UC San Diego

This dissertation examines the racial politics of models of girlhood in Young Adult literature (YA). I explore girlhood in relation to theories of temporality in youth and childhood studies as well as queer studies. I argue that YA engenders possibilities to reimagine girlhood outside of Western models of adolescence as a stage of development on the linear path to adulthood. Analyzing these engagements with girlhood and temporality in YA novels allows me to trace YA’s racial politics from its mid-twentieth century origins as a marketing category that tied girlhood to whiteness and middle-class status to present-day interventions by YA authors of color that center racialized girlhood as a site of resistance to gendered, racial, and age-based hierarchies.In addition to YA novels, I center online fan communities as a site where girl consumers are directly shaping the YA marketing category. Building on the field of girls’ studies, this approach allows me to produce knowledge not only about, but with girls, and to push back against child/adult hierarchies that children’s literature studies risks reinforcing if we do not consider real children’s perspectives alongside our own. By re-narrating the history of YA through its imaginations of girlhood and its fan communities, I make a threefold intervention in children’s literature studies. Firstly, emphasizing YA’s unabashed insistence that girls’ emotions, experiences, and worldviews matter shows how YA can envision anti-teleological models of subject formation that untether girlhood from the colonial imaginaries of developmentalism. Secondly, I make visible how whiteness has shaped YA from its inception while throwing into relief recent interventions by YA authors of color. Finally, my emphasis on teen consumers and online fan communities reimagines the relationship between the Child as a discursive category created by adults and real children’s lived experiences and contributions to cultural production. My new history of YA therefore illustrates why YA has become a site of both meaningful community for young people and of contentious debate regarding race, gender, sexuality, childhood, and nation.