“It Was Literally a Trauma Narrative”: Examining Queer-Reader/Queer-Response Connections to LGBTQ+ Young Adult Literature

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Queering the Classroom: Queer K–12 Curriculum and Pedagogy (Table 13)

Abstract

This paper looks across three episodes offered by one focal student in a course designed to examine and interrogate representations of queer adolescence in Young Adult literature. In this examination, I trace how, for this queer-identifying student, the assigned course texts came to offer points of relation for this student’s discursive identity construction within the course. Additionally, using notions of affective reader-response (Coleman, 2022), this paper examines how this focal student came to both push against and reimagine the literacy normativies (Pritchard, 2017) of the queer YA genre.

Author

• Kyle P. Smith, University of Michigan