Monstrous Bodies

Recent works of young adult fantastic fiction such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga have been excoriated for glamorizing feminine subordination. However, young adult horror fiction with female protagonists who have paranormal abilities suggests to female readers the possibility of resisting restrictive gender roles that are presented to them as natural and therefore immutable. In this type of fiction, the ""monstrous Other"" is a double with a difference, a metaphor of the adolescent girl in Western culture who is pressured to embody a doll-like feminine ideal which is untenable because it deprives them of agency. This book examines three types of female monstrous Others in young adult fiction - the haunted girl, the female werewolf and the witch - and considers what each has to tell us about feminine subordination in a supposedly post-feminist world, where girls continue to be pressured to silence their voices and stifle their desires in conformity with contemporary ideas about what it means to be a good woman.