The battleground of the adolescent body: Growing up female in the novels of female development.

For many adolescent girls growing up in a contemporary American society, a secure body image is difficult to achieve, and often her body becomes an obstacle to autonomy and self-agency as the girl tries to reconcile her body to the demands of a socially-proscribed gendered identity. Because of their age and social position, girls are particularly vulnerable to disciplinary practices, often feeling an intensified pressure during adolescence to achieve a body of particular shape, size, or appearance. Many contemporary novels of female development written by women, however, insist that it is only by recognizing this pressure that girls can begin to challenge the objectification and inferiorization of their bodies. Furthermore, these novels suggest that body images are never static or fixed, leaving open the possibility of (re)constructing representations of the female body in enabling ways. Female authors such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gish Jen, Janet Campbell Hale, Lisa Alther, and Sandra Cisneros foreground the girl\u27s body, interrogating the way social representations of the female body can be used to control female subjectivity; these authors recognize the adolescent girl\u27s body as being particularly susceptible to disciplinary practices which construct bodily ideals and standards of normative femininity, but her body can also be a site from which to contest these practices. Virtually every novel examined in this study emphasize race, ethnicity, class and sexual orientation as being central to the process of becoming a woman. The novel of female development seems to be particularly popular with women of color, and many of these novels suggest that a marginalized position can be paradoxically empowering because these girls already have the self-consciousness necessary to realize that the experience of the body is never neutral but is always mediated by cultural constructs. Novels of development written during the last forty years insist that women must continue to negotiate representations of femininity and bodily acceptability because women do not simply pass through the confusion of adolescence on the way to a secure body image. The body becomes a site of resistance if only in showing that identity is unstable, unfixed, and must be constantly negotiated, often well into adulthood, which explains the centrality of memory in so many of these novels. By continuing to see the female body as a battleground for social meaning, women will find ways to write new stories of growing up female