Robbins, Sarah2025-04-282025-04-282025-04-24https://repository.tcu.edu/handle/116099117/67016Categories of disability, genre, and girlhood are dependent on time, place, and culture, and these categories construct norms by rendering other phenomena as unthinkable. Young adult fiction transmits, but may also resist, such norms. Young adult literature can bring together depictions of girlhood and disability within genre fiction to mount particularly effective versions of such breaks from norms in the 21st-century United States, thereby giving the genre reparative force. To illustrate this cultural work, this dissertation analyzes examples from three YA sub-genres—historical fiction, romance, and science fiction—in The Degenerates by J. Albert Mann, Sick Kids in Love by Hannah Moskowitz, and On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis. These authors use reparative genre to reject stereotypes and establish new disability-centered narrative patterns of girlhood. These new patterns thus revise conventions and expectations within a genre to suggest radical possibilities for disabled girls’ lives and futures.Format: OnlineenAmerican literatureDisability studiesWomen's studiesYoung adult literatureText