Monstrous Bodies

Recent works of young adult fantastic fiction such as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga have been criticized for glamorizing feminine subordination. But YA horror fiction with female protagonists who have paranormal abilities suggests a resistance to restrictive gender roles. The “monstrous Other” is a double with a difference, a metaphor of the Western adolescent girl pressured to embody an untenable doll-like feminine ideal. This book examines what each of three types of female monstrous Others in young adult fiction—the haunted girl, the female werewolf and the witch—has to tell us about feminine subordination in a supposedly post-feminist world, where girls continue to be pressured to silence their voices and stifle their desires.

June Pulliam teaches courses on horror fiction and adolescent literature at Louisiana State University. She edits Dead Reckonings: A Review Magazine for the Horror Field and wrote Encyclopedia of the Zombie. She lives in Baton Rouge.

June Pulliam

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 200
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7543-8
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1663-6
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments  7
Introduction  11
Chapter 1. Subversive Spirits: Resistance and the Uncanny in the Young Adult Ghost Story  21
Chapter 2. Blood and Bitches: Sexual Politics and the Female Lycanthrope in Young Adult Fiction  73
Chapter 3. “An ye harm none, do as ye will”: Magic, Gender and Agency in Young Adult Narratives of Witchcraft  123
Conclusion  173
Chapter Notes  179
Bibliography  183
Index  189