Review: Youth Fiction and Trans Representation

Abstract

Tom Sandercock’s Youth Fiction and Trans Representation (2022) takes as its focus the developments in transgender and gender-variant representation in North American literature, media, and popular culture for young people across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The author’s ambition to “offer a sense of the scope and diversity in contemporary trans representation for young people” (4) is reflected in the book’s broad corpus: young adult novels, graphic narratives, television, and live-action film are explored alongside children’s picture books and animated cartoons. In its subject matter alone, this book makes a significant contribution to YA studies by being the first book-length study to give extended consideration to trans-ness as a distinct area of LGBTQ+ representation. The book also articulates and models a moral ground-rule for the critical study of trans youth texts that is crucial in our current socio-political climate: we must acknowledge there is much to problematise about trans representation as it exists in youth fiction while giving no credence to hostile and dismissive approaches to transgender youth.

Keywords

• ya
• ya studies
• trans representation
• queer narratives
• gender-variant representation