Bonnie Kneen Bonnie Kneen i(9615798 works by)
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Neither Very Bi Nor Particularly Sexual : The Essence of the Bisexual in Young Adult Literature Bonnie Kneen , 2015 single work
— Appears in: Children's Literature in Education , December vol. 46 no. 4 2015; (p. 359-377) 'This article examines four prominent young adult novels about bisexual protagonists: Julie Anne Peters’s It’s Our Prom (So Deal With It) (2012), Brent Hartinger’s Double Feature: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies (2007), Lili Wilkinson’s Pink (2009), and Sara Ryan’s Empress of the World (2001). Defining bisexuality in terms of gender-plural sexual desire, it argues that narratives about bisexuals may impose essentializing identities, which resignify and redefine bisexuality through the use of stereotypes and the evasion of the sexuality and plurality of bisexual desire. By doing this, Peters and Hartinger, who represent the ideological middle ground in such narratives, ironically sustain the invisibility of bisexuality that they ostensibly resist. Of the novels by Wilkinson and Ryan, Wilkinson’s Pink is the most stereotypical and evasive example, while Ryan’s Empress of the World, at the other extreme, manages to avoid essentializing bisexuality, seeing it in terms of plural desires. If narratives of bisexuality are to help bisexual teenagers interpret their plural desires and fill the bisexual spaces or gaps in their worlds, it is argued that this necessitates a shift towards approaches, like Ryan’s, that recognize the variety and individuality of these teenagers.' (Publication abstract)
X