The Young Adult Novel and Social Hegemony: How The Outsiders and Bad Girls Never Say Die Challenge and Reinforce Dominant Culture by Caci Kynaston A project submitted in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, Utah August 11, 2025 Approved Dr. Megan Van Deventer Dr. Emily January Dr. Rebekah Cumpsty Kynaston 1 Ever since the founding of the young adult (YA) literature category in the 1960s by the Young Adult Library Services Association, books written for young audiences have sought to capture the lived experiences of what it’s like to be a teenager (Strickland). The accurate depiction of life for teenagers was a form of New Realism and became a concern for many adults during the 1970s. In 1978, Maia Pank Mertz discussed the censoring of novels meant for teenage readers due to controversial subjects, such as teen pregnancy, abortion, homosexuality, and drugs, saying that, “It appears that many Americans believe that some young-adult novels defy, or indeed attempt to subvert society” (101). At the end of her article, Mertz argues against book censorship by stating, “Works that on the surface appear to deviate from traditional norms often, after closer analysis, are found to conform to existing values” (104). Instead of focusing on the content of books, Mertz suggests that teachers should instead focus on helping, “students to read more critically, to look beneath the surface of the books, so that they can evaluate the pervasive values and aspirations that the New Realism so easily masks” (104-105). Although Mertz was writing almost fifty years ago, the fear of books—especially books written for teenagers—challenging hegemonic and conservative values has endured. Since 2020, book bannings have risen to an all-time high within the United States. According to the American Library Association (ALA), in 2024, “2,452 unique titles were challenged, the third highest number ever documented by ALA and significantly exceeding the annual average of 273 unique titles over the period from 2001–2020” (“Banned & Challenged”). The reason for these book bannings and challenges has not changed much from the 1970s: people fear that books are introducing young people to ideas that challenge conservative values. The ALA reports that, “The most common justifications for censorship provided by complainants were false claims of illegal obscenity for minors; inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Kynaston 2 characters or themes; and covering topics of race, racism, equity, and social justice” (“Banned & Challenged”). All of this implies that YA literature, since its inception, has included discussions of societal issues and therefore has been feared for its potential to push against ruling ideologies. Mertz claimed that the early YA novels did more for continuing ideology rather than challenging it. The defining new realism of YA literature means that novels catered to teenagers will be mimetic and highlight societal issues that are important to or influence teenagers, which means that they will include hegemonically challenging ideas. However, because the YA classification has not only endured but grown exponentially in the last sixty years and because YA novels have been adopted into English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum, it is also clear that YA literature is doing exactly what Mertz claims and is working to promote dominant ideologies to reinforce societal hegemony. The question then is how are YA novels able to function both as counter-discourse and as cultural apparatuses reinforcing dominant ideologies at the same time? In order to investigate this question, I will be comparing a novel from the beginnings of the YA category, The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, and a contemporary retelling of The Outsiders, Bad Girls Never Say Die by Jennifer Mathieu. Mathieu takes the general plot of The Outsiders and places teenage bad girls at the center of the story as opposed to the teenage bad boys of the original. The main character, Evie, is almost raped at a drive-in movie theater as she headed to the bathroom. One of the more popular good girls, Diane, saves Evie by accidentally murdering her attacker. As the two go into hiding together, Evie learns about Diane’s pregnancy that caused her to be sent away from home and all but disowned by her parents. While this novel is an example of historical fiction, since the events take place in 1964, Mathieu is bringing attention to the continuing issues women face by highlighting that female situations have not improved or changed all that much in the past sixty years, especially when it comes to bodily autonomy, Kynaston 3 reproductive rights, and being socially expected to take on domestic roles. Hinton and Mathieu bring attention to ideologically challenging themes, demonstrating how contemporary YA literature continues to reify dominant culture while pushing against it. The results encourage young audiences to work toward social and cultural change but only in ideologically safe ways that uphold hegemony. These