18 - Young Adult Fiction

Summary

Introduction

Adolescents occupy a liminal space in Western societies; their quest for identity, their pushing of boundaries, and their struggle to become “masters of their domain” (Halberstam 47) can lead to creative breaks with cultural traditions imposed on them by an aging populace. Similarly, veganism also departs from institutionalized customs; from novel food practices to questioning long-held conceptions of species difference, new ways of thinking are embedded in veganism’s philosophy. Moreover, it is younger generations who are driving veganism’s increasing popularity in the West. It is timely, then, that young adult (YA) fiction – defined as “genre books that … [are] written about and for adolescents” (Garcia 5) – is brought to the attention of vegan literary studies, with both YA and vegan literature reflecting, and queered by, these sentiments of revolt.

Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood, noting the propensity for queer readings of vegan literature, have argued that veganism acts as a challenge to “normative gendered and sexual identities” by expanding “the scope of queer ideas of alternative affiliation to include relations with nonhuman animals”; indeed, veganism could be defined as “an inherently queer mode of being in, and relating to, the world” (3). Similarly, James Stanescu has argued that vegan literary studies must be “queer … to break down the dualism between human and animal” as queer theory forces us to “accept the irreducible difference of the other” (33, 27).

Equally, YA fiction has recently benefited from centering queer youths – creating the new sub-genre “Queer YA” (Mason 4, 16) – and from modern analyses that argue that queer theoretical concepts are well-established in the genre. For example, in Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture, Derritt Mason follows Kathryn Bond Stockton’s argument that “the child from the standpoint of ‘normal’ adults is always queer” as the child “can only be ‘not-yet-straight,’ since it, too, is not allowed to be sexual” (Stockton 7). Indeed, Stockton continues, “children grow sideways as well as up … because they cannot, according to our concepts, advance to adulthood until we say it’s time” (6).

It is this conception of “growing sideways” that Mason adapts to demonstrate how Queer YA is consumed by an anxiety that is a result of attempts to mold the “queer child” into a young person expected to adhere to the disciplinary heteronormative structures of adulthood (Mason xvi, 15).