Reviewed by: Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach by Derek J. Thiess Carter F. Hanson (bio) Derek J. Thiess. Embodying Gender and Age in Speculative Fiction: A Biopsychosocial Approach. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Print. Derek Thiess names the methodology of his study explicitly in his subtitle—A Biopsychosocial Approach—and readers should take immediate note because this study is all about its critical approach. Thiess' main intent is to demonstrate the efficacy of the biopsychosocial model, a leading clinical model of treating patients in health and developmental psychology, for literary criticism. As its name implies, a biospsychosocial approach to treatment stresses holistic attention to a person's physical needs, individual psychology, and sociological environment (13). Taking up Sherryl Vint's call in Bodies of Tomorrow (2007) for an ethically "embodied subjectivity" that values "bodies that matter," Thiess takes issue with the "social constructivist" approach of [End Page 412] many feminist and youth studies critics, which ignores important elements of identity, especially biological age (4–11). In his introduction and first chapter, Thiess engagingly critiques how understanding markers of identity, such as gender, class, race and age, as constituted entirely within social structures and discourses leaves theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Nancy Lesko no conceptual space for the "biological and psychological pain and pleasure [of] the individual body" (20). Bodies become abstracted and hence ageless, and this exclusion or abjection of the body does a particular disservice to those whose bodies are especially vulnerable: children and the elderly. Thiess seeks not to discard or reject social constructions of identity, but rather to include biological and psychological dimensions in the critical mix in order to ethically embody the subjects of literary texts. Thiess' first full application of his model looks at the character of Bella in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight as a 17-year-old girl in a "pederastic relationship" with a 108-year-old male vampire (43). Examining the sociological research that points to significant risk factors for teenage girls in relationships with older boys or men, Thiess argues that the Twilight series works to normalize such coercive relationships among female adolescents. Thiess posits that speculative fiction (sf)—or more often in his choice of texts, science fiction—is particularly well suited as a genre for his project because being less "constrained by physical reality, it allows us to consider topics such as gender in new ways" (5). Despite this potential, however, Thiess acknowledges that the history of sf is littered with novels, stories, and subgenres that mainly reinforce stereotypical patterns of white male power. To counteract this tendency, Thiess invokes Judith Fetterley's second-wave feminist concept of resistant reading, whereby the critic deliberately reads against the author's apparent intentions to uncover the text's blind spots, particularly with regard to assumptions about human experience. Thiess employs resistant reading to good effect in chapter 3 in his interesting analysis of age and care work (caregiving) in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). Placing Butler in the context of social constructivist views of youth that tend to treat children as miniature adults—where the "precociousness of children is often assumed"—Thiess shows that Butler's novels extend this idea "to the point of negating biological age" (71). In the dystopian Parable novels, protagonist Lauren Olamina is already a community leader and founder of a new religion, Earthseed, as a teenager, and feels a strong social imperative to teach and care for her younger siblings and other community children. Thiess argues that by reducing age to a purely social construct, Butler's novels overlook the "physical and psychological limitations of age and the stress of care work on the body and mind" (82). As in all of his chapters, Thiess marshals an impressive array [End Page 413] of clinical, psychological, and sociological studies to draw attention to the individual embodied subject. Thiess is to be commended for mastering large bodies of research that few literary critics ever touch. Thiess' book is the latest volume in Routledge's Children's Literature and Culture series, and from a strictly literary perspective, the book is an uneven...
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Jul 1, 2020
John Lannon + 1
Open Access