novels work as a case study for YA literature at large, which could and should include more examples of oppositional emergent culture that will lead to systemic societal change. Theoretical and Critical Perspectives Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology asserts that ideology is the reality in which we live (1287). Essentially, ideology is the norms that seem to be naturalized in a culture. These “norms” are, in reality, established and maintained by the dominant class. The processes through which those rules are created, maintained, adjusted, and submitted include what Althusser refers to as Repressive State Apparatuses, which are systems that enforce ideology through punishment and repression, and Ideological State Apparatuses, which act as a means to teach and normalize the ideology (1292). American adolescents spend the majority of their childhood and teenage years within the Ideological State Apparatuses of their family, school, and in some cases, religious groups, where books play a pivotal role. The novels selected to be taught within an ELA classroom or selected to be in classroom/school libraries communicate to the students which identities and beliefs are accepted and which identities and beliefs are punished by the dominant ideology. This is particularly important because The Outsiders has been canonized in ELA curriculum throughout the United States, which implies that this particular novel has been used to maintain dominant ideologies and/or not challenge those ideologies. Using Althusser’s theories about ideology and how it is perpetuated allows for a discussion about how the implicit Kynaston 4 and explicit messaging in Bad Girls Never Say Die both upholds and pushes back against the dominant power structure. Similarly, Raymond Williams’s ideas on how culture is an ever-changing and adapting part of dominating hegemony helps to explain how novels can include ideologically challenging material while still upholding dominant culture. Williams differentiates between ideology and hegemony by stating that hegemony is more deeply ingrained into reality than ideology is. Relying on Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony, Williams explains, “hegemony supposes the existence of something which is truly total, [...] which is lived at such a depth, which saturates the society to such an extent, and which [...] even constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway” (1342). Therefore, hegemony, to Williams, is more inescapable than ideology and thus, “emphasizes the facts of domination” (1342). For the purposes of my argument, I use the term ideology to refer to the specific set of ideas and principles that are being upheld or challenged, such as patriarchy, and the term hegemony to refer to the all-encompassing nature of dominating beliefs, which includes an acceptance and spreading of ideologies. Williams’s Marxist cultural theory states that hegemony is constantly shifting in order to maintain its dominance. There are two types of culture that influence hegemony: residual and emergent (Williams 1344). Residual culture is made up of practices, values, or meanings from a past social structure, whereas emergent cultures are practices, values, and meanings that are constantly being created, which the dominant culture then either incorporates or rejects (1344-5). Williams goes on to say that areas that used to be considered outside the scope of society or the state, and therefore ignored by the dominant culture, have narrowed since WWII. This means that more areas of life, which were previously seen as private, are now subject to rejection by the Kynaston 5 dominant culture if the dominant culture is challenged by the emergent culture being practiced (1345). Whether the dominant culture rejects or incorporates emergent culture is based on whether the culture is oppositional or alternative. Williams defines the difference between alternative and oppositional as the difference: between someone who simply finds a different way to live and wishes to be left alone with it, and someone who finds a different way to live and wants to change the society in its light. This is usually the difference between individual and small-group solutions to social crisis and those solutions which properly belong to political and ultimately revolutionary practice. (1345) Using this theory, in order to determine how YA novels challenge or reify social norms, we must analyze how YA novels introduce emergent cultural practices by determining if those practices are oppositional or just alternative, if the novels prolong residual cultural practices, and if the novels are, “a form of contribution to the effective dominant culture,” like Williams says most literature is (1347). Bad Girls Never Say Die deals primarily with the dominant residual ideology of patriarchy and the oppositional emergent ideological activism of feminism. Mathieu deliberately borrows the residual culture that is The Outsiders to create a new novel focusing on girls who live outside of hegemonic norms as opposed to the