Sexuality In Literature For Children And Young Adults

Expanding outward from previous scholarship on gender, queerness, and heteronormativity in children’s literature, this book offers fresh insights into representations of sex and sexuality in texts for young people. In this collection, new and established scholars examine how fiction and non-fiction writing, picture books, film and television and graphic novels position young people in relation to ideologies around sexuality, sexual identity, and embodiment. This book questions how such texts communicate a sense of what is possible, impossible, taboo, or encouraged in terms of being sexual and sexual being. Each chapter is motivated by a set of important questions: How are representations of sex and sexuality depicted in texts for young people? How do these representations affect and shape the kinds of sexualities offered as models to young readers? And to what extent is sexual diversity acknowledged and represented across different narrative and aesthetic modes? This work brings together a diverse range of conceptual and theoretical approaches that are framed by the idea of sexual becoming: the manner in which texts for young people invite their readers to assess and potentially adopt ways of thinking and being in terms of sex and sexuality.

Though discussing sexual material in novels aimed at the young adult market may make some individuals blush, the authors of such fiction often seek to represent a very real component in the lives of many teens. Unfortunately, authentic and teen-relatable information on healthy adolescent sexuality is not readily available, and sex education classes have had a minimal effect on positive sexual identity development. Consequently, young adult literature that contains sexual elements can play a critical role in addressing the questions and concerns of teens. In Sexual Content in Young Adult Fiction: Reading between the Sheets, Bryan Gillis and Joanna Simpson examine sexual material in canonical, historical, dystopian, romantic, and realistic contemporary fiction for teens. The authors begin with an exploration of sexual identity development and discuss the constructive influence that realistic representations of teen sexual behavior can have on that development. The authors provide a myriad of texts and examples that will help parents, teachers, and librarians better understand the positive role that sexual content in YA fiction can play in the socio-emotional and academic development of adolescents. The book concludes with an overview and analysis of censorship in the world of young adult fiction. In addition to providing a survey of sexual content in young adult literature, this book can help inspire adults to facilitate effective and responsible discussions about young adult fiction that contains sexual material. Featuring a "novels cited" and "works cited" bibliography, Sexual Content in Young Adult Fiction is an important resource that parents and educators will find particularly valuable.

This edited collection explores LGBTQ+ literature for young readers around the world, and connects this literature to greater societal, political, linguistic, historical, and cultural concerns. It brings together contributions from across the academic and activist spectra, looking at picture books, middle-grade books and young adult novels to explore what is at stake when we write (or do not write) about LGBTQ+ topics for young readers. The topics include the representation of sexualities and gender identities; depictions of queer families; censorship; links between culture, language and sexuality/gender; translation of LGBTQ+ literature for young readers; and self-publishing. It is the first collection to expand the study of LGBTQ+ literature for young readers beyond the English-speaking world and to draw cross-cultural comparisons.

American political and legal culture is uncomfortable with children's sexuality. While aware that sexual expression is a necessary part of human development, law rarely contemplates the complex ways in which it interacts with children and sexuality. Just as the law circumscribes children to a narrow range of roles—either as entirely sexless beings or victims or objects of harmful adult sexual conduct—so too does society tend to discount the notion of children as agents in the domain of sex and sexuality. Where a small body of rights related to sex has been carved out, the central question has been the degree to which children resemble adults, not necessarily whether minors themselves possess distinct and recognized rights related to sex, sexual expression, and sexuality. Children, Sexuality, and the Law reflects on some of the unique challenges that accompany children in the broader context of sex, exploring from diverse perspectives the ways in which children emerge in sexually related dimensions of law and contemporary life. It explores a broad range of issues, from the psychology of children as sexual beings to the legal treatment of adolescent consent. This work also explores whether and when children have a right to expression as understood within the First Amendment. The first volume of its kind, Children, Sexuality, and the Law goes beyond the traditional discourse of children as victims of adult sexual deviance by highlighting children as agents and rights holders in the realm of sex, sexuality, and sexual orientation.

Explores the highly sensitive issue of children and sex, offers advice on separating harmful from safe information about sex, and offers parents a guide to presenting the topic to their children.

* Instant NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY bestseller * * GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD WINNER for BEST DEBUT and BEST ROMANCE of 2019 * * BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR* for VOGUE, NPR, VANITY FAIR, and more! * What happens when America's First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales? When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius—his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse. Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through? Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue proves: true love isn't always diplomatic. "I took this with me wherever I went and stole every second I had to read! Absorbing, hilarious, tender, sexy—this book had everything I crave. I’m jealous of all the readers out there who still get to experience Red, White & Royal Blue for the first time!" - Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners "Red, White & Royal Blue is outrageously fun. It is romantic, sexy, witty, and thrilling. I loved every second." - Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six

Adolescence is a time of growth, change, and confusion for young women. During this transition from childhood to adulthood, sex and gender roles become more important. Meanwhile, depictions of females_from the hyper-sexualized girls of music videos to the chaste repression of Purity Balls_send mixed messages to young women about their bodies and their sexuality. Over the last several decades, authors of young adult novels have been challenged to reflect this concern in their work and have responded with varying degrees of success. In Learning Curves: Body Image and Female Sexuality in Young Adult Literature, Beth Younger examines how cultural assumptions and social constraints are reinforced and complicated through common representations of young women. Each chapter analyzes a recurrent theme in the history of young adult literature, including issues of body image, pregnancy, abortion, lesbianism, and romance. By examining selected novels for their sexual content, situating them within their social and historical context, and analyzing their discursive qualities, the author reveals the multitude of complex ways that society depicts teenagers and their sexualities and offers a critique of patriarchal culture that gives value to the female experience.

Knowledge about carnality and its limits provides the agenda for much of the fiction written for adolescent readers today, yet there exists little critical engagement with the ways in which it has been represented in the young adult novel in either discursive, ideological, or rhetorical forms. Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature is a pioneering study that addresses these methodological and contextual gaps. Focusing on texts produced since the late-1980s, and drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Kathryn James shows how representations of death in young adult literature are invariably associated with issues of sexuality, gender, and power. Under particular scrutiny are the trope of woman/death, the eroticizing and sexualizing of death, and the ways in which the gendered subject is represented in dialogue with the processes of death, dying, and grief. Through close readings of historical literature, fantasy fictions, realistic novels, dead-narrator tales, and texts from genres including Gothic, horror, and post-disaster, James reveals not only how cultural discourses influence and are influenced by literary works, but how relevant the study of death is to adolescent fiction--the literature of "becoming."