Fictions of Adolescent Carnality: Sexy Sinners and Delinquent Deviants by Lydia Kokkola (review)

In Fictions of Carnality, the first volume of the Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition series, Lydia Kokkola, professor at Luleå University of Technology, focuses specifically on representations of “carnal desire and the act of sex whether desired or not” (7) in novels and short stories that depict sexually active teenagers. She includes in her study an impressive sample of 200 texts written in English “since the Second World War and available in more than one English speaking country” (14). Through this corpus, Kokkola seeks to understand general trends, across national boundaries, in representations of young people’s physical and emotional longing. Readers will appreciate Kokkola’s lively voice and accessible prose, and a bibliography of texts analyzed from older titles like Jill Paton Walsh’s Unleaving to more recent work like Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight franchise, which underscores the wide range of narratives that Kokkola examines.

In each of the five sections of Fictions of Adolescent Carnality, Kokkola analyzes different tropes used to depict adolescent sexuality and desire and theorizes the implications these tropes have for power dynamics among adults and teens. Kokkola carefully positions her arguments in each section in relationship to previous work by scholars working in the field of children’s and young adult literature. Kokkola’s thoughtful engagements with previous theorizations of childhood innocence, adolescence, sexuality, and desire make her findings all the more compelling.

In section one, “Adolescence, Innocence, and Power: Sexuality as Power,” Kokkola provides a history of the social and ideological category of adolescence. She theorizes adolescence as an ideological category that emerged in the Westernized Anglophone world in the late nineteenth century. To theorize the representation of adolescents who are sexually active and/or carnally desiring, she draws on the work of James Kincaid and Marah Gubar. Specifically, Kokkola defines childhood innocence as a lack of carnal knowledge and argues that sexual awareness paves the way for a false sense that adulthood displaces adolescence entirely, that is, “the magical belief that a single sexual encounter can bring about the end of childhood” (35). This argument sets up the context for and frames the rest of Kokkola’s study.

In the next section on “The Calamitous Consequences of Carnality: Loss and Loneliness, Pregnancy and Parenthood, Disease and Death,” Kokkola details how fiction tends to show teens being punished, explicitly or implicitly, for acting on their sexual desires. Adolescent protagonists confront unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and even death. For one vivid example of punishment, Kokkola cites Meyers’s Breaking Dawn, which includes terrifying descriptions of the nonvampire protagonist, Bella, enduring a pregnancy with a vampiric infant whose monstrous birth renders Bella inhuman. Kokkola’s analysis suggests that the angel/whore dichotomy remains alive and well in such fictions, as ostensibly bad girls continue to get pregnant while their good girl counterparts are spared this fate. Kokkola concludes, “Most of the teenage mothers in the corpus are depicted as monstrous beings, whose bodies—because they fall outside the child-adult binarism—are abject” (61). Here, Kokkola makes one of her most important points, that adolescent fictions—however progressive they may seem—often retain a conservative standpoint.

In the third section, “Queer Carnalities: Adolescent Sexuality as Queer Sexuality,” Kokkola chooses novels that represent relationships between consenting adults and adolescents. She argues, “The novels depicting adult-adolescent consensual pairing challenge the view of the teenagers as less powerful than the adult and so offer a queer revision of age relationship.” She encourages readers to read “queerly,” refusing to accept the power relations that texts present (18). Section four, “The Beastly Bestiality of Adolescent Desire,” builds on “Queer carnalities” as Kokkola turns to depictions of monstrous adolescent desire in novels such as William Rayner’s Stag Boy and Melvin Burgess’ Lady: My Life as a Bitch. “When teenagers are compared to animals, they are inevitably presented as being less mature than adults,” Kokkola writes. “Their bestiality marks the impropriety of their desires” (170). In the final and most powerful...