boys of the original to comment on how society views and treats females. Writing a historical fiction novel allows for any potentially oppositional emergent culture of feminist critiques of society to be incorporated by the dominant culture by labeling misogyny a problem of the past. In order to understand the full critiques Mathieu makes of past and present patriarchy, it is necessary to understand the ideological movements of both second and fourth wave feminism. Kynaston 6 Second-wave feminism is widely credited to have begun in 1963, being sparked by the publication of Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, a book that is directly referenced at the end of Bad Girls Never Say Die. Friedan’s book discusses an unrest felt among housewives: that they lacked purpose and were unhappy in their isolated lives of wives and mothers. From that point, second-wave feminism continued up until the late 1970s when, “multiple sub-groups [of feminism] created new organizations for themselves, [and] other debates within feminism grew” (Alexander, “Feminism: The Second Wave”). These debates split up the national movement so that there was no longer a strong, singular voice in which to argue for political change benefiting women as a whole. During its height, the women’s movement fought for equal pay for women, brought attention to women’s issues such as sexism and rape, helped to broaden access to birth control and abortion, and gained women the right to have their own line of credit. The most important thing second-wave feminism accomplished, according to historian Linda Gordon, was the rejection of, “the assumption that women’s subordination was natural” (23). Since Mathieu’s novel takes place in 1964, it discusses many of the issues that second-wave feminists worked to challenge and improve, such as bringing awareness to rape through Evie’s sexual assault, the dissatisfaction of housewives through the character of Cheryl, and reproductive rights through Dianne’s experience of pregnancy. Many of these issues are still present in contemporary society and are being taken up by fourth-wave feminists. There is no official start date of fourth-wave feminism because there was no official end to the third-wave, yet, “activists recognize that the 21st century has ushered in a new type of activism,” primarily through social media and digital platforms (Alexander, “Feminism: The Fourth Wave”). These new activist platforms have focused on sexual assault as a key issue of fourth-wave feminism. The Me Too, TIME’S UP, and Believe Women movements Kynaston 7 are all campaigns centered around bringing awareness and putting an end to all forms of sexual assault. Mathieu’s emphasis on Evie’s guilt surrounding her assault matches up with the contemporary ideologies being fought against by fourth-wave activists. The characters of Bad Girls Never Say Die enact feminist ideologies in the limited ways available to them in their second-wave time period. However, the characters, Evie especially through her narration of the novel, take a fourth-wave lens in how they are thinking about the issues. The actions and thoughts of these characters then work as ideological messaging to adolescent females to perpetuate or disrupt what it means to be female inside hegemony. Literature Review YA literature is inherently a means of reckoning with ideological forces. Roberta S. Trites argues in her book what makes a novel an example of young adult literature. She suggests, “The chief characteristic that distinguishes adolescent literature from children’s literature is the issue of how social power is deployed during the course of the narrative [...] protagonists must learn about the social forces that have made them what they are” (Trites 2-3). As such, “Much of the genre is thus dedicated to depicting how potentially out-of-control adolescents can learn to exist within institutional structures” (7). Trites argues that adolescents do not fully achieve maturity in postmodern YA novels, “until they have reconciled themselves to the power entailed in the social institutions with which they must interact to survive” (20). All of this suggests that YA novels are the perfect place for scholars to examine the ideological messages that society wants adolescents to subscribe to because, “the YA novel teaches adolescents how to exist within the (capitalistically bound) institutions that necessarily define teenagers’ existence” (19). Trites’s argument is that YA novels, by her definition, are meant to help their readers become more aware Kynaston 8 of their place and power within society by highlighting the ideologies of society that specifically impact teenagers. The Outsiders is one such example of YA literature mimicking societal structures that teenagers are subject to. Hinton began writing The Outsiders when she was just fifteen years old in 1963, she got a publishing contract once she graduated high school, and the novel was officially published in 1967. Although the 1960s in the United States were a turbulent time full of social change, Hinton’s inspiration