Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature

Angel Daniel Matos is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College (Maine, USA), where he teaches courses on queer youth literature, queer Latinidades, teen cinema, and video game culture. His work has appeared in Children’s Literature, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, The ALAN Review, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, among other journals and edited volumes. He co-edited Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (2021) with Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula J. Massood.

"The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature is a treatise on queer futures, pasts, and presents, an homage to queer texts that represent the hurts alongside the optimism. In this stylish and astute study, Matos asks us to consider what it means to consume queer YA literature and culture within frameworks of pain, suffering, and the reparative possibilities open to us when we acknowledge past wounds and tragedies. Above all, this book asks us to make room for all the messy underpinnings of queer YA literature: the pain, hurts, and even happiness. Urging readers to embrace these contradictions, Angel Daniel Matos offers a refreshing approach to the study of queer YA cultures and literature."—Dr. Cristina Herrera, author, Welcome to Oxnard: Race, Place, and Chicana Adolescence in Michele Serros' Writings (2024) and ChicaNerds in Chicana Young Adult Literature: Brown and Nerdy (2020)"The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature artfully challenges the melancholic and often normative roots of queer YA literature by engaging with reparative frameworks that seek out hope as an act of resistance. Matos’s deft inclusion of film and video games alongside more traditional texts is a breath of fresh air and positions The Reparative Impulse to be required reading for any who wish to keep up with the field."—Dr. Cristina Rhodes, Associate Professor of English, Shippensburg University"Matos approaches this reparative reading of queer YA through a complex look at how these texts refer to, move away from, or both at once, a queer past that that has often included harm. Reading queer YA is personal and often messy for Matos and all queer readers, and he shows this through a nuanced analysis of YA texts in multiple forms. This analysis is especially poignant when Matos discusses how he responded as a queer Latine to texts with queer Latine main characters."—Dr. Summer Melody Pennell, author, Queering Critical Literacy and Numeracy for Social Justice: Navigating the Course (2019)“Unpacking binaries of adult/youth, hurt/hope, pain/healing, and past/present that have moulded much queer YA criticism, The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature propels the development of a new critical ethos in the production and reception of contemporary queer YA… Amid escalating attacks on queer and trans youth and adults in the US, Matos issues a vibrant rallying cry: it’s time to expand our expectations for what queer YA can accomplish and turn the YA ‘happiness enterprise’ (133) on its head to foreground queer liveability, survival, and futures in continuity with a witnessed queer past.”-- Henry Roach, University of Glasgow

• Chapter IThe Politics of Critique and RepairChapter IIMore Sad Than Not? The Joywashing of Queer YAChapter IIIThe Haunting Presence of AIDS Chapter IVOn Mortality and Permalife Chapter VCatastrophic Comforts Chapter VIThe Limits of Repair