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“Beyond the Boundaries:” Negotiations of Space, Place, Body and Subjectivity in YA Fiction

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Abstract

Where and how do I belong? As Erin Spring (2016a) notes in her examination of space, place, and youth engagement with literature, “young adult fiction is fraught with implications for identity, of which place often takes center stage” (p. 432). Yet despite the ubiquity of adolescent characters’ negotiations within and across physical and cultural spaces in contemporary texts for young people, few scholars address the interconnectedness of those spheres with perceptions of subjectivity and the material body. Drawing on the theoretical framework of feminist cultural geography (Massey, 1994; Rose, 1993) and relevant scholarship on conceptualizations of the body (i.e., Butler, 1990; Longhurst, 2001), I aim to uncover some of the ways in which young protagonists respond to the perceived barriers, boundaries, and borders of their bodies, subjectivities, and worlds—including the subtle ways in which they actively shape and redefine them (Bavidge, 2006). In addition to examining the experiences of displaced or somehow othered protagonists in three works of youth fiction—Sonya Harnett’s Surrender, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again—I consider how literary spatial analyses of subjectivity and body might enable readers to critically reflect on the real world constraints and freedoms encountered by young people across the spaces and places of their everyday lives.

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Notes

  1. See also Glenn’s (2019) discussion of the pedagogical import of studying space, place, and identity in the edited volume, Engaging with Multicultural YA Literature in the Secondary Classroom: Critical Approaches for Critical Educators.

  2. In their examination of texts by Julia Alvarez, Brochin and Medina (2017) broaden the scope of space, place, and fictional youth to uncover spheres of confinement, transformation, and reproduction across and within real world cultures, locations, and social groups.

  3. See Probyn’s (1991) discussion of “the pleat” in her feminist theorization of the constructions and articulations of embodied selves.

  4. Erin Spring (2018), in her study of the intersection of place and embodied identities of Indigenous readers, expanded her feminist cultural geography and reader response framework to include Mona Gleason’s understanding of embodiment as a physical manifestation of social and, in Spring’s analysis, spatial relations of power—arguing that “encounters in and through places inform our identities, and therein the reading experience” (p. 148).

  5. Feminist geographers have long recognized the tensions inherent in identifying the experiences of manufactured social categories—including the potential for reifying the essentializing discourses around space, place, and identity that they seek to erode. See Jacobs and Nash (2003) on the problematic homogenization of group identities, and Haraway (1988/1997, as discussed in McDowell and Sharp, 1997) on the voyeuristic romanticizing of the oppressed.

  6. Expounding on studies of corporeality, this work further situates material and discursive bodies in and with social, cultural, and physical spaces and places—questioning, as Vicki Kirby (1997, p. 4) writes, “how it is that the cultural context that surrounds a body can also come to inhabit it,” as well as “the ways, in turn, bodies reinscribe and project themselves onto their sociocultural environment” (Grosz, 1998, p. 31). See in particular Elspeth Probyn (1991, p. 116) on the “compromised concept” of an ‘embodied self;’ Elizabeth Grosz’s (1992) discussion of “body-cities;” Robyn Longhurst’s (2001, p. 125) concept of “close(t) spaces” and the coding of specific bodies as “leaky, messy, [and] awkward” (p. 2) in public spaces; Joyce Davidson et al.’s (2007) volume on the interplay of emotion, body, and place; Pamela Moss and Isabel Dyck’s (1996, 1999) development of a “radical body politics” framework; and Heidi J. Nast and Steve Pile’s (1998) cross-disciplinary collection on the alternating filtering and fluidity of body and place. Although more explicit scholarship on embodiment and affect in geography has subsequently emerged, the plasticity and ephemerality of the ‘embodied self’ (Probyn, 1991) as it relates to space and place is also effectively explored in Massey’s (1994) foundational work. Citing poststructuralist Chantal Mouffe’s theory that “we are in fact always multiple and contradictory subjects, inhabitants of a diversity of communities” (Mouffe, 1989, p. 44), Massey (1994) espouses the interconnectedness and plurality of subjectivity, body, space, and place—seeking to invalidate the widespread marginalization and cultural positioning of female and othered bodies within the confines of certain physical and cultural environments.

  7. Despite this upsurge in geographical scholarship on corporeality—including attention to how individual bodies experience and perform religious, racial, sexual, gendered, and/or able-bodied identities—some might argue that the materiality of bodies is still frequently excluded in geography research in favor of discursive forms of identity (Longhurst, 2001; Paechter, 2011).

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  1. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Caroline Hamilton-McKenna

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    Caroline Hamilton-McKenna

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Caroline Hamilton-McKenna is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her research focuses on the critical spatial analysis of young adult texts. As a former public school teacher, she is especially interested in how the study of literature might engage adolescent readers in examinations of their own everyday mobilities and belonging.

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Hamilton-McKenna, C. “Beyond the Boundaries:” Negotiations of Space, Place, Body and Subjectivity in YA Fiction. Child Lit Educ 52, 307–325 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-020-09419-4

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