for the novel was centered on the small-scale social situations of her own life. In a “Dear Reader” note at the beginning of the novel, Hinton explains that she wrote The Outsiders because, “I was mad about the social situation in my high school. I desperately wanted something to read that dealt realistically with teen-age life.” In further explanation of her inspiration for the novel, Hinton says in an interview at the back of the book, “One day a friend of mine was walking home from school and these ‘nice’ kids jumped out of a car and beat him up because they didn’t like his being a greaser.” This real-life situation made Hinton angry, so she went home and, “started pounding out a story” (Hinton). Hinton’s inspiration for The Outsiders is deeply rooted in her own experiences and environment as a teenager and therefore the novel mimics the ideological forces, such as classism, that teenagers of the 1960s and today face. Not only does The Outsiders demonstrate how YA literature functions to mirror the society it is written within—including acknowledgments of ideologically challenging identities, ideas, and experiences that will always exist in a society—but it also teaches its young readers how to adjust and fit into society without changing or challenging hegemony. Some, like Sandra Beal, make the argument that Hinton’s novel, “does indeed challenge the classism of 1960s culture in the US by encouraging readers to participate in the protagonist’s conscientização, a Kynaston 9 process of developing critical consciousness of oppression and how it works” (183). Beal states that Ponyboy starts off, “naïvely embedded in the classist ideology that oppresses him. We see this naïveté in his acceptance that it is at least partially his fault that Socs assault him as he walks home from the movies” (187). Throughout the novel, Ponyboy begins to question characteristics that seemingly define Socs from greasers. Ponyboy’s realization of class consciousness is apparent in the final scene when he realizes, “that things could and should be different [...] With a new sense of agency, he imagines that he could tell a story that would make a difference, an intervention in classist ideology” (Beal 190). Ponyboy takes personal action in the end, writing the novel as a class assignment as a way to bring awareness to the issues that the oppressed group of greasers face. Therefore, “We could say that The Outsiders offers solutions to the suffering caused by social inequality, but they are quiet, contemplative, and as yet unformed solutions,” and, “It is up to readers whether, when, and how these solutions will be actualized in the world beyond the novel” (Beal 197-8). Beal’s argument highlights how The Outsiders appears to offer emergent culture by showing the protagonist take action against classism. However, Hinton is actually using the residual culture that education is the solution to all of society’s problems to reify classist hegemony since Ponyboy does not take any direct action in his immediate community. In fact, Ponyboy acknowledges that the only way to improve his situation is to leave his community behind: I looked at Darry. He wasn’t going to be any hood when he got old. He was going to get somewhere. Living the way we do would only make him more determined to get somewhere. That’s why he’s better than the rest of us, I thought. He’s going Kynaston 10 somewhere. And I was going to be like him. I wasn’t going to live in a lousy neighborhood all my life. (Hinton 138) This acknowledgement implies that Ponyboy does not see a path forward in which the classist struggles his community deals with can be solved. Society and the hegemony that governs it cannot be changed. It is only possible for individuals to overcome class struggles through the Ideological State Apparatus of education. In the end, even though issues of classist ideology are identified in the novel, capitalistic hegemony remains unchallenged. This is the argument that Eric L. Tribunella makes by uncovering how The Outsiders has been canonized in secondary education and therefore used as a means to uphold/teach dominant ideologies even though the novel appears to challenge them. Tribunella states that the “New Realism” that Mertz discusses being the cause of disputes around YA literature due to its mirroring of uncomfortable realities led YA to fall into didacticism, saying, “It is hard to write a novel about a problem or problems without being tempted to offer solutions” (89). However, the solution Hinton offers is only a representation of the problem; something Tribunella describes as, “a safe and undisruptive palliative for class inequality” (88). He goes further to say that, The sleight of hand of the novel is in its suggestion that representation is an adequate response to a systemic and structural problem. To produce and consume representation is not itself sufficient in terms of addressing the problems represented. (97) Therefore, The Outsiders, and other YA novels, can exist within and uphold dominant hegemony even though it may contain challenging