University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Faculty Publications Library and Information Science, School of 6-4-2019 "You Can't Go Back to Holding Hands." Reading Judy Blume's Forever in the #MeToo Era Jenna Spiering University of South Carolina - Columbia,
[email protected] Kate Kedley Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/libsci_facpub Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Publication Info Published in Study and Scrutiny: Research in Young Adult Literature, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2019, pages 1-19. © 2019 Jenna Spiering, Kate Kedley. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This Article is brought to you by the Library and Information Science, School of at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. “You can’t go back to holding hands.” Reading Judy Blume’s Forever in the #MeToo Era JENNA SPIERING UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA KATE KEDLEY ROWAN UNIVERSITY INTRODUCTION “Look Kath…” she said, “I’ve always been honest with you about sex…” “I know.” “But you have to be sure you can handle the situation before you jump into it…sex is a commitment...once you’re there you can’t go back to holding hands.” “I know it.” “And when you give yourself both mentally and physically...well, you’re completely vulnerable.” Judy Blume’s novel Forever (1975) was one of the first young adult novels to tackle topics like teenage sex, pregnancy, and orgasms (Cart, 2016).