Pitching: The Scapegracers
By Cassandra Eliodor
Key Features: Super queer! Girls Supporting Girls! Multiculturalism! Found Family! Supernatural!
Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers follows the story of Sideways Pike, a cynical, angsty, teenage lesbian witch. Though she initially considers herself somewhat of an outcast, Sideways soon finds an unlikely friendship in the three most popular girls in her school. Together, they form a powerful coven, in which they explore love, sisterhood, and the supernatural.
Why does this book matter?
It normalizes diversity. The Scapegracers has one of the most diverse casts of characters. The description alone reveals how the novel is clearly and proudly queer. The all-girl main cast consists of a white lesbian, a Black sapphic, a bisexual Chinese American, and a straight white girl – and this diversity also extends itself to the secondary characters, such as parents and friends, who either identify as queer or are visible minorities. In short, The Scapegracers breaks the heterosexual matrix and challenges the white default in literature.
- It is casually queer: there is no coming out. The characters are already comfortably queer, therefore figuring out their sexual identity is not a driving plot point.
- It features the explicit use of the term “lesbian” (which is often absent or even censored in media and literature).
It features strong girls supporting strong girls: The Scapegracers excels in depicting different kinds of women, each complex and unique in their own right. This female-led novel centers around the tight-knit friendship of four heroines – all diverse, in both appearance and personality. Be they soft, pretty, fierce, caring, weird or overprotective, these girls are all powerful (Literally. They are witches). All in all, Clarke successfully creates a world where femininity and strength are not mutually exclusive.
- This book celebrates feminity through female friendships.
- It subverts the stereotypical girl-hate-girl narrative usually attached to the ‘new-girl-meets-popular-girls’ trope.
Breaking social barriers
A major theme explored in The Scapegracers is the concept of normativity, more precisely, what it means to occupy the undefined spaces outside of our social norms. Here is a quote taken from the novel in order to showcase the potential impact of this conversation:
I guess my point is that teenage girls aren’t supposed to be powerful, you know? Everybody hates teenage girls. They hate our bodies and hate us if we want to change them. They hate the things we're supposed to like but hate it when we like other things even more, because that means we’re ruining their things. We’re somehow this great corrupting influence, even though we’ve barely got legal agency of our own. But the three of us – the four of us, counting you – we’re powerful. Maybe not in the ways that people are supposed to be, maybe in ways that people think are scary or hard to understand, but we are. (Clarke 108)
Femininity, in media and society, has been constructed as something that is universal and fixed; women and young girls often do not have agency over their own narrative, and are therefore condemned to occupy limited spaces of expression that do not reflect their reality. Fighting to deconstruct and transcend these limitations is a universal female experience, and Hannah Abigail Clarke’s The Scapegracers actively contributes to this movement by portraying four exceptionally courageous heroines who refuse to be contained.
Finding “identity” in fiction
When we consider the importance of windows and mirrors, we begin to understand the potential impact that children’s and YA literature can have on the formation of young people’s identities.
Watch the video below to learn more about the importance of windows and mirrors in children's literature!
Children’s book author and illustrator Grace Lin explores the concept of windows and mirrors in her TEDxNatick TED talk.
Lin, Grace. “The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf | Grace Lin | TEDxNatick.” Youtube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 18 Mar. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wQ8wiV3FVo.
Youth literature presents children with conscious and subliminal models of their society: media representation not only teaches young people how to view themselves, but how to view their world, and perhaps most harmfully, how their world views them. Dominant cultures have the authority to form, establish, and distribute norms. As a result of this, one leading image is promoted in our multifaceted society, leaving many narratives omitted and made virtually non-existent.
The problem with “normality” is how it implies that everything outside of its bounds is “other than” normal. Therefore, children's instinctive response to being “Othered” is to regulate themselves in order to fit models that were never meant to accommodate them in the first place. For this reason, subversive fiction, written by and about marginalized people, “is a form of ‘imaginary’ activism” (Ramdarshan Bold and Philips 6): it challenges the limits of our normative society and begins to fill in the invisible gaps that minority groups occupy.
The laugh of the medusa
In her 1976 essay, "The Laugh of the Medusa", French poet and feminist writer Hélène Cixous implores women to write themselves into the canon of their patriarchal society. She urges this in view of the fact that male-dominated literature filters our society through a phallocentric lens and limits our collective image of the world. In other words, seeing as men are the dominant culture, their perception of society and of women influences and molds our own. This subconsciously leads women to suppress themselves in order to fit a mold that does not accurately mirror their reality: the shoe does not fit.
Cixous prompts women (and in this case, all marginalized people) to write themselves, because by taking charge of their own narrative, they begin to dismantle invisible boundaries for both themselves and the whole world:
Woman un-thinks the unifying, regulating history that homogenizes and channels forces, herding contradictions into a single battlefield. In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. As a militant, she is an integral part of all liberations. (882)
That being said, as a non-binary author writing about non-normative characters, Hannah Abigail Clarke actively contributes to the larger movement of subversive literature.
Meet the author! Hannah Abigail Clarke introduces their book:
Author Hannah Abigail Clarke introduces and summarizes their first book, The Scapegracers, for Erewhon books.
Clarke, Hannah Abigail. "Hannah Abigail Clarke Introduces The Scapegracers." YouTube, uploaded by Erewhon Books, 8 September 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei5H-wd3BIU.
Sources
Clarke, Hannah Abigail. The Scapegracers. New York, Erewhon Books, 2020.
Cixous, Hélène, et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, 1976, pp. 875–93, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173239. Accessed 12 Apr. 2022.
“Hélène Cixous.” The European Graduate School, https://egs.edu/biography/helene-cixous/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2022.
Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie and Leah Philips. "Adolescent Identities: The Untapped Power Of YA." Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, Vol. 1 : Iss. 2 , Article 7, 2019, https://sophia.stkate.edu/rdyl/vol1/iss2/7.