Books by Sanna Tapionkaski
Girls Transforming: Invisibility and Age-Shifting in Children's Fantasy Fiction Since the 1970s
"This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English-language ch... more "This book explores representations of girlhood and young womanhood in recent English-language children’s fantasy by focusing on two fantastic body transformation types: invisibility and age-shifting. Drawing on recent feminist and queer theory, the study discusses the tropes of invisibility and age-shifting as narrative devices representing gendered experiences. The transformations offer various perspectives on a girl’s changing body and identity and provide links between real-life and fantastic discourses of gender, power, invisibility and aging.
The main focus is on English-language fantasy published since the 1970s but the motifs of invisibility and age-shifting in earlier tales and children’s books is reviewed; this is the first study of children’s fantasy literature that considers these tropes at length.
Novels discussed are from both critically acclaimed authors and the less well known. Most of the novels depicting invisible or age-shifting girls are neither thoroughly conventional nor radically subversive but present a multiplicity of discourses. In terms of gender, children’s fantasy novels can be more complex than they are often interpreted to be. ""
Papers by Sanna Tapionkaski
Language Development Research, 2025
Developmental dyslexia (DD) is associated with phonological deficits. In this article, we will di... more Developmental dyslexia (DD) is associated with phonological deficits. In this article, we will discuss the phonological deficits occurring in DD by applying psycholinguistic models of speech production (Levelt et al., 1999; Dell, 1986). According to these models, output phonology is created through a process called phonological encoding, which operates in a close relationship with internal speech monitoring. We will argue that in decoding (reading by using letter-sound correspondences instead of whole word recognition) phonological word-forms are assembled within the speech output system by utilising phonological encoding and, more specifically, through a process that we call unguided phonological encoding. In this process, encoding is done in a piece-by-piece fashion without access to an active word-form, which means that internal speech monitoring cannot function in a normal manner. This makes the process less regulated and more prone to difficulties. We argue that DD is related to difficulties in unguided phonological encoding. We will consider the implications of our theoretical hypotheses, first, from a clinical perspective by providing a qualitative description of typical blending difficulties among children with DD at our clinic. Second, we will discuss earlier research literature on DD by focusing on how difficulties in unguided phonological encoding could explain the widely researched features of DD. Finally, we will outline a few possibilities for how our theoretical hypotheses could be tested. We suggest that the focus on the interplay between phonological encoding and internal speech monitoring provides a framework with which we can ask new questions about the phonological difficulties associated with DD.
Työelämäläheisyyden kehittäminen monialaisen kieliasiantuntijan laaja-alaisen kandidaatintutkinnon opetussuunnitelmassa 2017–2020
Monialaisen kieliasiantuntijan laaja-alaisen kandidaatintutkinnon työelämäläheisyyttä selvittävä ... more Monialaisen kieliasiantuntijan laaja-alaisen kandidaatintutkinnon työelämäläheisyyttä selvittävä hanke käynnistyi keväällä 2016 Jyväskylän yliopiston kielten laitoksella (nykyisin kieli- ja viestintätieteiden laitos) osana laajempaa opetussuunnitelmien uudistamistyötä. Termi ’työelämäläheisyys’ on lainattu Päivi Tynjälältä (2016), joka korostaa, että yliopisto-opintojen ei tarvitse olla työelämälähtöisiä, mutta hyvinkin työelämäläheisiä: jälkimmäinen voi toteutua työelämäyhteistyön kautta, mutta myös työelämärelevantteina opintojaksojen sisältöinä ja toteutuksina. Uusissa opetussuunnitelmissa vuosille 2017–2020 tutkintorakenne muuttui ja aiemman monialaisen kieliasiantuntijan suuntautumisvaihtoehdon pohjalta kehitettiin uusi monialaisen kieliasiantuntijan laaja-alainen kandidaatintutkinto. Kehittämishankkeen tavoitteena oli selvittää, miten uuden tutkinnon opetussuunnitelmaan saataisiin entistä paremmin mukaan työelämäläheisyyttä sekä laajemmin koko tutkintokokonaisuuden kannalta et...
Fafnir, 2015
Fan fiction offers rich data to explore readers’ understanding of gendered discourses informing t... more Fan fiction offers rich data to explore readers’ understanding of gendered discourses informing the narrative construction of fictional and real-life identities. This paper focuses on gender identity construction in self-insertion fan fiction texts – stories that involve avatars of fan writers – based on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. Self-insertion fan fiction stories can be considered a form of life writing where authors play with their identity in a virtual context in texts that mix documentary elements and fiction; a combination that is here termed as speculative life writing. While earlier studies have discussed self-insertion fan fiction as a potentially empowering form of resistance to conventional gendered discourses, or a space for (young) women to explore and play with their gendered and sexual identities, among fans themselves self-insertion fan fiction stories – especially stories involving ‘Mary Sues’, characters that are highly idealised versions of the author – ar...
