Young Adult Literature, Mode of Address, and Ideologies of Bullying, Harassment, Female Sexuality, and Power

• In Event: Doing Critical Discourse Analysis at the Nexus of Education, Equity, and Language, Literacy, and Teaching

Abstract

Presenter D explores the relationship between a reader and a text and locates that relationship within discourses of power, female sexuality, and adolescence. Over the last thirty years, American society and schools have struggled to understand and respond to bullying and harassment by young people. In that time, scholars and policy makers have worked not only to understand this phenomenon but to also create interventions that can prevent such incidents because the consequences of bullying have been shown to be so detrimental for all involved. Adult concerns with peer aggression have led to a proliferation of young adult (YA) novels that take bullying as their narrative focus. Such novels are popular among young people as part of their personal reading practices and increasingly are being integrated into English curricula in American schools for a variety of reasons. Presenter D will discuss a methodology that employs both a literary and critical discourse analysis of YA novels in order to undertake an examination of the ideologies of bullying, harassment, female sexuality, and power embedded in the novels as part of the narrative structure.

This approach uses a feminist poststructural theoretical framework (St. Pierre, 2002; Weedon, 1997) in order to complete two layers of analysis:  a textual analysis of the novels as literary works coupled with a feminist critical discourse analysis (Lazar, 1997; Davies, 2000) in order to understand these novels and their themes of adolescence, bullying, and female sexuality and the ways “in human relationships power is always present” (Foucault 1995).

Further, Presenter D will overview how the analytic tool of “modes of address” provides an understanding of how authors hail readers into the subject positions occupied by the female main character in the novels and how these “modes of address “continue, expand, and at times resist contemporary discourses on adolescence, female sexuality, and power (Ellsworth, 1997). Modes of address become then a welcome for readers both into the fictional world created by the author, but also inculcates readers into these discourses around power and sexuality that operate in their actual lives.

At the same time, Presenter D will overview the development of this methodology, which began as an ethnographic project seeking to understand in a more nuanced way the lives of early adolescent women as they experience, understand, and negotiate issues around sexuality, bullying, and a complex web of power relations among peers.

Author

• Cara Crandall