{"title":"Getting Better:","authors":"L. V. Schaik, I. Kickbusch","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.10","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126664486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Works Cited","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"129 17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132879161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Back Matter","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124469935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Immaturity: Reflections on the “Great (Queer) YA Debate”","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This book’s conclusion reiterates the argument that queer YA is an anxious genre that perpetually rehearses a nervous uncertainty about its own constitution. Mason steps back to consider queer YA’s relationship to children’s literature more broadly, entering the discussion through a concept developed in Beverley Lyon Clark’s Kiddie Lit: the “anxiety of immaturity” that circulates around and within children’s literature and its criticism. Mason revisits the “Great YA Debate” of 2014, which followed a Slate piece by Ruth Graham entitled “Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Young Adult Books.” This debate included high profile pieces by Christopher Beha and A.O. Scott in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, both of which evince a profound ambivalence about whether or not adults should be reading young adult literature. These conversations, Mason concludes, illustrate how young adult literature continues to be an unceasing source of adult anxiety.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128665464","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visibility:","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126186373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"CONCLUSION","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"273 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124230562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visibility: Growing Sideways in I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.1","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter revisits the first-ever young adult book with gay content, John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip., originally published in 1969. Mason finds value in elements of this novel that have been critiqued over the years: invisibilities, ambiguities, nonteleological ways of conceiving growth, and, specifically, how the protagonist never has a “coming out” moment. Donovan’s adolescent protagonist, Davy, resists what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls, in The Queer Child, “the vertical, forward-motion metaphor of growing up,” instead “growing sideways” through his relationship with his pet dachshund, Fred. This novel, Mason argues—so often lambasted for its hopelessness, stereotypes, and omissions—is a lot queerer than it may initially appear, and much more relevant to contemporary notions of sexuality and queerness than many critics have suggested.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"467 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115896478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Acknowledgments","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129762960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Getting Better: Children’s Literature Theory and the It Gets Better Project1","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers Dan Savage and Terry Miller’s It Gets Better project, an anti-bullying YouTube campaign that launched in 2010 following a rash of queer youth suicides, and argues that this project is a site of convergence for children’s literature and adult fictions. Mason suggests that the circulation and adaptation of cultural texts like It Gets Better across and through multiple genres—what he refers to, after Kathryn Bond Stockton, as a text and/or genre’s “sideways growth”—challenge critics to widen their theoretical lenses for the study of young people’s texts and culture. The book version of It Gets Better engages in a repetitive anxious rehearsal of its own metanarrative of “getting better” and renders the project (im)possible, Mason argues, drawing on Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan. While It Gets Better fails politically, it succeeds nonetheless at generating critical cultural discourse about how adults address queer youth.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130827145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dystopia: Queer Sex and the Unbearable in Grasshopper Jungle","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter draws on Andrew Smith’s 2014 novel Grasshopper Jungle to explore the representation of queerness as a locus of dystopian adolescent experiences and, by hyperbolic extension, the cause of the apocalypse. Smith’s novel satirically amplifies the idea that adolescence is itself a kind of dystopia, and simultaneously points to how queer sex is a kind of darkness—or invisibility—often “experienced as unbearable,” in Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s words, by critics of queer young adult literature. Austin, Grasshopper Jungle’s history-obsessed narrator, records in astonishing detail the world’s destruction by mutant bugs, yet Austin’s moment of sexual intimacy with his male best friend remains a striking silence in his otherwise scrupulous account. This chapter concludes that Grasshopper Jungle’s excessive rendering of YA’s storm, stress, darkness, and violence ironically makes visible the novel’s unwillingness to confront the unbearability associated with queer sex.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"187 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"113981425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}