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

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.