This article is an important addition to scholarship about magic in children's and young adult fantasy fiction. Jes Battis argues that the performance of magic is an interstitial space that simultaneously reinforces gender norms and allows characters to transgress those norms. His ideas, combined with earlier explorations about the roles magic plays in protagonists' coming of age journeys and with subjectivity and identity in fantasy fiction, should provoke thought among speculative fiction scholars.
Journal
The Looking Glass : New Perspectives on Children's LiteratureISSN
1551-5680Volume
10Issue
1Publisher
La Trobe UniversitySection Title
Alice's AcademyAuthor Biography
Jes Battis is currently a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, in the department of English. He is the author of Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (McFarland: 2005), and Farscape: Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction (IB Tauris, 2007), as well as ten articles on various aspects of fantasy, pop culture, and teen lit. His doctoral research focuses on gay and lesbian fantasy fiction, and he is also developing a future book on queer high-school narratives.Date Created
2008-12-09Rights Statement
Essays and articles published in The Looking Glass may be reproduced for non-profit use by any educational or public institution; letters to the editor and on-site comments made by our readers may not be used without the expressed permission of that individual. Any commercial use of this journal, in whole or in part, by any means, is prohibited. Authors of accepted articles assign to The Looking Glass the right to publish and distribute their text electronically and to archive and make it permanently available electronically. They retain the copyright and, 90 days after initial publication, may republish it in any form they wish as long as The Looking Glass is acknowledged as the original source.Data source
OJS data migration 2025: https://ojs.latrobe.edu.au/ojs/index.php/tlg/article/view/93
