Abstract
The goal of this paper is to investigate the role of disciplinary power regimes of femininity in sporting institutions depicted in sports fiction. With a renewed interest in analyzing sports practices as specifically gendered, this paper addresses how contemporary narratives’ deeper address of the affective encounters of characters has reconfigured the sports literary panorama. As represented in Miranda Kenneally’s novel, Coming Up for Air (2017), friendship poses a challenge to the institutionalized, parental and gendered bodily vulnerability of sports. The analysis reveals how the adolescent body is manageable but can also contest, in direct questioning of the interests of authority. Enjoying friendship in sports, eventually, reveals paths towards more inclusive (bodily) practices in them. Finally, this paper speaks of the fact that juvenile fiction, traditionally considered an archive of negative influence on young readers’ behaviors, can exercise the opposite effect too.
 
 Article received: December 28, 2018; Article accepted: January 23, 2019; Published online: April 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper
 How to cite this article: Riestra-Camacho, Rocío. "An Embodied Challenge to Femininity as Disciplinary Power in the Contemporary American Young Adult Sports Novels." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 18 (2019): 65–77. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i18.295
Highlights
Prior to delving into the analysis of the novel, it is relevant to look at one basic Foucauldian discourse scaffolding young adult sports fiction, that of “disciplinary power.”[1]
The goal of this paper is to investigate the role of disciplinary power regimes of femininity in sporting institutions depicted in sports fiction
How affective dynamics function in Coming Up for Air reveals that teenage hood is a time to care for and be cared by friends
Summary
Prior to delving into the analysis of the novel, it is relevant to look at one basic Foucauldian discourse scaffolding young adult sports fiction, that of “disciplinary power.”[1]. The analysis will incorporate the notion of affect dynamics to examine how friendship frames Georgia’s resistance to disciplinary power against norms of femininity Punching above their weight: analysis of supporting characters in Coming Up for Air. Adults, whose role as educators is “inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching”, Foucault suggested, have “a relation of surveillance” over children.[16] In Coming Up for Air, Georgia, Maggie, Hunter and Levi, a group of friends, contest the sports university system by ignoring the expectations of parents and trainers. Chloë Taylor, “Foucault and the Ethics of Eating,” Foucault Studies 9 (2010):[73]
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