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Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

2012

Adolescence

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The Androgynous Tomboy: Adolescent Liminality In The Contemporary Southern Bildungsroman, Brooke Alexandra Shippee May 2012

The Androgynous Tomboy: Adolescent Liminality In The Contemporary Southern Bildungsroman, Brooke Alexandra Shippee

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Androgynous Tomboy: Adolescent Liminality in the Contemporary Southern Bildungsroman is an analysis of the adolescent, specifically, of the young tomboy characters central to three Bildungsroman texts set in the American South during the twentieth century: Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (1946), Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1985) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1993). I seek to challenge the very notion of the conventional tomboy within the coming of age literary genre by defining these youths as androgynous, rather than as young individuals who assume a singular gender opposite of their biological sex. Throughout my work, …