Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites

Abstract

Reviewed by: Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature by Roberta Seelinger Trites Amy L. Montz (bio) Roberta Seelinger Trites. Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature. UP of Mississippi, 2018. Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature introduces theories of material feminism that have been developed within the twenty years since Trites published her ground-breaking study, Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels (1997). In this present text, Trites argues that despite the critical interventions made by feminist scholars during the 1990s and 2000s, "media distortions" often cause her students to misunderstand feminism. She states that she writes this book in [End Page 339] particular response to the "'backlash' that Feminist Studies has faced in the first part of the twenty-first century" (xi). Trites accounts for the difficulties she has faced in the classroom in her effort to convince students that feminism is not equivalent to misandry and thus that they are, in fact, feminists: after all, she argues, feminism is simply "the belief that all people should have equal rights under the law, regardless of race, gender, orientation, religion, ability, social class, ethnicity, or any other factor" (xi-xii). One corrective to this misunderstanding and indeed purposeful miscasting of feminism is, Trites maintains, the bold work happening within the children's, adolescent, young adult, and new adult publishing industry. Trites states that many of these texts aim to show feminism as "break[ing] down binaries in complex and creative ways that empower girls regardless of whether they identify with the gender they were assigned at birth" (xii). Of particular concern to Trites is identifying "injustice": she argues that it "is neither strident nor toxic to identify injustice, especially when that injustice is leveled against people who are not yet fully enfranchised because of their age" (xii). Such a bold thesis is fulfilled over the next six chapters, which are respectively devoted to the concept of "becoming" (chapter 1), race and materiality (chapter 2), ecofeminism (chapter 3), speculative fiction (chapter 4), gender identity and sexuality (chapter 5), and disability studies (chapter 6). Each chapter is set up in similar ways: Trites begins with a breakdown of the relevant work over the past twenty to thirty years in material feminism, paying particular attention to groundbreaking works examining children's and young adult literatures before she moves into theoretical readings of a set of texts relevant to the argument of the chapter. Chapter 4 on Speculative Fiction, for example, examines Suzanne Collins's popular Hunger Games trilogy as well as more recent works on cyborgs (using Donna Haraway's influential "Cyborg Manifesto" as her leading theoretical framework). Trites explores the "false binary represented by the mind/body split" (99), using Lissa Price's Starters as her exemplary text. In Starters, youth (held by the Starters) is prized by the Elderly (the Enders), who occupy Starters' bodies to reexperience being a teenager. The body is the Starter's, but the mind is the Ender's, disrupting the "Cartesian split" (99). Each chapter then concludes with a summation of the major theories discussed and a look forward to the next chapter's work. Of all the excellent chapters in Trites's work, I found the chapters on ecofeminism and gender identity and sexuality to be most groundbreaking. Trites argues that "Ecofeminism and material feminism are interrelated, especially in the way that ecofeminism insists on the agency of the natural world" (59). Using critics such as Ynestra King, Nancy Tuana, and Alice Curry to set up an argument about ecofeminist literature for the young adult audience, Trites argues that this literature is "uniquely positioned as a mechanism by which [End Page 340] to explore the intersubjective and interactionist relationships people develop by interacting with the environment as they mature" (61). This maturing is seen in several ecofeminist young adult novels—realist, speculative, or magical realist—as the protagonists of these novels (Heaven, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, and Ninth Ward) interact with their environments and encounter social injustice. In her reading of Jewell Parker Rhodes' Ninth Ward, for example, Trites argues that Rhodes' depiction of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina demonstrates...