Women Empowerment and Gender Stereotype Challenge in Postmodern Dystopian Young Adult Fiction: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games

Abstract

This dissertation investigates females empowerment within dystopian young adult fiction and the subversion of the stereotypical representation of women’ roles during the twenty-first century explorating Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, focusing on the heroine Katniss Everdeen among other female characters. It also examines the impact of the strong portrayal of female roles upon adolescent readers. And investigates how young readers would relate to theses fictional characters. Launching our query required answering the following questions which combined: How postmodern YA dystopian fiction shaped new conceptualizations about gender roles and women’ empowerment from feministic and gender studies examination of the book? To what extent does postmodern YA dystopia affect female characters psyche, to embrace various archetypical images through psychoanalytical analysis? How would the psychological struggles of powerful females in dystopia create an ideal model? What are the potential impacts of females’ empowerment upon young readers through exploring young readers’ perspectives from a survey? Based on the findings of the present dissertation, it can be concluded that postmodern females’ performance have radically changed within dystopian YA fiction to alter the whole stereotypical representation of gender identity, thus, females moved further in their empowerment to adopt a highly powerful and centered roles in equal society for both genders. Finally, it explores young readers’ attitudes toward female empowerment within dystopia and shows the positivism of the female protagonist embodiment of both feminine and masculine characteristics for young readers to create perfect role models and a distinctive empowerment. This study encourages readers to know the impact of postmodernist fiction to change the traditional representation of women, thus altering the negative assumptions toward women roles and experiencing their empowerment.