Coming of age in the ’80s as part of a “very Catholic” family located in a “white, conservative town just north of Indianapolis,” Corrine Wickens had yet to realize that she was a lesbian.
That comprehension would surface in college, says Wickens, a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction.
But under different circumstances – or maybe with the masses of LGBTQ young adult literature now readily obtainable but not then – she acknowledges that she might have understood or pondered her sexuality earlier than adulthood.
“Learning about diversity there was primarily learning about racial diversity, and it would have been enlightening for me as an individual. It might have made life easier,” Wickens says.
“Even though I could read basically anything I wanted, it would have been really difficult for me to have that kind of freedom, and access is essential,” she adds.
“When we go outside the greater metropolitan area of Chicago, which includes our region, going much further, whether it’s rural Indiana or rural Illinois, things are much different than they were in the 1980s in relationship to books being available to young people and their being able to understand, whether they are aware, questioning or not. Being able to understand the broader world is something that we take for granted.”
She knows well.
Named the College of Education’s Senior Faculty Fellow for 2024-26, Wickens is devoting her tenure (and its release from teaching) to completion of her book, “ ‘Dreams of Justice’: Shifts in Contemporary Realistic LGBTQ Young Adult Literature in the 21st Century.”
Her work will analyze around 50 books published from 2000 to 2020, all of which are award winners, highly rated in reviews and, of course, somehow connected to LGBTQ themes.
Given constantly evolving styles of writing, narratives and narrators throughout the traditional to the postmodern storytelling after World War II to the “post-postmodern” that appeals to millennial and Generation Z readers, Wickens found her theoretical framework.
“In the book I’m rereading now, one of the chapters is an anti-romance. The character is so despondent, and it’s in some way teenage angst, and it’s like, ‘My god, how can I get through this book?’ In that way, it’s differently postmodern,” she says.
Or, she says, “a couple of the books talk to the reader directly, as if you’re the audience – that’s called ‘break the frame.’ ”
“Post-postmodern might be some of the intersections of elements. Whereas in postmodern, he just happens to be gay, this maybe is gay and dealing with depressions, or is gay and Iraqi American,” she adds. “We have these multiple identities at play because we all have them. That is new in the literature, and those are just a few of the kinds of things I’m exploring in the book.”
Also new – and where Wickens derives the “Dreams of Justice” terminology that she’s borrowed from another researcher – is an altered conception of adolescence as traditionally glimpsed in fiction as from the perspective of “outsiders” or other teens.
“What is being articulated in our contemporary era is that these identities are directly connected with hope for and dreams of justice. It’s not just all about oneself and resolving this identity conflict. It’s about self – and other selves in the world,” Wickens says. “That’s particularly timely as we’re in this election cycle and through the last several years. We’ve always known that young people are the ones to take up social activism, and that’s being taken up in the literature.”
Consider how readers have seen themselves in the page of “The Hate U Give” by Angela Thomas, she offers.
“Thomas becomes a spokesperson for Black Lives Matter in that context. Young people in the text are doing what lot of young people are actually doing,” Wickens says, “and that’s taking up social activism – dreams of justice. Dreams of justice is not just dreams of one’s life and caring what one will be, which is traditional identity-conflict-resolution stuff, but, ‘How can I make things better?’ ”
FOR WICKENS, WHO AS a member of Generation X is not the intended audience of the books she is analyzing, the process is “first and foremost about connecting with oneself and connecting with others.”
“It’s a way of gaining understanding and gaining empathy, and that’s something that has been integral to me forever – as a young person wondering how I could learn about others through literature,” she says.
“The other key element that I am bringing that is unique is the notion of constructions of children and childhood as an ideology. We think about ideology related to race, gender, sexual orientation, language, nationality – all of those things – but we don’t consider is how we frame individuals younger than 17,” she adds.
“And so then we don’t actually think about young people as people. This becomes a part of why a lot of books with LGBTQ content become censored and banned because they are constituted as
‘not age-appropriate,’ and all of that connects to a distinction of what is considered appropriate for adults and what is appropriate for children.”
Her sample group of books, meanwhile, coincides with major changes in society.
“One of the things that I remind people is that it wasn’t until 2003 that Lawrence v. Texas happened,” Wickens says of the Supreme Court ruling that U.S. state laws criminalizing sodomy between consenting adults are unconstitutional, “so my analysis begins right before and continues after, and after Obergefell v. Hodges, when same-sex marriage became legalized.”
In between those decisions, she adds, the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy ended.
“We have had huge legislative gains in the past 20 years that people now take for granted,” she says. “The millennials and Generation Z might have some awareness, but all of that is mostly part of their early history.”
And publishers clearly have taken note of the resulting lucrative market, Wickens says, not just from government but also as “more young people are coming out earlier and earlier. Young people are transitioning through gender expression changing; through pronouns changing; through names changing; through using beta blockers to prevent puberty. That’s all radically still new, relatively speaking.”
“The publishing industry is about making money, and they think that if it’s published and will sell, then they will publish and sell,” she says.
“You can see it in the rates,” she adds. “In a single year, there will be more books published related to LGBTQ literature than there were for the 30 years from 1970 to 2000. That’s just how much legislation has shifted and enabled this.”
