Splicing Genes with Postmodern Teens: The Hunger Games and the Hybrid Imagination

Abstract

In “Portrait of the Female Artist as a Young Robin,” Mitzi Myers challenges readers of Georgian children’s literature to disrupt the traditional iconographic affiliation between little girls and docile creatures, such as mice and robins. She calls for adding a narrative layer to male-identified historical accounts and representations of the Romantic period to unsettle preconceived notions of young women’s roles in England at that time (231–32). Myers asks, ‘And if the wild boy child who prowls the Romantic natural world is joined by the good girl in the back yard, is it still ‘Romanticism’ as we’ve always known it? Does it remain the same literary body when so many cells are new?” (231). Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular Hunger Games trilogy carries these questions into the twenty-first century and into a not-so-distant future dystopia, where the good girl in the backyard is the new wild child, Katniss Everdeen, and the cells are added onto not only the literary body but also the human and animal bodies. In her now-classic “Cyborg Manifesto,” quoted in the headnote (and collected in Simians), Donna Haraway directs feminists to embrace the cyborg to resist the many-layered structures of patriarchal oppression in the late twentieth century. The Hunger Games highlights its hero’s metaphoric union with animals, especially the hybridized mockingjay, as a means to resist the colonial subjugation under which the teen tributes and their districts suffer.