Date of Award

Summer 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

English Language and Literatures

First Advisor

Susan Vanderborg

Abstract

This thesis is a time sensitive case study on the nature of Libba Bray's novel Beauty Queensand it's placement as both a metacognitive novel and discourse in the nature of queer acceptance in the publishing and media landscape of the 2010s and 2020s. This includes focusing on contextualizing the book in the changing landscape of queer acceptance and visibility in the media over the last 20 years through the lens of the inclusion in YA and how that manifest in the 2010 and 2020s book bans on LGBTQ YA fiction. The novel highlights the wider need for LGBTQ YA literature and how it compares to its contemporaries in avoiding book bans as compared to other books. The goal of this work is to study the Young Adult publishing market in terms of its willingness and ability to promote and publish novels featuring LGBTQ+ characters now (as of March 2025) as compared to the culture and climate of the industry in the 2010s. This study will use the 2011 novel Beauty Queensby Libba Bray, which features three different types of queer female characters, as a litmus test and barometer for the change in the perceived publishability of queerness in books published by major United States publishers in the 2010s and now in the 2020s. Sparked by a 2011 instance of publishers and editors asking a number of authors to remove their queer characters, Beauty Queenswas curiously not only able to keep its queer characters, but works to depict said queer characters with a vibrancy and integrity well beyond that of its counterparts at the time, which were censored for much less. Bray's particular inclusion of a transgender character in the context of competing in a beauty pageant embodies the book's goal of challenging readers in what they believe a beauty queen and teenage girl can be, outside of the societal norms and conformity ascribed to them. It is my belief that Beauty Queens' unique narrative construction and interwoven plot that guarantees the keeping of its queer female characters, which are statistically less likely to appear among queer YA novels.

Rights

© 2025, Kayla Michelle Crumbley

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