Purpose
In an era when engagement in public spaces and places is increasingly regulated and constrained, we argue for the use of literary analytic tools to enable younger generations to critically examine and reenvision everyday spatialities (Rogers, 2016; Rogers et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to consider how spatial analyses of contemporary young adult literature enrich interrogations of the spaces and places youth must navigate, and the consequences of participation for different bodies across those spheres.
Design/methodology/approach
In a graduate seminar of teachers and writers, we examined literary texts through a combined framework of feminist cultural geography, mobilities and critical mobilities studies. In this paper, we interweave our own spatial analyses of two selected works of young adult fiction with the reflections of our graduate student participants to explore our spatial framework and its potential to enhance critical approaches to literature instruction.
Findings
We argue that spatial literary analysis may equip teachers and students with tools to critically examine the spaces and places of everyday life and creatively reenvision what it means to be an engaged citizen in uncertain and troubling times.
Originality/value
While we have engaged in this work for several years, we found that in light of the global pandemic, coupled with the recent antiracist demonstrations, a spatial approach to literary study emerges as a potentially even more relevant and powerful component of literature instruction.
Through the lens of feminist cultural geography, the authors seek to understand how film and television depictions of the violent white schoolgirl across the idealized space of white suburbia temporarily disrupt, but ultimately sustain, the borders that define gender, youth, normalcy, and deviance. The authors analyze contemporary cinematic and televised dramas, including Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, the 2018 HBO series Sharp Objects, and Cory Finley’s 2017 film Thoroughbreds to demonstrate how spatial dimensions of “deviant” white adolescent femininity enforce the boundaries of “normal” girlhood.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.