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

Zabrzewska, Adrianna

Abstract

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.

Citation

Zabrzewska, A. (2019). Becoming Bodies: Material Feminism in Children’s and Adolescent Literature. Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura, 1(1), 259-272. https://doi.org/10.32798/dlk.17

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Jul 24, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019
• Deposit Date: Jan 28, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 28, 2025
• Journal: Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura
• Print ISSN: 2657-9510
• Electronic ISSN: 2657-9510
• Publisher: University of Warsaw
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 259-272
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.32798/dlk.17
• Keywords: ecocriticism; feminism; material feminism; children’s and young adult literature; gender; corporeality; Roberta Seelinger Trites; disability studies; critical race theory; queer theory; embodimen