ideologies so long as any apparent solution to oppression is unproductive to actual systemic change. This occurs by making the solution focused on knowledge/representation or individual change, such as Ponyboy’s response to solve the problem Kynaston 11 by writing about his experiences, which may, “ground his emotional recovery, but this individual catharsis does not itself address or intervene in the larger social processes at work to produce or sustain the problem of class inequality and alienation” (96). This is not to say that YA literature is wholly unproductive in providing chances for challenging harmful ideologies. Tribunella ends by stating that any text that includes some sort of discussion of societal issues “might work to motivate the reader to seek more information about the problem, to ask important questions, and to consider alternatives to the outcomes presented in the novel” (101). In this way, bringing attention to the issues, even without offering clear, effective solutions, can pave a way for future collective action. Bad Girls Never Say Die functions similarly to how Beals and Tribunella describe The Outsiders as a means to bring attention to harmful ideologies while also upholding hegemony. Mathieu’s book was published in 2021, meaning it was being thought about and written in a time when Tarana Burke’s #metoo campaign and the Ford-Kavanaugh sexual assault hearings were bringing female issues, primarily sexual assault, to the forefront of public attention. The social media campaign and the hearings highlighted how American society viewed sexual assault at that time. Mathieu’s intentions/inspirations come from a direct result of the national conversation as well as her local state legislation surrounding reproductive justice. In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Mathieu states, “What is happening today in our country, with legislation like Texas’s barbaric State Bill 8, is telling girls they have no autonomy over their own bodies, reproductive rights, and destinies” (Lodge). Mathieu goes further to say that, “I hope readers of my novel [...] will be prompted to consider what makes a person ‘bad’ in the eyes of society, and whether or not being ‘bad’ is sometimes something worth striving for” (Lodge). More than just introducing feminist thinking to her readers, Mathieu deliberately attempts to bring attention to Kynaston 12 whom society punishes or rewards, thus making her readers more aware of the patriarchal ideology in which they live and therefore more prepared to challenge it. In her article, Holly Amelia Amos analyzes the rape myths being perpetuated specifically during the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings and how they build/support the sexism inherent to U.S. culture. She writes that the use of rape myths like mockery and insistence that the victim is lying are, “Used to dis-empower women in order to keep men’s societal power and status above them” (Amos 12). Mathieu builds upon Hinton’s canonized work as a form of residual culture to highlight the lasting presence of the power imbalance Amos describes with the intention of helping readers to challenge that imbalance inherent to patriarchal hegemony. Mathieu does this by taking up the specific rape myth that it is the victim’s fault for being assaulted and working to deconstruct it. Scene Analysis Bad Girls Never Say Die appears to challenge dominant ideologies through its showcasing of female issues, especially of bodily autonomy, but it fails to offer actual oppositional emergent culture that would allow readers to see an example of how to oppose and change harmful ideologies. In the first chapter of the book, Mathieu sets up the social hierarchy of the novel. Much like the greasers and Socs of The Outsiders, Bad Girls Never Say Die has the tea sippers, the upper-class kids from River Oaks High, and the hoods, the lower-class kids from Eastside High. Unlike The Outsiders, Mathieu sets up a gender hierarchy in which the males in each group rank higher than the females. This is showcased by the way Sunny, one of Evie’s friends, is treated by her boyfriend. Evie comments that she doesn’t care for her friend’s boyfriend, “because he’s always acting like Sunny’s his property, like his leather jacket or something” (Mathieu 9). This sentence alone problematizes the residual culture of women being seen as property that is embedded within the dominant culture by having Evie notice and object Kynaston 13 to it. However, Evie doesn’t take any action to stand up for Sunny or challenge that view. Her rebellion remains within her mind, thus making the ideology that women should be treated as humans instead of objects alternative instead of oppositional. Evie’s thoughts allow the young adult reader to gain insight into the alternative ideas without showing them how those ideas can actually be enacted. The denial of the girls’ bodily autonomy is heightened in the inciting incident of the novel: the attempted rape of Evie by a boy from River Oaks. Leading up to this event, the boy says, “You don’t know