The SA in YA Project

Especially since the watershed #MeToo movement’s 2017 global moment that brought an outpouring of disclosures and discussions about sexual trauma, violence, and rape culture in popular discourse, the classroom has increasingly become a space to navigate these issues and stories. In particular, literacy education generally and literature learning sites (such as English Language Arts classrooms and school libraries) specifically continue to be places where sexual assault narratives tend to be welcomed and wrangled with. This significant work is also often engaged with through exploring a genre of trauma literature that is currently flourishing: young adult (YA) sexual assault narratives. While sexual assault, trauma, and violence has long had a presence in literary works of all kinds, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, some young adult fiction specifically hones in to explore how features of rape culture(s) impact youth characters and their communities, and with increasing attention to inclusive and intersectional perspectives. For example, consider these recent YA publications that tackle sexual violence and/or rape culture(s): Hannah Kapin’s (2020) Foul is Fair, Kelly Yang’s (2021) Parachutes, and Amber Smith’s (2024) The Way I Am Now. Due to the public health crisis of sexual violence prevalence and rape culture(s) leading to continuing insidiousness across communities and cultures, building an online presence that attends to the growing pedagogical significance of YA sexual assault stories is both important and timely.

The SA in YA Project: Collecting, Connecting, and Curating Pedagogy, Resources, and Scholarship about Sexual Assault and Rape Culture in Young Adult Texts is then dedicated to supporting those in education fields to enhance their book knowledge about such YA stories attendant to narratively exploring the impact of rape culture on adolescents. This is a feminist project aimed to function as a focused digital toolbox resource for educators, librarians, scholars, and students interested in YA sexual assault narratives, especially for the purposes of teaching, learning about, and researching such texts. As such, this project’s leading objectives include: 

1. To promote inclusive and intersectional YA sexual assault narratives as vehicles for learning about sexual violence, rape culture(s), and antirape activism(s); 

2. To collect and curate existing YA sexual assault (SA) texts and capture emergent literature, as well as pedagogy, resources, and scholarship dedicated to such texts; and 

3. To create and cultivate an online community and network of inquiry and practice among educators, librarians, students, and scholars interested in engaging in antirape work through literary studies.