Reading Young Adult Literature Queerly: A Queer Literacy Framework for Inviting (A)Gender and (A)Sexuality Self-Determination and Justice

• In Event: 42.075 - Queering Identities in Adolescent Literature and Classrooms

Abstract

While there are a growing number of Young Adult Literature (YAL) texts that reflect the differential gender and sexual realities of today’s students (Author, 2014) there is also a growing phenomenon in adolescent culture, which shows that some youth eschew gender and sexual labels (Author, 2015a, 2015b, 2014c). Faced with these realities, literacy teacher educators and their preservice teachers, and secondary English language arts (SELA) teachers are challenged to mediate literacy learning that affirms these differential realities in their SELA classrooms. That
said, how can teachers move beyond discussions relegated to only gender and sexuality and embrace a continuum that includes the (a)gender and (a)sexuality complexities and
intersectionalities that students embody? One such strategy emerges from these additions of the (a) in front of both gender and sexuality, which demonstrate an expanding awareness that some people do not ascribe to social definitions for either. (A)gender references those who may
eschew gender, and its biological, historical and even social definitions and (a)sexuality refers to those who are not sexual or who do not identify with a sexual orientation. Placing these nuanced additions to the ephemeral “LGBT”… acronym, adds to the corpus of queering literacy practices
which both aids in and advances literacy teaching that can undo restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life, and honors them as separate and distinct categories. Introduced in the new (name blinded for review), a tool that both contributes to queering the classroom and reading YAL queerly, this model takes up the unhinging of (a)gender from (a)sexuality and provides principles and commitments along with subsequent strategies for preservice and inservice literacy teachers that supports them to develop and embody the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to help all students learn (NCATE, 2000) while simultaneously supporting them to remain open to redefinition and renegotiation when they come up against social limits. This paper will model this tool and engage the audience in practicing its application through young adult novels.

Author

• sj Miller, NYU Steinhardt - The Metropolitan Center