what I’m thinking [...] You probably don’t want to know” (Mathieu 22). To this, Evie responds, again in her head, that “What do mean, drunk boys like this want? I know. All girls do. Somewhere along the way, the answer to that question seeps into us until we can’t remember a time when we didn’t know it” (22). During this moment, and throughout the rest of the novel, the words “rape” or “sexual assault” are never used. Instead, the reader is left to infer that Evie knows the boy wants to rape her. By making the reader infer what is happening, Mathieu emphasizes the point that all girls instinctively know men desire to use and harm women’s bodies. She is relying on that residual cultural knowledge for the reader to make full sense of what is happening on the page. Making the reader engage in the ideology of rape culture is a form of challenging that ideology. It may make the reader question why all girls are so deeply aware of the harm boys wish to cause them, and then potentially spur them on to make social changes where that knowledge is no longer needed. Or, if the reader does not immediately make the inference that all girls have learned to fear boys, it may make them curious to find answers of what girls experience, thus making them aware of the ideology, perhaps for the first time. Kynaston 14 The actual challenge to rape culture, and the patriarchal ideologies from which it emerges, comes from Diane murdering Evie’s attempted rapist. Diane takes real physical action to protect another girl’s bodily autonomy. Her motivation for helping Evie emerges when Diane says, “I stabbed him. It was so quick. But I’m not sure what would have happened to you if I hadn’t done it” (Mathieu 27). Diane’s defense of Evie demonstrates female solidarity and challenges hegemonic masculinity. Evie’s gang of girls was initially wary of helping Diane after the murder because she was a tea sipper. However, after getting to know Diane better and putting their class differences aside, Connie, the leader of Evie’s gang, declares, “I want to say—in case there was any question—that Diane was one of us” (281). The acceptance of Diane into their group challenges the hegemonic class structure that is designed to keep people fighting amongst themselves instead of working together to fight against the systemic oppression of the dominating culture. It is because of female solidarity that neither Evie nor Diane were charged in the murder of her assailant. It was Diane’s friend Betty who helped to convince the police chief, Betty’s father, that the murder happened in self-defense. The reader doesn’t get to see it on the page, but it is implied that other girls served as witnesses to the danger that the boy presented. This can be seen when Betty says, “The truth is, I remember how Preston Fowler could get when he’d had too much to drink. So could a lot of girls at school, I’ll bet” (206). These unnamed girls working together made it possible for Diane and Evie to take action to protect themselves without facing societal punishment. Unlike The Outsiders with Johnny and Ponyboy only being helped by Dally, Evie and Diane are helped through collective action both through Evie’s group of friends and the unnamed girls from River Oaks, which offers a more realistic example of overcoming harmful ideologies. All of this together offers an oppositional view to patriarchal hegemony of Kynaston 15 female equality that could influence readers to take action themselves against rape and victim-blaming culture by creating systems of female solidarity. Unsurprisingly, even though the novel offers some guidance on how to dismantle harmful ideologies, it also reinforces the ideology that women are inferior to men. This begins with the line, “Boys have it so easy. They never get in trouble as much as girls do” (15). The fact that women are punished by society more than men are, especially when it comes to sexuality, is integral to Diane’s story, as she has been ostracized from her upper-class community because she got pregnant with a lower-class boy’s, Johnny’s, baby. Because of the actions that Diane and Johnny took together, Diane was punished by being sent away to a facility to hide her pregnancy and having her baby taken from her without her consent. However, Johnny’s only social punishment was that he thought his girlfriend broke up with and ignored him. Diane acknowledges the profound disparity between their experiences by saying: I know he was miserable when I disappeared, and that’s why Connie hated me at first. But he didn’t get stuck in that awful place in Dallas. He didn’t have to carry our baby for all those months and then sit there, helpless, while our child was ripped away. And he didn’t have to take being called a slut by his own parents because he wasn’t the one who’d gotten herself pregnant. (172) Diane is not the only character in the book who is punished for her sexuality. Cheryl, Evie’s older sister, was pressured into a marriage she did not want after she became pregnant. Evie often comments that Cheryl doesn’t seem like herself in her, “worried