Boy Meets Music: Affective and Ideological Engagements in David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy, Love is the Higher Law, and Two Boys Kissing

Music is a source of both affective and social power. As ‘a medium with a capacity for imparting shape and texture to being, feeling and doing’ and a ‘resource for social agency’ (DeNora 2000, pp. 152–153), the experience of audible music can be particularly productive. To consider musical references as they appear in prose fiction, at first glance, seems to consider an engagement far removed from the cognitive and bodily experience of listening to music, and therefore its productive potential. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre (2002), however, employs a Bakhtinian approach to musical reference in fiction narrative when she theorises how music can function as part of the heteroglossia of the novel. As ‘an equally vibrant language within the literary text’, she argues, musical reference offers another site ‘to engage social struggles’ (pp. xviii – xix). Scholars have further argued that references to music in young adult fiction can enter into textual processes of ideological positioning, the construction of subjectivity, and the negotiation of adolescent identity at individual, social and political levels.1