“Starving For Justice: Teen Action Heroines and the Logic of Anorexia”
This project builds on feminist cultural studies of eating disorders and Leslie Heywood’s notion of “anorexic logic” to examine how the logic of anorexia resonates through the increasingly popular figure of the post-feminist action heroine, specifically within speculative fiction franchises for young adults. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, and their subsequent film and fan fiction adaptations serve as the primary case studies for my investigation. All three of these series feature a female protagonist with post-feminist attributes, and emerged as top-selling YA speculative fiction franchises in the post-Harry Potter era, giving rise to enormous fandoms that spawned thousands of fan fiction narratives in turn. If anorexia is a “crystallization of culture” as Susan Bordo suggests, then these series, as record-breaking cultural phenomena and female-lead multimedia franchises, are vital objects of study in this field. Although scholars like Jeffery Brown have begun to analyze the discourses surrounding powerful female protagonists in post-feminist contexts, the correlation between anorexia and these complex female figures has yet to be fully explored.
Keywords
Anorexia, popular speculative fiction franchises, action heroines, girl studies
Mentor
Dr. Irene Gammel