voice on the other end of the phone. Her lonely letters from Fort Hood” (169). On the other hand, the most that Johnny, or any boy in the novel, is punished is being wrongfully sent to jail for a week for a crime he did not commit. Diane, however, ends up being punished even more for Johnny’s wrongful Kynaston 16 imprisonment. Johnny’s friends blame Diane for his imprisonment and take it upon themselves to enact revenge on her for their friend. The group of boys advance on Diane, “ready to do anything,” when Diane flees for her safety, “running without thinking,” and ends up being hit and killed by a car (253). Although it was the group of boys’ fault that Diane died, Sunny lets Evie know that, “nothing’s happening to them because I don’t know if they can really prove it. It all got written off as some wild accident” (280). Diane is left to pay the ultimate price while the boys in the book are allowed to continue on with their lives. Just like victim blaming in rape culture, Mathieu’s wording that Diane was “running without thinking” implies that it is Diane’s fault she died. If only she had looked before running into the street, then she most likely would have survived. This scene upholds systemic patriarchy by giving the attacking group of boys their desired outcome while avoiding any penalty for their actions and placing all of the blame for the situation on Diane. The hegemonic practice of victim blaming is a key aspect of Bad Girls Never Say Die. Throughout the novel, one of Evie’s main concerns is how her mother will react to hearing about the attempted sexual assault. Evie believes that she will be punished for putting herself in a situation where sexual assault was a possibility. Society’s punishment of women is so internalized that Evie blames herself for her attacker’s actions. Once Evie tells her mother all that has happened, she and the reader experience a moment of catharsis when her mother says that it wasn’t her fault: “Hearing my mother say it, though? Listening to her voice say those sentences out loud? Something about it feels like the heaviest weight I didn’t know I was carrying has slipped off my shoulders” (264). In this scene, Mathieu signals that this is the solution to women being punished unfairly and then being blamed for that punishment: the acknowledgement, said aloud, that it isn’t Evie’s, and by extension, any girl’s fault that she was sexually assaulted. Kynaston 17 Mathieu’s solution, however, remains individualistic and emotional. Evie’s mother is not able to provide any advice on how to solve the systemic issue of rape culture because she, as a single and lower-class woman, doesn’t hold any institutionalized power to make societal changes. All she can offer Evie is an apology that this happened to her thus reifying, or at the very least not challenging, patriarchal ideologies. Comparing Diane’s death to Johnny’s death in The Outsiders complicates the patriarchal messaging in Bad Girls Never Say Die further. In The Outsiders, Johnny’s death is caused by a heroic action on his part: saving children from a burning building alongside Ponyboy. This moment of heroism is the catalyst that changes societal impressions of the greasers as a whole: “They’re still writing editorials about you in the paper. For being a hero and all [...] Yeah, they’re calling you a hero now and heroizin’ all the greasers. We’re all proud of you, buddy” (Hinton 148). This conversation between Dally and Johnny happens as Johnny is dying in the hospital. Johnny is allowed to know how his actions positively influence his friends, and his friends get to say goodbye to him. Johnny’s death therefore is purposefully challenging the classist ideology that the greasers are just no good hoods. This moment of communal grieving and societal change is denied to Dianne, Evie, and the rest of their friend group due to the suddenness of Diane’s death. By breaking away from the expectations built by the residual culture source material and not offering a heroic moment that changes society’s impressions of the girls, Mathieu is highlighting the sexism of the historic time period the novel is set in in order to bring awareness that our society today is still just as sexist. Neither in the 1960s nor the 2020s can hegemony allow for a heroine. Mathieu’s choice to leave Diane’s death comparatively unresolved mimics society, but it lacks insight that would lead a reader to engage in ideologically challenging behaviors to improve society. Going back to Tribunella’s argument about The Outsiders, Kynaston 18 representation and acknowledgment of a systemic problem are not enough to fully solve it. Because there was no real justice for all that Diane went through and because Evie’s anxieties about her worth and future prospects as a woman in the United States are solved internally as opposed to systemically, this novel remains ideologically safe within the hegemony. Bad Girls Never Say Die is using the residual culture of The Outsiders to highlight issues being faced in our current society, but it does not offer actionable