‘Youth theory’: a response to aetonormativity

Abstract

This paper proposes a ‘Youth Theory’ of analysis which constructs youth as a site oftransition, rather than an ‘other’ figure, and examines the relationship that youngpeople have with the dominant social discourse (adulthood). The theory is similar toMarxist theory, except instead of focusing on arbitrary class barriers, it focuses on aculturally determined age-based power hierarchy. Fiction for young readers is unusualin the publishing discourse because the target audience of the genre does not (usually)produce the texts they consume. Instead, Children’s and Young Adult fiction (YA) isproduced by adult authors. This exclusion of the young readers’ voice can marginaliseand (eventually) colonise young adults as readers because it privileges the voice of the‘powerholders’, or adults. Young readers differ from other marginalised groups, suchas women, people of colour, and LGBTQ+ people, because there is no youth-specifictheory of textual analysis in the way that there is Feminism, Post-colonialism, andQueer theory. This paper addresses this gap in critical practice; it models the use ofYouth Theory by analysing contemporary fiction for young readers through an agebased interpretive framework. It examines how aetonormativity is portrayed in fiction,and how young characters are shown reacting to it.