Let’s write about sex – YA fiction as a means of learning about sexuality

ABSTRACT

Judy Blume’s seminal 1975 novel Forever is commonly referred to as a sex instruction manual for teenagers in the form of a novel. My doctoral project ‘A 21st Century Forever: Learning about Sexuality through Young Adult Fiction’ explores how the creative writer can present honest candid sex scenes for teenagers that provide information while avoiding overt didacticism. Drawing upon Louise Rosenblatt’s Transactional Reader Response theory, this project supposes that the young adult reader can be engaged not didactically but aesthetically and upon further reflection learn from the fictional experience. This paper discusses how narrational point of view can be utilised to both avoid overt didacticism and imbue honesty into the narrative. By comparing two young adult novels that both utilise dual narration with two main protagonists yet use either first or mainly restricted third person voice and in an exegetical analysis of my own work in progress novel which is a dual narrative with a singular voice written in both first and restricted third person, I explore how the choice of narrator impacts the instructional nature of the text and how honest the sex scenes are for a young adult audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• young adult fiction
• didacticism
• transactional reader response theory
• dual narration
• first person authentic voice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Sara Hutchinson is a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She completed a Bachelor of Arts Honours Degree in English in the UK and spent over a decade teaching English as a second language. Sara has won local awards in Gympie for both her short stories and poetry. Her story ‘Lifeless’ which explored the use of second person narration won the best overall short story in the Gympie region Bendigo Literary Awards in 2012 and ‘Skin Deep’ won best poem in the same event in 2013 while her short story ‘A Letter Home’ placed second the same year. She has an interest in all genres but is particularly drawn to Young Adult literature due to its innovational nature.

Notes

1 ‘A genuine discourse of desire would invite adolescents to explore what feels good and bad, desirable and undesirable, grounded in experiences, needs, and limits. Such a discourse would release females from a position of receptivity, enable an analysis of the dialectics of victimisation and pleasure, and would pose female adolescents as subjects of sexuality, initiators as well as negotiators’ (Fine 1988, 33),

2 ‘There were other things I wanted to say about sex, but novels are not vehicles for unmotivated blurting of pet beliefs, so I gave Sibylla’s mother the job of working in public health and sex education policy which then allowed me to have Sib recall some of her mother’s enshrined maxims including things about safe sex, and that “drunk means no”, that “pornography bears no resemblance to lifeography” and that LGBTG are normal’ (Wood 2013, Guest Blog on The Midnight Garden).