Redefining the Teenager: Liminality and the Dystopian Young Adult Heroine Who Overthrows the Government to Save the Child and Preserve Innocence

Author

• Ashtyn Zavala, Clemson UniversityFollow

Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Committee Chair/Advisor

Clare Mullaney

Committee Member

Hannah Godwin

Committee Member

Michelle Smith

Abstract

The teen girl figure has swept young adult dystopian fiction from 2008 onward, continuously overthrowing governments and acting outside of her socially defined roles. This stock character became a cornerstone in most YA fiction during its time, leading to this thesis’s investigation of its necessitation: why must a teenage girl save her country’s people from an oppressive government and why can none of the other children or adults do this saving? This thesis attends to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games (2008-2025) and Tahereh Mafi’s Shatter Me (2011-2021) to examine the conditions and subsequent formula that give rise to this teen girl figure and argue that this recurring YA heroine reclaims a character identity I term Teenager. Teenager serves as my term for the teen figure in these novels who uses the slippery and socially transgressive liminality afforded in teenagerness to straddle the line between child and adult in order to save its world. Important to my analysis of the Teenager, particularly the Teenager girl within these dystopian novels, is their relationship to Lee Edelman’s theorized Child. Such a connection teases out how these Teenager characters preserve the futurity of their worlds while simultaneously straddling the line between Child and adult. The relationship between the only Teenager, the protector, in the novel and the Child, the protected, then catalyzes political rebellion. In reclaiming the Teenager term absent in these dystopian novels and understanding their relationship to the Child, readers can understand heroines like Katniss and Juliette as socially transgressive liminal figures in terms of their age, gender, and cultural reception whereby they wield this liminality to secure their own and others’ futures. The relevance of this project lies heavily in the contemporary political moment and the collective revisitation to the YA dystopian genre both by prominent and new authors.

Recommended Citation

Zavala, Ashtyn, "Redefining the Teenager: Liminality and the Dystopian Young Adult Heroine Who Overthrows the Government to Save the Child and Preserve Innocence" (2026). All Theses. 4703.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_theses/4703