ABSTRACT
For at least forty years, teachers have theorized about how to empower girls in the literature classroom—and the solution for many has been to engage feminist pedagogies. In this chapter, we trace how issues of critical thinking have led feminism (and misunderstandings of feminism) to intersect with secondary English education in the United States in order to contextualize a study we conducted of four high school teachers who self-consciously problematize gender while attempting to expose issues of critical thinking in their literature classrooms. We follow our consideration of texts and teachers with a demonstration of how two Young Adult (YA) novels marketed to girls—E. Lockhart’s The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games—represent gender as a multivariate social construct.
