Abstract
Cruelty is an omnipresent threat in fictions for adolescent readers that focus on the formation of non-heteronormative identities. Historically, such novels have been quick to remind readers that Western societies still discriminate against subjects who identify as gay, lesbian, transgender, or queer. The result of this emphasis on social intolerance has been the construction of non-heteronormative identities as precarious, primarily because they occasion cruelty from the wider community. Using Phillips and Taylor’s discussion of kindness (2009) as a framework, this paper will argue that despite the repeated occurrence of cruelty in Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies (2014) and David Levithan’s Two Boys Kissing (2013), it is actually the concept of kindness which underpins the representation of gay subjectivity in these novels.
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Flanagan, V. (2018). “Kindness in a Cruel World”: The Formation of Agentic Non-heteronormative Identity in Contemporary YA Fictions. In: Flegel, M., Parkes, C. (eds) Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72275-7_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72275-7_13
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