'I'm Fat. It's Not a Cuss Word.': A Critical Content Analysis of Young Adult Literature Featuring Fat Female Protagonists

Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. 315 Aderhold Hall, Athens, GA 30602. Tel: 706-542-7866; Fax: 706-542-3817; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://jolle.coe.uga.edu

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Content Analysis; Adolescent Literature; Young Adults; Novels; Cartoons; Obesity; Females; Literary Devices; Human Body; Social Bias; Fiction; Self Concept; Stereotypes; Dating (Social); Interpersonal Relationship; Parent Child Relationship; Gender Issues; Food; Feminism

1559-9035

This critical content analysis examines the representation of fat female bodies within and across four contemporary young adult novels, two prose novels and two graphic novels: "Gabi, A Girl in Pieces" (Quintero, 2014), "Dumplin'" (Murphy, 2015), "In Real Life" (Doctorow & Wang, 2015), and "This One Summer" (Tamaki & Tamaki, 2015). Guided by the theoretical frameworks of Critical Fat Studies, Feminist Criticism, and Reader Response Theory, this study uses the methods of critical and comparative content analyses (Johnson, Mathis, & Short, 2017; Sulzer, Thein, & Schmidt, 2018) to explore the tension between prose and graphic novels with regards to constructions of fat female bodies. As a result of this analysis, the following themes emerged across the texts: fatness defined in relation to other bodies, the conflation of weight and desire, young women's body surveillance by adult women, and precarious relationships with food. While the female protagonists in the texts under analysis demonstrate agency and complexity in the face of fat shaming, findings from this study reveal the visual nature of graphic novels make possible the ability to better disrupt narratives of fatness rooted in shame.

As Provided

2019

EJ1212457