Queering girlhoodrepresentations of sapphic adolescents in contemporary irish young adult fiction in english

Abstract

This research project analyses Young Adult (YA) literature with lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise queer female protagonists written in English by Irish women. This analysis comprises a variety of objectives, such as: providing a critical assessment of: the representation of the lives of lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise queer teenage girls in Ireland; an evaluation of how lesbianism and bisexuality have been introduced in Irish YA fiction; a study of the social changes that Ireland has experienced concerning the rights of the LGBTQ+ community; and an examination of how these are represented in different YA novels. Feminist and queer theoretical frameworks will be used to analyse a selected corpus consisting of different novels of YA literature written in English by women authors, and the significance of the representation of the different protagonists will be analysed.