disciplined as a potential citizen in young adult (YA) literature at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Engaging the field of children’s and YA literature through queer and feminist theory, I analyze how the adolescent’s proximity to, but inability to fully inhabit, normative adulthood disrupts totalizing narratives of development and citizenship. Queer theory has recently attended to the question of childhood through highbrow and adult literature and culture, perhaps most notably in Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child (2009). Conversely, childhood studies and children’s literature have engaged feminist and queer theory, but have not yet attended fully to the potential of adolescence for theorizing alternatives to what José Muñoz calls “straight time,” the orderly procession of marriage and reproduction dictated by the norms of white middle-class respectability. Drawing on Muñoz’s work on utopia and Stockton on queer childhood, I complicate recent conversations on queer temporality, community, and the queerness or anti-queerness of the child. My archive of popular and acclaimed YA fantasy literature of the last three decades engages the growing pervasiveness of powerful young women protagonists to explore the complexities of community, belonging, and coming of age in literature for and about young people. As a locus of especially visible resistance to normative constructions of gender, race, and adult citizenship, the figure of the girl highlights the potential of adolescence for theorizing alternatives to hegemonic discourses of self and community. The project as a whole argues that recent YA literature imagines the adolescent as a figure for utopian possibility and critical citizenship—what I argue is a kind of transformative citizenship—engaged in ii interrogating normalizing discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and community. Challenging the notion that children’s and YA literature functions to inculcate young readers into normative citizenship, I show how even mainstream literature for young people is engaged in rethinking citizenship practices in communities and collectivities not defined by the nation-state. Chapter One examines the intersections of adolescence, temporality, and citizenship in Avi’s Newbery Honor novel The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (1990). Set aboard a sailing ship in 1832, the novel chronicles 13-year-old Charlotte’s coming of age over the course of her journey from England to Providence, Rhode Island. Her discovery of a planned mutiny forces Charlotte to confront her complicity with the systemic violence that underlies her privileged world, and eventually to reject not only the limited model of American citizenship dictated for her by her gender, race, and class, but also the imperative to transition out of the liminal space of adolescence. Charlotte thus becomes the paradigmatic image of the adolescent suspended in transition that animates my analysis: Removed from the orderly, linear conceptions of time defined by capital and the developmental imperative of what she calls her destiny, to become “a lady,” Charlotte finds axes of movement previously unavailable to her and chooses to remain in a suspended, unpredictable, and cyclical temporality that reveals how adolescence disrupts naturalized racial, classed, and gendered imperatives of adulthood and citizenship. Turning from historical fiction to medievalist fantasy, Chapter Two argues that the developmental period of adolescence and the historical period of the Middle Ages are analogous temporal “middles,” bracketed off but with a tendency to trouble the boundaries between past and future, fantasy and reality, the archaic and the modern, and the primitive and the civilized. Analyzing Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet (1983-1988), an early exemplar of recent trends in YA fantasy directed at girls, I argue that medievalist fantasy is especially iii well-suited to engaging the slippery temporality of adolescence to facilitate a transformative politics of growth and resistance. Focusing on the third novel of the series, in which the protagonist Alanna is adopted by a tribe of the desert-dwelling Bazhir people who live under the colonial rule of her native Tortall, the chapter shows how Alanna’s move to the marginal space of the desert stages potential for, and limits of, resistance to the patriarchal and colonialist power structures she is subject to even as she bears them with her. Chapter Three focuses on the relationships among the protagonists of the three loosely-connected novels of Kristin Cashore’s Seven Kingdom’s Trilogy (2008-2012) to theorize the potential of transformative citizenship as a source of community and worldmaking that transcends political, geographic, and even temporal boundaries. The protagonists of this YA fantasy series all possess extraordinary powers that mark them as dangerous to their communities and make them vulnerable to dehumanization and exploitation by those in power. Through their contacts with one another, they form an alternative kinship network that allows them to reimagine themselves as healers and protectors. Offered alternative avenues of growth from the monstrosities prescribed by their societies, their metamorphoses transform the world around them. In contrast to the utopian visions in Cashore’s trilogy, Chapter Four examines the limits of transformative citizenship in an analysis of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy. Katniss Everdeen lacks even the limited the privilege and access that allows the protagonists of Cashore and Pierce’s novels to bring about change in their respective homes. I engage the temporal disruptions of personal and historical trauma—a thread throughout this dissertation—to understand the impossibility of complete liberation from histories of violence and exploitation. Finally, I consider the utopic longings of Collins’s dystopia, even as it disappoints expectations iv of both the revolutionaries in the text and many readers who desire Katniss’s unequivocal triumph. Collins’s trilogy provides glimpses of utopia even in the midst of horror, offering a dynamic vision of a utopia that is always in process. Contributing to queer theory, children’s literature, and American literary studies, “Fantasies of Citizenship” shows how YA literature offers dynamic alternatives to stagnating visions of normative adulthood, citizenship, and futurity. Both no longer and not yet, the adolescent’s unstable temporality emerges as a generative site from which to engage processes of citizen formation, collectivity, and worldmaking. v Acknowledgments At its core, this project is about community; it never would have come to fruition without the personal and intellectual support of the many people who make up mine. I’ve been incredibly lucky to be advised by a committee of scholars who have been unfailingly generous with their time and their insights. Since we met on my campus visit to the University of Illinois, Ricky Rodríguez has been a constant presence through the process of conceptualizing and writing this dissertation, offering his feedback and support at every stage of the project. Kate McDowell has been an enthusiastic sounding board for my ideas as well as my process; I always look forward to our conversations, and they always feel too short. Stephanie Foote has a knack for seeing through the messiest draft to the kernel of what I’m trying to say, and for seeing the way out of the mess when I can’t. The first time we met in person, Kathryn Stockton wasted no time before asking me about my work, despite being at the end of a long day of travel; her work continues to inform mine, and I’m grateful to have had her feedback as well as her scholarship to draw on. Thank you all; I am a better and more confident scholar for having had the opportunity to work with you. The seeds of this project were planted in my undergraduate work at Tufts University. I’d like to thank Christina Sharpe and Lecia Rosenthal, who advised my senior special project, and Joseph Litvak, for his mentorship and advice during and after my time at Tufts. My research and writing were supported by several teaching release fellowships, conference travel grants, and a summer fellowship from the University of Illinois Department of English. The department’s support staff made the administrative side of pursuing a long graduate degree as painless as possible. Thank you all for your tireless work making sure this scattered academic turned in her paperwork (sort of) on time. vi I’m grateful to the wider community of scholars I have had the good fortune to share my work with at the University of Illinois and beyond. Members of the Youth Literatures and Cultures research group in the Center for Children’s Books offered invaluable insight on Chapters Two and Three. The members of my writing group helped me get through this process with fewer tears and more laughter than there would have been otherwise: S. Moon Cassinelli, Heather McLeer, Elyse Vigiletti, Elizabeth Tavares, Jess Wong, and Kate Norcross, I owe you all a drink. The camaraderie and solidarity of friends is essential to finishing any long term project; I’d particularly like to acknowledge Heather McLeer, Rebecca Stone, Alexandra Cavallaro, Jessica Erickson, Alaina Pincus, Michelle Martinez, Liz Hoiem, Laura Stengrim, and Jenelle Grant: thanks for fielding all the late-night texts, working alongside me, talking through ideas, listening to me vent, and coming to the rescue when I thought I couldn’t do it.