Becoming Bodies: Material Feminism in Children’s and Adolescent Literature Cover Image

O ciałach, które się stają. Feminizm materialny w literaturze dla dzieci i młodzieży
Becoming Bodies: Material Feminism in Children’s and Adolescent Literature

Author(s): Adrianna Zabrzewska
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Gender Studies, Essay|Book Review |Scientific Life, Studies of Literature, Sociology, Comparative Study of Literature, Book-Review, Philology, British Literature, American Literature
Published by: Wydział Polonistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: ecocriticism; feminism; material feminism; children’s and young adult literature; gender; corporeality; Roberta Seelinger Trites; disability studies; critical race theory; queer theory; embodiment

Summary/Abstract: Trites, R. S. (2018). Twenty-first-century feminisms in children’s and adolescent literature. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. As a review article dedicated to Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children’s and Adolescent Literature (2018) by Roberta Seelinger Trites, the paper aims to discuss the material turn in feminist theory and its implications with respect to research on gender in literature for young readers. After presenting Trites as a researcher and briefly discussing her earlier works, the author of the article takes a little detour to retrace various approaches to embodied subjectivity in feminist thought. An account of different approaches to the question of corporeality – as expressed in the writings by Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, or Elizabeth Grosz – serves as a background against which the theories of material feminists such as Karen Barad’s can be fully displayed. Simultaneously, this discussion sets the scene for showing how Trites’s employment of material feminism can be translated into research on literature for children and teenagers in a way that opens new fields of inquiry and new planes of interpretation. The subsequent part of the article discusses each of the chapters of the book to show how questions of mattering, becoming, and knowing in being intersect with perspectives crucial to contemporary feminisms, e.g. critical race theory, ecocriticism, queer theory, and disability studies.

  • Issue Year: 1/2019
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 259-272
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Polish