How to Be Yourself: Ideological Interpellation, Weight Control, and YA Novels

Ginny is too fat. Lia is too skinny. You, dear teen reader, may also have issues with your weight, and we have books for you, particularly if you are female. Read them! With their guidance, you will learn to take control of your weight, wresting it from the machinations and manipulations of adult authority figures and the media. Not only will you be happier and healthier, but you will also blossom into a productive member of society.

If you have not encountered Ginny and Lia yet, they inhabit recent YA novels that seek to redress prevalent depictions of female teenagers. Virginia “Ginny” Shreves is the protagonist of Carolyn Mackler’s 2003 novel The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, and Lia is the protagonist of Laurie Halse Anderson’s 2009 novel Wintergirls. Slightly overweight, Ginny obsesses over her body and the reactions it engenders in family, friends, and classmates. Anorexic Lia obsesses over her body as well, monitoring her food intake and exercising compulsively. With their messages of body acceptance, these two novels seem to offer alternatives to much YA fiction, which frequently reinforces prevalent cultural messages valorizing thinness and equating larger bodies with moral transgression. On closer examination, however, both novels further the same ideological process they ostensibly criticize, working only to author an alternative template for its expression. These adult-authored books guide readers through a policing of their bodies, intervening between a girl and her appetites.

Young adult literature often showcases ideological interpellation on a general scale, as adolescent characters become aware of social power structures and learn how to operate within them. As Roberta Seelinger Trites writes, adolescent novels focus on protagonists who “learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they must function, including family; school; the church; social constructions of sexuality, gender, race, class; and cultural mores surrounding death” (3). While this negotiation requires intellectual compliance, ideology does not exist solely in ideas but in actions and practices as well. Ideological interpellation has a strong corporeal element, and with its ideological thrust, YA literature works to regulate how adolescents shape and then inhabit their bodies. Characters in young adult novels demonstrate how to affect—in a literal, bodily way—the “reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology” (Althusser 133). Typically written by adults, YA novels inevitably contain an adult viewpoint and agenda that Perry Nodelman has dubbed “the hidden adult.” The messages transmitted have physical ramifications, given that a focus on the body serves to make teen readers aware of their own physical presence outside of the imagined space of reading. For better or for worse, the novels ask readers to identify with the protagonists and to recognize certain eating practices and behaviours as unhealthy and unproductive.

Considered as part of a broader ideological phenomenon, YA novels work alongside magazines and other media in targeting young girls and featuring pervasive, often explicit and decidedly gendered directives for makeup, clothing, exercise, and diet. Instead of including step-by-step instructions or glossy photographs of supposed ideals, YA novels provide models for behaviour by showing characters dealing with rules about self-presentation. In particular, such novels often regulate body size and appropriate eating; they reward characters who lose weight through dieting and, in doing so, work to circumscribe the corporeal experience of adolescence. In her 1998 article “The Portrayal of Obese Adolescents,” Rachel Beineke describes her search for protagonists that reflected her obese, female adolescent self. She discovered novels that target middle-grade audiences primarily but included some YA titles, among them Paula Danziger’s The Cat Ate My Gym Suit, Jan Greenberg’s The Pig-Out Blues, and Robert Lipsyte’s One Fat Summer. The plots of these novels resemble the narratives of recent YA texts such as Mackler’s The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, Sasha Paley’s Huge, and Donna Cooner’s Skinny:

The novels look at the pressure families place on their children to lose weight and even those who neglect their children because they are overweight. The books also look at...