Girlness and Guyness: Gender Trouble in Young Adult Literature

Dear Diary,

Today, I got a package in the mail from Canadian Children's Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse (CCL/LCJ), an established Canadian journal recently relocated from Guelph University to the University of Winnipeg. The package contained twelve children's books. My assignment is to read them for a review article I agreed to write on the representation of gender in contemporary Canadian children's literature. I am imagining the best summer ever: swinging in my hammock, sipping ice-cold lemonade, and reading young adult novels. I love my job.

Dear Diary,

After a summer reading adolescent and children's fiction—lesbians involved in the porn industry, girls getting tattoos, sexual abuse, war, boys gambling, boys quitting school to play in rock bands, various kids in conflict with the law—I need to write my review article, but I'm now more in need of a quiet summer vacation. Turns out, my summer reading wasn't nearly as relaxing as I expected.

Not only was my reading mind-altering, but changes have also occurred at CCL/LCJ. After much discussion with the editorial board and other stakeholders, the journal has decided to change its name to reflect the broadening of its horizons to engage children's literatures and cultures not exclusively Canadian or print media. By the time I manage to finish my article, it will be coming out in the inaugural issue of Jeunesse.

Roberta Seelinger Trites literally wrote the book on young adult fiction, casting her astutely critical eye on the problems of the teenage problem novel. In Disturbing the Universe, Trites argues that T. S. Eliot's famous question, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" lies at the heart of adolescents' quest for discovering the power they have to affect their world. Trites states uncategorically: "Young Adult novels are about power" (3). She explains: " . . . although it [young adult literature] affirms modernity's belief in the power of the individual . . . it very self-consciously problematizes the relationship of the individual to the institutions that construct her or his subjectivity" (20). While I am uneasy about Trites's generalization about all young adult fiction, her point is well taken: young adult fiction is often about the individual's troubling relationship to the norms of the greater society, and the outcome of such books usually highlights the power of the individual to transform his or her world.

Perhaps one of the significant regulatory regimes that causes conflict in children's and young adult fiction, although not particularly singled out by Trites, is gender. In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler sheds a clear light on the complicated manner in which gender...