9 research outputs found
Beyond damsels in distress : female heroism in young adult fantasy fiction and fantasy role-playing video games
No full textThis thesis argues that an analysis of the fantasy genre through a girls studies lens reveals that diverse representations of girlhoods through female heroes can empower girls despite the genres patriarchal roots. To support this argument, I analyze representations of gender and sexuality in A Court of Thorns and Roses and Dragon Age. The first chapter argues that Maas cultivates many visions of the female hero through Feyre while negotiating issues of identity, agency, and power central to Feyres heroic transformations that empowers certain girlhoods. The second chapter argues that Dragon Age, although catering to the male gaze, becomes more progressive over time in its gendered narratives by educating players about queer identities and cultivating heroism through a sisterhood of side characters. The importance of looking at fantasy media with a girls studies lens is illustrated by the popularity of fantasy media and the increasing focus on girl characters
Reparative genre: Disability and girlhood in young adult literature
No full textCategories of disability, genre, and girlhood are dependent on time, place, and culture, and these categories construct norms by rendering other phenomena as unthinkable. Young adult fiction transmits, but may also resist, such norms. Young adult literature can bring together depictions of girlhood and disability within genre fiction to mount particularly effective versions of such breaks from norms in the 21st-century United States, thereby giving the genre reparative force. To illustrate this cultural work, this dissertation analyzes examples from three YA sub-genres—historical fiction, romance, and science fiction—in The Degenerates by J. Albert Mann, Sick Kids in Love by Hannah Moskowitz, and On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis. These authors use reparative genre to reject stereotypes and establish new disability-centered narrative patterns of girlhood. These new patterns thus revise conventions and expectations within a genre to suggest radical possibilities for disabled girls’ lives and futures
