Weathered Girls: A Corpus Study of Girlhood as Exposure in Australian YA Fiction

This working paper examines how contemporary Australian YA fiction constructs girlhood as a condition of exposure rather than a stable developmental stage. Using a purpose-built corpus of Australian YA novels featuring girl protagonists (2000–2024), the study applies keyword extraction, collocation networks, sentiment trajectories, and semantic pattern analysis to trace how girlhood is linguistically and narratively linked to vulnerability, emotional labour, environmental instability, and relational precarity. Early findings indicate that Australian YA fiction frequently positions girlhood as a weathered and weathering subjectivity shaped by ongoingness rather than resolution. This preprint presents the project rationale, corpus design, analytical methods, and initial results, laying the groundwork for a full article that combines corpus linguistics, girlhood studies, and feminist environmental humanities.