This is Me, This is Who You Think I Am: Disgust and the Liminal Agency of Young Adolescents

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of liminal teen agency in Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals and Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels Like the Movies. By focusing on two teen characters from working class families, one female, one queer, I investigate how teens assert their autonomy while still living under the constraints of classism and (hetero)sexism. While these teens are able to retain some form of autonomy, I argue that their agency is often obscured or overwritten by the disgust reactions of other characters in each novel. Drawing on affect theory, particularly Sara Ahmed’s body of work, Jonathan Dollimore, and Sianne Ngai, and drawing on Joan Sangster’s work on the construction of female delinquency, I investigate the significance of the disgust reaction, and how the reaction is a means of reasserting power over the willful, resistant teen body. As the Canada Reads competition reveals, the middle class, cis-hetero readerly discomfort with these novels becomes an avenue through which this literature is deemed “unpalatable,” providing a justification to doubt the testimony of narrators like Baby and Jude. This thesis is ultimately an intervention into doubted testimony, and demonstrates how affective disgust is the source of doubt. Since agency and testimony are tightly intertwined in each novel, doubting testimony becomes a violent form of denying these characters, and the authors, agency.