Monstrous Youth

<div><b>Winner 2024 Children's Literature Association Book Award</b> The monstrous has a long complicated history within children's popular media. In <i>Monstrous Youth: Transgressing the Boundaries of Childhood in the United States</i> Sara Austin traces the evolution of monstrosity as it relates to youth culture from the 1950s to the present day to spotlight the symbiotic relationship between monstrosity and the bodies and identities of children and adolescents. Examining comics films picture books novels television toys and other material culture-including <i>Monsters Inc.</i> and works by Mercer Mayer Maurice Sendak R. L. Stine and Stephanie Meyer-Austin tracks how the metaphor of monstrosity excludes engulfs and narrates difference within children's culture. Analyzing how cultural shifts have drastically changed our perceptions of both what it means to be a monster and what it means to be a child Austin charts how the portrayal and consumption of monsters corresponds to changes in identity categories such as race sexuality gender disability and class. In demonstrating how monstrosity is leveraged in service of political and cultural movements such as integration abstinence-only education and queer rights Austin offers insight into how monster texts continue to reflect interpret and shape the social discourses of identity within children's culture.</div>