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  • Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites
  • Adrienne Kertzer (bio)
Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature. By Roberta Seelinger Trites. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018.

Roberta Seelinger Trites begins this volume with a definition of feminism that has much in common with the one that she used in Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels (1997). She also admits that she continues to "believe that most aspects of life are mediated by language and discourse" (xvi). Despite these links to her earlier work, however, Twenty-First-Century Feminisms offers a strikingly different theoretical perspective on children's and adolescent literature. It has much to offer anyone interested in how the principles of material feminism inform various contemporary feminisms and how reading literature for young people through the lens of material feminism can bring into focus similarities between apparently different theoretical approaches.

In her introduction, Trites identifies three objectives: "to show how authors . . . are employing various forms of feminism to break down binaries in complex and creative ways" (xii); "to interrogate the ways that material feminism can expand our understanding of materiality, maturation, and gender—especially girlhood—in preadolescent and adolescent narratives" (xxiv); and "to explore how representations of materiality affect the relationship between gender and empowerment in literature for youth" (xxv). In insisting that these objectives should not be regarded as a dismissal of her earlier work, she follows the example of Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, who suggest that material feminists share a desire "to build on rather than abandon the lessons learned in the linguistic turn" (Alaimo and Hekman, "Introduction" 6). Claiming that "feminist theory is at an impasse" because of the mistaken belief "that the real/material is entirely constituted by language" (1, 2), Alaimo and Hekman write that "we need a way to talk about the materiality of the body as itself an active, sometimes recalcitrant, force. Women have bodies. . . . We need a way to talk about these bodies and the materiality they inhabit" (4; orig. emphasis). In the six chapters of Twenty-First-Century Feminisms, Trites responds to this invitation by examining how more than thirty texts offer different ways of talking about bodies and materiality.

Trites suggests that while her earlier work "focused on how authors construct gender discursively," she now wants to ask, "Why do they do so?" (xxv; orig. emphasis). However, precisely because literary texts "are always and only discursive," her question—"What pertinence, then, does [End Page 476] material feminism have to the study of children's literature?" (xviii)—is not strictly a "why" question. Rather, it asks how we might understand material feminism as informing the practices of the writers, readers, and scholars who deal with texts. Trites's answer is that whereas the linguistic turn directed attention to epistemology—"how we know what we know" (xvii)—material feminism raises "metaphysical questions of ontology, that is, questions of being and evaluations of what constitutes reality" (xvii–xviii). Acknowledging that her earlier work emphasized "the epistemological at the expense of the ontological," she sees the principles of material feminism as permitting her to explore how texts "engage . . . child readers in ontological questions about how gender intersects with the material world" (xviii).

Trites's acknowledgment that "literature is representational" (xviii) exists in productive tension with the perspective of philosopher Karen Barad. Her first chapter, "Becoming, Mattering, and 'Knowing in Being' in Feminist Novels for the Young," provides a detailed introduction to Barad's theories and terminology (and use of italics). Challenging the belief in "the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent," Barad objects to "Thingification" (Barad 123, 130). To convey that matter is "not a thing, but a doing" (139), she coins the neologism "intra-activity," which "signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies" (qtd. in Trites 11). Barad prefers "intra-action" to "interaction" because the latter "presumes the prior existence of independent entities" (Barad 133). When Trites proposes that "children's and adolescent literature offers material feminism . . . the opportunity . . . to concentrate on a stage of life that is largely implicated in processes of becoming" (30), she is clearly invoking Barad...

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