The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature

The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature is a provocative meditation on emotion, mood, history, and futurism in the critique of queer texts created for younger audiences. Given critical demands to distance queer youth culture from narratives of violence, sadness, and hurt that have haunted the queer imagination, this volume considers how post-2000s YA literature and media negotiate their hopeful purview with a broader--and ongoing--history of queer oppression and violence. It not only considers the tactics that authors use in bridging a supposedly ＂bad＂ queer past with a ＂better＂ queer present, but also offers strategies on how readers can approach YA reparatively given the field’s attachments to normative, capitalist, and neoliberal frameworks. Central to Matos’ argument are the use of historical hurt to spark healing and transformation, the implementation of disruptive imagery and narrative structures to challenge normative understandings of time and feeling, and the impact of intersectional thinking in reparative readings of queer youth texts. The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature shows how YA cultural productions are akin to the broader queer imagination in their ability to move and affect audiences, and how these texts encapsulate a significant and enduring change in terms of how queerness is--or can be--read, structured, represented, and felt.

Angel Daniel Matos is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College (Maine, USA), where he teaches courses on queer youth literature, queer Latinidades, teen cinema, and video game culture. His work has appeared in Children’s Literature, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, The ALAN Review, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, among other journals and edited volumes. He co-edited Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (2021) with Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood.