{"title":"Not Getting Better: Sex and Self-Harm in It Gets Better / Glee Fanfiction","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how fanfiction writers deploy characters from the television show Glee in the context of the It Gets Better anti-bullying YouTube project to imagine scenarios where the project’s teleological narrative fails to describe the lived experiences of queer youth. Glee reached peak popularity in 2010–2011, the year that It Gets Better was launched and queer YA began undergoing a publishing boom. In fanfiction that combines Glee with It Gets Better, fans repurpose It Gets Better to bring critical elements to the YouTube project that are missing from its official stories: sexual pleasure, and the possibility that it doesn’t always get better. These traces in material culture of young people writing back to It Gets Better, Mason concludes, illustrate problems with Jacqueline Rose’s argument about the untouched “middle space” between adult authors of children’s literature and the genre’s young audiences.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"81 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":"126012674","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":"Risk: The Queer Pedagogy of The Man Without a Face1","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter illustrates how queer young adult literature might provide more nuanced versions of risk than the limited yet pervasive narrative of “at-risk.” Mason challenges the idea that “risk,” when associated with queer youth, necessarily entails harm and violence; he considers instead the pleasurable risks offered by queerness. This chapter rethinks the assumed constitution of risk by asking: at-risk of what? What does it mean for queer youth to actively “risk” (as a verb) versus being labelled as “at-risk”? Mason’s alternate version of risk emerges from Isabelle Holland’s 1972 novel The Man Without a Face, which is often censured by contemporary critics for its ostensibly outdated and problematic content, including an intimate teacher/student relationship. Drawing on Deborah Britzman, Mason argues that this relationship offers a model of queer pedagogy that illuminates the productive and pleasurable aspects of risk, including risk’s potential for altering our approaches to sexuality and relationality.","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":"125774685","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":"HIV/AIDS: Playing with Failure in Caper in the Castro and Two Boys Kissing","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter puts into conversation two temporally and formally distant texts: C.M. Ralph’s video game Caper in the Castro, created during the height of the AIDS crisis in 1989 and recently restored in 2017; and David Levithan’s 2013 young adult novel Two Boys Kissing, which is set in the present-day but narrated by a ghostly chorus of gay men—called the “shadow uncles”—who died during the worst of the AIDS epidemic. As a video game, Mason argues, Castro allows us to play with and feel the anxieties about HIV/AIDS that continue to circulate in queer YA and its criticism—including Levithan’s novel, which confines HIV/AIDS to historical trappings, keeping it detached from the social worlds of its young contemporary protagonists. This is consistent with the treatment of HIV/AIDS elsewhere in young adult literature, which habitually mis- and underrepresents the virus in order to preserve the innocence of its protagonists.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"9 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":"134279070","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":"Notes on an Anxious Genre: Queer Young Adult Literature and Culture","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the emergence of queer themes and characters in young adult literature, as well as critical commentary on queer YA, to demonstrate how anxiety is the affective form that best characterizes this subgenre of children’s literature. Mason argues that, in the long tradition of children’s literature criticism, queer YA criticism functions as an illuminating index of anxieties about how adults address queer youth. This chapter draws on sociological work on adolescence, as well as psychoanalytic theorists Adam Phillips and Julia Kristeva, to illustrate how adolescence and young adult literature are themselves the products of adult anxiety. Anxiety characterizes the affective economy through which queer young adult literature circulates, Mason argues, while itself evincing a queer temporality that places delay and forward-oriented growth in tension with one another. Overall, Mason demonstrates the utility of children’s literature and its theories for thinking more broadly about adult concerns and anxieties.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"208 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":"115902786","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":"Horror and Camp: Monsters and Wizards and Ghosts (Oh My!) in Big Mouth","authors":"Derritt Mason","doi":"10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496830982.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter moves readers from Andrew Smith’s adolescence-as-dystopia to the popular animated Netflix series Big Mouth, which represents adolescence as a horror show. Like Grasshopper Jungle, Big Mouth provides audiences with monstrous avatars for the storm and stress of adolescence. Instead of horny, rampaging mutant mantises, however, Big Mouth offers viewers Hormone Monsters, haunted houses, ghosts, and other Gothic tropes as embodiments of those anxieties that surround puberty and its horrifying humiliations. Unlike Grasshopper Jungle, Big Mouth universalizes queerness, celebrates the polymorphous perversity of childhood, and uses camp to defuse many of the anxieties that attend other representations of adolescent sexuality. Big Mouth offers us a kind of camp with strong ties to shame—what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls “dark camp”—and illustrates how shame and debasement can function as a powerful model of relationality, one that unites the show’s young protagonists through shared queer feelings.","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"5 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":"130517440","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":"Horror and Camp:","authors":"","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fkgcb9.9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":296955,"journal":{"name":"Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture","volume":"104 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114002287","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}