An Embodied Challenge to Femininity as Disciplinary Power in the Contemporary American Young Adult Sports Novels
An Embodied Challenge to Femininity as Disciplinary Power in the Contemporary American Young Adult Sports Novels

Summary/Abstract: The goal of this paper is to investigate the role of disciplinary power regimes of femininityin sporting institutions depicted in sports fiction. With a renewed interest in analyzingsports practices as specifically gendered, this paper addresses how contemporary narratives’deeper address of the affective encounters of characters has reconfigured the sports literarypanorama. As represented in Miranda Kenneally’s novel, Coming Up for Air (2017), friendshipposes a challenge to the institutionalized, parental and gendered bodily vulnerability ofsports. The analysis reveals how the adolescent body is manageable but can also contest, indirect questioning of the interests of authority. Enjoying friendship in sports, eventually, revealspaths towards more inclusive (bodily) practices in them. Finally, this paper speaks of thefact that juvenile fiction, traditionally considered an archive of negative influence on youngreaders’ behaviors, can exercise the opposite effect too.

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