“Female Masculinity” in Dystopian Adolescent Fiction – Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Series

In this paper, I seek to analyse the concept of ‘female masculinity’ by studying Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series. Pro-feminist Masculinity theorists like R.W. Connell and Michael Kimmel regard masculinity as not an ‘essence’ that manifests itself in ‘true’ males but as a ‘practice’ that is held as quintessential to all males and hence often aggressively pursued by males in order to maintain their superior position to women and to other marginalized males. The ‘practice of masculinity’ thus often rewards the males with positions of authority and power. (Connell, Gender and power: Society, the person, and sexual politics, 1987). If gender is exclusive of sex, it follows that female sex is capable of practising masculine gender. Judith Halberstam advocates this possibility of female masculinity in her work by the same name. (Halberstam, 1998). She claims that female masculinity is not an imitation of male masculinity but a “glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 1). She regards female masculinity to be superior to that of male masculinity as it is not depended on the process of ‘othering’ women. Hunger Games series which gained much popularity among adolescents and adults alike and has been lauded as an exemplary work of female freedom has also got major female characters performing acts normally associated with masculinity. This study scrutinizes whether the actions of these female characters in the series superimpose or subvert masculinity.

Translation of Stylistic Devices in Contemporary Young Adolescent Fiction

General interest in teenage books has been upsurging because of films based on international best-sellers. Therefore, the scripture becomes a source of language, in a sense that youngsters learn new words, phrases, allusions or metaphors and incorporate them in their everyday language. Demand for popular reads requires a quick reaction translating these books as there are plenty of novels for young adults written in foreign languages. However, translation of adolescent fiction is a challenging task due to the use of slang and other colloquial vocabulary or stylistic devices. However, the translation of stylistic devices as such has not been researched since linguists focus on teen slang. The translation of stylistic devices is an interesting issue to deal with as the entire translation “eco-system” is observed not from one sentence or paragraph perspective. The research deals with stylistic devices and their translation and the analysis of translation. It also presents stylistic devices according to their types, each type is illustrated by one or two examples depending on the number found, their translation and explanation of its aim, used strategy and achieved results are provided.

Rape Scripts and Rape Spaces: Constructions of Female Bodies in Adolescent Fiction

This article offers an analysis of the construction of female bodies in adolescent fiction about rape, arguing that the absence of a developed rapist character results in a focus on and pathologising of female characters. This positions female bodies as the cause of rape, rather than societal problems or rapists themselves, creating ‘rape spaces’. The positioning of female bodies as the cause of rape sanctions public and state control of those bodies, removing a female's subjective agency and right to manage her own body. I demonstrate how the depiction of psychological relationships to bodies as they develop sexually during puberty and attract unwanted male attention can function within the narrative to undermine a girl's ability to manage her own body, and how female sexual desire can either undermine or reinforce a girl's ability to manage her own body. I analyse how fraught relationships to clothing and food can be either accepted and interpolated to reinforce the construction of female bodies as rape spaces within these texts, or problematised to portray empowered female characters as they recognise and reject them as potential tools of patriarchal control.