Doing gender and sexuality intersectionally in multimodal social media practices
The Routledge Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality, 2021
In this chapter our focus is on how members in participatory cultures engage in everyday, informa... more In this chapter our focus is on how members in participatory cultures engage in everyday, informal and interest-driven social and discursive practices primarily on social media, but in ways that also relate to the material and physical contexts of their lives. In particular, we will show how social actors operating in these sites construct gender and sexuality intersectionally and multimodally. Intersectionality, we argue, is a crucial notion for understanding and explaining how gender and sexuality are always constructed at particular intersections with other identity categories. With respect to both digital and physical participatory activities, multi-semioticity is, in turn, necessary as an analytic perspective: it allows the investigation of how in these activities, participants routinely draw on and deploy a range of multimodal and embodied resources for the production of discursive, social and cultural meaning. In our discussion of the nexus of participatory cultural practices, social media, intersectionality and multimodality, we will highlight how, in order to capture the multi-sited and
The Fame and Blame of an Intellectual Goth: Sofi Oksanen (1977)
Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature, 2011
The intersection of age and gender in children’s stories is perhaps most evident in coming-of-age... more The intersection of age and gender in children’s stories is perhaps most evident in coming-of-age narratives in which aging, and the ways in which aging affects gender, are usually seen as natural, if complicated, processes. In regard to coming-of-age, magic changes in age in fantastic stories – whether the result of a spell or a time-shift – are particularly interesting, because they disrupt the natural aging process and potentially offer critical perspectives on aged and gendered subjectivities. This paper examines age-shifting caused by fantastic time slips in two novels by Diana Wynne Jones, The Time of the Ghost (1981) and Hexwood (1993). The main concern of the paper is how the female protagonists’ gendered and aged subjectivities are constructed in the texts, with a particular focus on the representations of girlhood. Gender and age are examined both as embodied and performed by examining the ways in which the shifts back to and away from girlhood affect the protagonists’ sub...
Mustan miehen etninen toiseus ja vastapuhe suomalaisessa populaarimusiikissa
Lumooja, noita vai samaani? : Pohjoisenetnisyyden kuvauksia englanninkielisessä lastenfantasiakirjallisuudessa
Tarzan of the Apes - The Bearman Tarsa : Discourses of National Identity and Colonialism in a Finnish Adaptation of an American Classic
Näkymättömiä tyttöjä ja vanhoja nuoria naisia : fantastiset ruumiilliset muodonmuutokset ja sukupuoli lastenfantasiakirjoissa
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2017
Discourses of exotic Lapland with its indigenous inhabitants, the Sámi, are widely circulated in ... more Discourses of exotic Lapland with its indigenous inhabitants, the Sámi, are widely circulated in the tourist industry and also surface in contemporary English-language children’s fantasy fiction. In contrast to the ‘self-orientalism’ of discourses of tourism, where places and people are represented as exotic to a tourist gaze, the portrayals of the North and its inhabitants gain different symbolic meanings in fictional texts produced by outsiders who rely on earlier texts – myths, fairy tales and anthropological accounts – rather than on their own lived experience of the North or indigeneity. This article applies the concept of Borealism to examine cross-cultural intertextuality and discourses of the Sámi/Lappishness in English-language children’s fantasy by four contemporary authors. The Sámi and their folklore become recontextualised in fictional texts through a Borealist gaze that associates the indigenous characters with feminist and ecocritical discourses and frames indigenous ...
Space and Place in Children's Literature: 1789 to the Present. Eds. Maria Sachiko Cecire, Hannah Field, Kavita Mudan Finn and Malini Roy
International Research in Children's Literature, 2016
Children's Literature in Education, 2012
Susan Price's ' 'Odin Trilogy'' (2005-2008) is a juvenile science fiction series that depicts a f... more Susan Price's ' 'Odin Trilogy'' (2005-2008) is a juvenile science fiction series that depicts a future where class relations have become polarised due to late capitalist and technological developments and where ways of doing gender continue to be strongly connected with class. The society in the novels is based on slavery: people are either Freewomen/Freemen or bonders. Here wealth and genetic engineering regulate normative ways of doing gender and class and define borders between humanity and inhumanity. By drawing on recent feminist theory and queer theorisations of and Halberstam (2005), I will examine gender and class as both material and performative aspects of identity that are ''un/done'' in relation to heteronormative life trajectories. I focus on the two female protagonists and their classic role reversal: one escapes slavery while the other is forced to become a bonder. The classic scenario becomes more complicated when the girls escape together to Mars and start a new life there as a queer couple. The girls' ''queer life trajectories'' (Halberstam) challenge normative ways of doing gender and class and open up possibilities for reading Price's trilogy as a critique of neoliberalist and postfeminist discourses of gender, class, identity and choice.
