ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how theorizing dominant and oppositional gazes allows students to read multicultural young adult literature in transformative ways. As Piddy Sanchez—the protagonist and narrator of Meg Medina’s novel, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass—navigates her new social landscape after moving to escape unsafe housing, her experiences as a Latina teenager reveal the injustices of society’s dominant gazes while underscoring the significance of her own and others’ oppositional perspectives. To engage students in this critical approach, this chapter links strategies designed to help students recognize dominant/oppositional gazes in their own worlds and lives with those designed to foster literary analysis, including transferable sets of questions that help student readers notice characters’ experiences of being looked at, the ways characters act in response to gazes, and the various positions of characters, both those that adopt the dominant gaze and those that counter them. Pointing to other young adult novels that provide rich explorations of the oppositional gaze, this chapter offers one approach for helping readers analyze and appreciate literary perspectives that challenge the simplified stories that have kept groups in power.
