Creating Spaces of Freedom for Gender and Sexuality for Queer Girls in Young Adult Literature

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

Abstract

This paper looks at characters in a YA novel to examine the spaces girls inhabit between the always, already overdetermined expressions of femininity in adolescence (Tolman, 1994a, 2006) and the stereotypical expectations of masculinity or a rejection of femininity for girls desiring
girls (Driver, 2007), to find spaces that YA characters queer as they resist being defined by preexisting categories. Jesse and Emily in The Difference Between You and Me by Madeleine George struggle within the confines of femininity to find a space for their gender and sexuality expression within the limitations, both on gender and sexuality, imposed by the expectations of adolescent girlhood. Research on dominant idealized images for girls tells us that at adolescence, if not before, the possibilities for girls’ identities become fairly foreclosed. Girls are expected to
become passive about their bodily wants and needs, to disavow hunger and desire and to carefully manage their feelings so they don’t seem too needy, too emotional, or too mean (American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualizaiton of Girls, 2007; Brown, 1997; Fine, 1988; Tolman, 1994b, 2006). Queer girls do not escape these heteronormative and gender normative stereotypes, and they are also subject to specifically lesbian stereotypes.
Limiting the gender expression of queer girls, either by discursive constructions within lesbian communities or in popular culture may make it harder for queer girls examining their identifications to find a representation of themselves, or to understand where they fit in community (Eves, 2004).

Gender is contested, discussed, challenged and debated out loud by characters in The Difference Between You and Me. Characters notice and comment on other character’s gender
expression, or on their own expressions of gender. The link between gender and sexuality is not assumed, nor does it represent a simple, clear relationship. Both Jesse and Emily queer gender in their own way. Each girl employs a technology of the self “that permit individuals to effect by
their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own souls, thoughts, conduct and ways of being” (Foucault, 1998, p. 18) in which they each push against the boundaries of allowed expressions and possible subjectivities to create a self in which they can
express their desires. In this self-expression each girl follows “an ethics of pleasure [that] allows for the recognition of individual agency in their own conduct and pursuit of pleasure” (Rasmussen, 2006, p. 217). The examples of girls desiring girls in Madeleine George’s The Difference Between You and Me pull back the curtain of gender performance and desire to show the complex negotiations of identity that take place in each of these girls thoughts. George gives
her characters language for both their gender and their sexuality desires, and this language allows readers to experience the narrators’ explorations of the queer possibilities for their present and
future.

Author

• Darla Linville, Georgia Regents University