"Maybe I am fixed": Disciplinary Practices and the Politics of Therapy in Young Adult Literature

In this article, I investigate the mobilization of therapeutic treatment as impetus for changing how adolescent women with eating disorders view themselves within three young adult novels: Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls (2009), Meg Haston's Paperweight (2014), and Julie Halpern's Get Well Soon (2007). I argue that while a positive discursive shift occurs within the novels, leading characters from talking about body-image to focusing on body-health, the deployment of therapeutic treatment as a mechanism for change actively reinforces the social systems of power that these texts ostensibly seek to critique. By situating therapy as a contemporary disciplinary practice of femininity, these novels demonstrate how clinical treatment functionally perpetuates the ideological notion that women are inherently lacking.