solutions to those issues, besides communal support among girls, and therefore cannot be considered an oppositional emergent culture that has the power to challenge and transform harmful hegemonic ideologies. Mathieu has stated that a main hope she has for her novel is to get her readers to truly consider who society labels as bad and how that label can sometimes be worth striving for (Lodge). She does this by reframing the trope of social outsider with a heart of gold from The Outsiders to a group of girls that are labeled as bad mostly due to how they over perform femininity through their makeup choices and push hegemonic norms. Mathieu writes an empathetic portrayal of societal outsiders, which appears to challenge hegemony by showcasing bad girls putting what is ethically right over what is socially acceptable. However, Mathieu lacks any portrayal of true oppositional emergent culture that would challenge who is labeled as good and bad and therefore falls short of her main goal of the novel. Conclusion and Future Action Since the beginnings of YA literature, those in power have feared its mimetic properties and potential didactic lessons to push against oppressive norms. However, as demonstrated by The Outsiders and Bad Girls Never Say Die, YA novels rarely offer oppositional emergent culture that could be used as a road map to actually rebel against social hegemony. Nonetheless, YA novels that feature identities, events, or ideas that do not align with conservative norms, even Kynaston 19 when those novels ultimately uphold dominant ideologies, continue to be challenged and banned. If bannings will continue regardless of whether oppositional emergent culture is present or not, perhaps it is time to purposefully make including it the aim of YA literature. YA literature that falls into speculative fiction categories often portrays its protagonists fighting against corrupt hegemony in order to bring about a better society. For example, the Harry Potter series is full of teenagers working together to end the racist and classist ideologies spread by Voldemort in the wizarding world. In The Hunger Games, Katniss becomes a symbol of hope for the oppressed citizens of Panem to create a strategic and multifaceted rebellion against the ruling class. The Giver is the story of a young boy deliberately rebelling against the unjust laws of his society in order to bring knowledge and agency to his community. Solutions to systemic oppression can already be found in YA literature, but it is hiding in the realm of the fantastical and speculative. YA authors and publishers should be creating/seeking novels that offer real solutions to real problems so that teenagers today have an example of how to create a more equitable society. This is more prescient than ever because teenagers are now coming of age in a time of intense climate crisis, political turmoil, economic precarity, and potential nuclear war. They need stories that inspire them to take action that will lead to real change as opposed to leaving them feeling hopeless and nihilistic about their futures. Some YA novels with emergent culture do already exist: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is one example. In this novel, the main character Starr takes real action to help get justice for her friend Khalil, who was murdered by a police officer during a traffic stop. Thomas shows Starr taking part in the judicial system by testifying against the police officer and also participating in protests organized by her community. Kynaston 20 While more books that challenge harmful hegemony are being written and published, it is important for adults, such as parents, teachers, and librarians, to help young adults critically consume literature and other forms of media that already exist. Teachers who use The Outsiders in their classroom should include discussions of whether Ponyboy’s solution to write about and bring awareness to the greasers’ situation is enough. Teachers may also consider bringing in Bad Girls Never Say Die to increase the nuance between how society treats different marginalized groups of people. Altogether, there is work to be done when it comes to offering young adults literature that will help them to create a more inclusive culture, and the time to take action is not in another sixty years; it is now. Kynaston 21 Works Cited Alexander, Kerri Lee. “Feminism: The Fourth Wave.” National Women’s History Museum, 3 December 2021, www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/feminism-fourth-wave. Alexander, Kerri Lee. “Feminism: The Second Wave.” National Women’s History Museum, 18 June 2020, www.womenshistory.org/exhibits/feminism-second-wave. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The Norton Anthology Theory & Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 3rd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 1285-1311. Amos, Holly Amelia. "How in which is the Brett Kavanaugh Rape Case Discussed and Reported Throughout the Media-A Critical Discourse Analysis." 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