This article explores how undergraduate students enrolled in a postsecondary course centering LGBTQ+ young adult literature came to discursively construct notions of queer youth. Braiding postdevelopmental and poststructural theories of childhood with queer theory, we interrogated how what we name as the (il)logics of adolescence shaped who and…

Part of a larger yearlong ethnography at a comprehensive, public high school in a Midwestern city in the United States, this article explores a telling case from a bookclub that was part of the school's Genders and Sexualities Alliance. Approaching curriculum as a question of what knowledges are valued in education, in this article I describe the…

One place to start understanding how pre-service teachers learn about contemporary young adult (YA) literature, especially those works that feature lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) and gender identity themes and characters, is through an examination of the YA literature course--a course many pre-service teachers take as…

As research on transgender and gender nonconforming children and youth becomes increasingly prevalent in literary scholarship, educational possibilities arise for teachers of children's and young adult (YA) literature in various classroom settings. This article provides a brief history of literature for children and teens containing queer and…

Although trends in young adult literature (YAL) indicate that authors are constructing more positive renditions of gay characters, curricular and pedagogical choices seem to remain quite unsympathetic and "conservative," reproducing harmful stereotypes. This paper contends that the kiss in YAL can symbolize the physical, social, and…

Drawing on and reexamining theories on gender and literacy, derived from research performed between 1974 and 2002, this qualitative study explored the gender assumptions and expectations of Language Arts teachers in a graduate level adolescent literature course at a university in the Midwestern United States. The theoretical framework was…

Counter-storytelling is defined by critical race theory scholars as a method of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told, including people of color, the poor, and members of the LGBTQ community. This article discusses multicultural young adult literature as a form of counter-storytelling, with an emphasis on how…

How do we become the people we are? Humanist common sense proposes that people are born with a rational "self." But poststructural theory proposes a subjectivity formed in interaction with cultural discourses. Poststructural theory offers teachers fresh ways to teach critical literacy and thinking and provides students with ways to resist ideas…