Queering Girlhood: Sapphic and Trans Girlhoods in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction

Abstract

In an era where girlhood is increasingly commodified in postfeminist and digital cultures, queer girlhood, particularly sapphic and trans forms remains contested, underrepresented, and structurally silenced. This paper examines the complex literary representation of intersectional queer girlhoods in two contemporary Anglophone novels: Emily M. Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2012) and Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet (2019). Drawing on the frameworks of queer temporality (Halberstam 2005), intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991), and affect theory (Ahmed 2004; Muñoz 2009), the paper interrogates how these texts disrupt normative paradigms of development, innocence, and heteronormativity that often define girlhood in literature. In The Miseducation of Cameron Post, the repression of sapphic desire under Christian moralism is juxtaposed with moments of subversive agency, silence, and queer kinship. In Pet, Emezi constructs a speculative future where a Black trans girl protagonist must confront concealed structural violence despite narratives of supposed safety. By analysing how both novels deploy genre (realism and speculative fiction), voice, and affect to articulate queer resistance, this study foregrounds girlhood not as a universal or stable category, but as a site of becoming, inflected by race, sexuality, gender identity, and sociocultural power. Ultimately, the paper argues for a reading practice that attends to the pluralities of queer girlhoods, not merely to represent but to reimagine the political stakes of visibility, recognition, and refusal in contemporary literature.