Abstract
This article examines four prominent young adult novels about bisexual protagonists: Julie Anne Peters’s It’s Our Prom (So Deal With It) (2012), Brent Hartinger’s Double Feature: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (2007), Lili Wilkinson’s Pink (2009), and Sara Ryan’s Empress of the World (2001). Defining bisexuality in terms of gender-plural sexual desire, it argues that narratives about bisexuals may impose essentializing identities, which resignify and redefine bisexuality through the use of stereotypes and the evasion of the sexuality and plurality of bisexual desire. By doing this, Peters and Hartinger, who represent the ideological middle ground in such narratives, ironically sustain the invisibility of bisexuality that they ostensibly resist. Of the novels by Wilkinson and Ryan, Wilkinson’s Pink is the most stereotypical and evasive example, while Ryan’s Empress of the World, at the other extreme, manages to avoid essentializing bisexuality, seeing it in terms of plural desires. If narratives of bisexuality are to help bisexual teenagers interpret their plural desires and fill the bisexual spaces or gaps in their worlds, it is argued that this necessitates a shift towards approaches, like Ryan’s, that recognize the variety and individuality of these teenagers.
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Notes
Social scientists have traditionally described sexuality either as a biologically essential orientation, or as a socially constructed preference. Some literary theorists, however, have used the idea of essence more broadly, untethering it from its claims to pure biology. Leo Bersani, for example, explicitly denies the bioscientific foundation of essentialist thought when he argues that “the elaborating of certain erotic preferences into a “character”—into a kind of erotically determined essence—can never be a disinterested scientific enterprise” (Bersani, 1995, pp. 2–3). It is this view of essence, as being part of one’s fundamental character which is “elaborated” or constructed from sexual preference, that I deploy in this article.
“PoMosexual” is a term coined from “postmodernism” and “sexual” for unlabelled sexuality.
Lydia Kokkola’s study of desire in adolescent fiction, for example, states merely that “bisexuality is treated so similarly to same-sex desire that [Kokkola has] not treated it as a separate category” (2013, p. 97).
In addition to the books discussed in this article, these are: M.E. Kerr’s Hello, I Lied (1997), Aidan Chambers’s Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999), Lena Prodan’s The Suicide Year (2008), Malinda Lo’s Ash (2009), A.J. Walkley’s Queer Greer (2009), Rachel Cohn’s Very LeFreak (2010), Katherine Scott Nelson’s Have You Seen Me (2011); Alex Sánchez’s Boyfriends with Girlfriends (2011), Mary Rawson’s All of Us (2011), and Sara Shepard’s “Pretty Little Liars” series (2006–2013).
Vanessa Wayne Lee (1998, p. 158) suggests, similarly, that “lesbian texts” offer lesbian teenagers an important “point of lesbian identification and community.”
In addition to It’s Our Prom and Double Feature, Boyfriends with Girlfriends, Postcards from No Man’s Land and the “Pretty Little Liars” series are also focalized from more than one perspective.
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Acknowledgments
An early version of part of this article was presented at the “Talking Bodies: Identity, Sexuality, Representation” conference held at the University of Chester in 2013.
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Bonnie Kneen is a lecturer at the University of Pretoria doing doctoral research into marginalized sexual desires in YA literature.
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Kneen, B. Neither Very Bi Nor Particularly Sexual: The Essence of the Bisexual in Young Adult Literature. Child Lit Educ 46, 359–377 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9237-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-014-9237-8