Young Adult Romance Novels From The 1950s And 1960s
Introduction:
Young adult or YA books such as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Warcross by Marie Lu are well known for their messages that celebrate empowerment and individual choice. This does, however, pose an interesting question, do these characters actively give their consent in situations, even if those situations are empowering? Is consent only understood to mean affirmative consent regarding sexual encounters/romance?
While consent is understood to mean affirmative consent, it can also include an individual’s willingness to participate in any activity or role. We investigated how consent’s defined and represented within YA novels that have been released over the past two decades, with a focus on books released over the past five years, since the probability of consent being discussed would be higher.
Method:
To curate a book list for the research report, I browsed through Goodreads and read through various synopsis to see if any of them either directly or indirectly referred to consent. In order to make sure that we were not limiting our definition of consent to affirmative consent only, we selected YA books from a variety of sub-genres, including fantasy, dystopia, contemporary, and urban fantasy. Many of these books also had romantic subplots, which allowed for exploration of consent as choice and affirmative consent.
Here is the final list of books that I ended up reading for the research report:
-Caraval by Stephanie Garber (2017)
-Call It What You Want by Bridget Kemmerer (2019)
-Counting Down With You by Tashie Bhuiyan (2021)
-Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (2020)
-The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen (2012)
-The Grace Year by Kim Liggett (2019)
-The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008)
-Warcross by Marie Lu (2017)
Findings:
We found that consent was represented almost exclusively in terms of sex, sexual relationships, and romance. While there were several books where affirmative consent was explicitly addressed such as Call it What You Want and Counting Down With You, there were seldom any, if none, that addressed consent as a willingness to take part in specific activities, within the contemporary genre.
We also found that even if characters explicitly gave their consent to participate in an activity; they almost always did so because the alternative option was worse (for example, being imprisoned). In our academic research, we discovered that consent solely referred to sex, which presented a challenge for finding secondary sources that defined consent as choice.
However, at the start of the project, we hypothesized that speculative fiction, with its fantastical elements, might allow for discussions about consent beyond sex. What we discovered was that YA speculative fiction focuses more on choice, and often, any discussion of choice is absent altogether, but few engage in dialogue about consent as choice.
Something else we wanted to explore was whether consent was represented differently in novels with female protagonists vs. male protagonists. We found that in YA novels, male protagonists/characters were often expected to inherit a generational legacy, and that this inheritance is not something they can consent to. In contrast, female protagonists/characters were often in situations where they could not consent to major life decisions, such as marriage, since others made these decisions on their behalf.
Conclusion:
YA novels focus on consent in terms of sex, sexual relationships and bodily autonomy. Few conceive of consent in more broad terms such as agency or choice. We believe that this is problematic, as affirmative consent implies that individuals do not need to view consent beyond sex.
Works Cited:
Schazjmd. "Young Adult Romance Novels. JPD." Wikimedia Commons, 20 May 2020, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Young_adult_romance_novels.jpg. Accessed 22 August, 2021.