Abstract
Adolescence is a time marked by bodily changes and often by insecurities about the body. Currently, most research on young adult literature or YA focuses on genres that treat bodies like problems. Following disability scholarship, which presents a positive focus on differences as an alternative to the pressure of the normative body, this project examines the portrayal of strange or non-normative bodies in young adult fairy-tale retellings. YA is a popular genre concerned with identity and the positive impact of representation, featuring protagonists with alternative bodies like a cyborg Cinderella or a disabled Beauty. Fairy tales already thematize the body and adolescence: happy endings often depend on the protagonists' bodies, like Cinderella's foot, and depict reaching adulthood through milestones like finding a partner. However, their normative patterns are challenged in fairy-tale retellings, which are an ideal genre to investigate the cultural conceptions of bodies. This project combines methods from disability studies (e.g. Garland-Thomson) and second-generation cognitive sciences (e.g. embodied narratology). Using concepts like crip time and chrononormativity, this project also analyses the relationship between temporality, specifically happy endings, and the body, to explore strange bodies as a dynamic concept that may provide adolescent readers with positive non-normative body images.
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