Isa Cruz

Yesterday evening, the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library (H-L) invited community members to celebrate the release of a new book by Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Angel Matos. Matos took to the podium of H-L’s Nixon Lounge to give a lecture overview of the book, “The Reparative Impulse of Queer Young Adult Literature,” which deals with themes of queer representation, oppression and healing in the young adult (YA) genre.

The evening saw a deep dive into queerness in YA literature and media, as Matos discussed his book’s grappling with pain and hardship as a crucial part of the queer experience that often lacks cultural representation. Matos explained that the book began with his graduate dissertation, which largely focused on positive queer experiences represented in literature. Following a series of tragedies in the queer community, however, Matos was pushed to pivot his scholarly approach.

“I was really reaching a moment of crisis with my project.… I wasn’t really reckoning with the fact there was a lot of pain that was foundational to the formation of my queerness and the queerness of so many other people that I’ve encountered,” Matos said. “And so what I wanted to do was take a much more nuanced look at the emotion and feeling within this archive and to take a really deep look at the emotional politics present in YA culture and literature.”

Though a large part of the book deals with critiques of YA media, which leave out these nuances, Matos sought to go beyond a surface-level analysis which categorizes certain representations as “good” and others as “bad.” To reach a more productive discussion of the YA genre, Matos explained, the book invokes the processes of both critique and reparation.

“I think really carefully about this tense relationship that exists between critique and repair, especially in critical academic circles.… Our scholarship has almost been exclusively targeted at pointing out harm and pointing out when certain aspects of the text are problematic. And then the conversation is left there,” Matos said. “That’s why I really wanted to unite reparative and critical, suspicious approaches to try to get to a more nuanced way of understanding how emotions are negotiated.”

To illustrate how the YA genre often forsakes representations of queer pain, Matos discussed the re-release of the novel “More Happy Than Not” by Adam Silvera, which purposely replaced the book’s tragic ending with a more positive conclusion. Matos expressed his disappointment with this change.

“I thought [the initial ending] was such a powerful critique in light of the politics of happiness, in light of considering what space does sadness have today,” Matos said. “This is the novel that we celebrated for doing some of the most powerful work in the field, and then the author revises it…. And so this impulse to turn YA into a happiness enterprise is really overshadowing books that are doing important political and critical work.”

Matos expanded on the importance of including a broad range of queer experiences in media, explaining the complex implications of predominant approaches to YA literature.

“There’s a deep divide between people who view youth as entities that have to be protected from harm and at all costs and then there are people who believe that we should prepare our youth for the realities of the world,” Matos said. “Interestingly enough, whiteness is really imbued into those sensibilities, and I think often about how there are many queer people of color who aren’t really afforded neither the innocence nor the protection that other people are afforded.”

Matos’s discourse offered attendees the chance to consider the impact that literature can have beyond the page. After attending Matos’s book launch, James Benavides ’25 reflected on the power of media to drive larger cultural conversations.

“I think oftentimes we think of like literature as something so passive, like you pick up a book and you read it, but there is so much to gain from not only how you interact with a book and how you approach it, but also how you critique something you’re reading,” Benavides said. “I think this talk exemplified that there is so much to distill and … so many components go into a novel that people don’t really consider.”