Puhe ja kieli, 2018
Artikkelissa tarkastellaan käsityksiä hyvästä vuorovaikutuksesta ja kielenkäytöstä vanhainkodissa... more Artikkelissa tarkastellaan käsityksiä hyvästä vuorovaikutuksesta ja kielenkäytöstä vanhainkodissa kriittistä diskurssintutkimusta ja etnografiaa hyödyntäen. Tutkimus perustuu aineistoon, joka kerättiin haastattelemalla ja havainnoimalla asukkaita, hoitajia ja esimiehiä kahdessa monikielisessä vanhusten hoitoyksikössä. Aineistosta analysoitiin vanhustyön kieleen liittyviä kieli-ideologioita ja metakieltä. Analyysin tuloksena nousi esiin neljä keskeistä vanhuslähtöisen kielen ulottuvuutta: (1) vuorovaikutuksen laatu, määrä ja sävy, (2) puhuttelun ja nimeämisen tavat, (3) äidinkieli ja monikielisyys sekä (4) kosketuksen ja muun multimodaalisen vuorovaikutuksen merkitys. Tulokset tuovat esiin, että vanhainkoti on institutionaalinen paikka, joka on asukkaille koti ja hoitajille ja esimiehille työpaikka. Nämä toisistaan poikkeavat positiot luovat erilaisia tarpeita ja toiveita vuorovaikutukselle ja kielenkäytölle: siinä missä hoitajat pyrkivät tekemään työnsä tarkoituksenmukaisesti ja suj...
“How Did Child of Light Save Me?” Engagement with a Children’s Multimodal Game Narrative as Adult Play and Self-Therapy
Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships, 2021
This chapter investigates the online reception of the Canadian video game Child of Light (Ubisoft... more This chapter investigates the online reception of the Canadian video game Child of Light (Ubisoft, Child of Light. Montreal: Ubisoft Studios. Video Game, 2014) as a space of encounter between imaginary childhoods and experienced adulthoods. Child of Light is a well-selling video game involving a conventional fairy-tale narrative about a young princess Aurora battling against darkness with a party of companions. The game contains narrative elements typical of children’s stories but has been popular among adult players. The focus of this chapter is on a specific case study: an adult male professional game reviewer and his publicly shared online life narrative, in which he discusses his real-life traumatic experiences in relation to the fairy-tale game narrative. The chapter draws on the notions of speculative life writing (Lehtonen, Writing Oneself into Someone Else’s Story—Experiments with Identity and Speculative Life Writing in Twilight Fan Fiction. Fafnir—Nordic Journal of Science...
Musiikki osana vanhustyön vuorovaikutusta
Available at https://journal.fi/gerontologia/article/view/74286/36726.
The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Games. Ed. Elisabeth Wesseling
International Research in Children's Literature
Lastenkulttuurin kauhujen kartta
AVAIN - Kirjallisuudentutkimuksen aikakauslehti
Kirja-arvostelu: Ylönen, Susanne 2016. Tappeleva rapuhirviö. Kauhun estetiikka lastenkulttuurissa... more Kirja-arvostelu: Ylönen, Susanne 2016. Tappeleva rapuhirviö. Kauhun estetiikka lastenkulttuurissa. Jyväskylä Studies in Humanities 282. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto. 255 s.
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Books by Sanna Tapionkaski
The main focus is on English-language fantasy published since the 1970s but the motifs of invisibility and age-shifting in earlier tales and children’s books is reviewed; this is the first study of children’s fantasy literature that considers these tropes at length.
Novels discussed are from both critically acclaimed authors and the less well known. Most of the novels depicting invisible or age-shifting girls are neither thoroughly conventional nor radically subversive but present a multiplicity of discourses. In terms of gender, children’s fantasy novels can be more complex than they are often interpreted to be. ""
Papers by Sanna Tapionkaski