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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of English, 2017., This inquiry considers female-authored texts, published from 1976-2013, which detail girls' entrance into the sexual realities of heteronormativity in a manner that refuses to sanitize the uglier, darker aspects of this process or the ugly feelings that are one of its results. By making subversive use of language—both verbal and visual—these works illuminate how girls' agency, particularly their sexual agency, has been obstructed and make visible the violence implicit in this obstruction. In reaction to the emotionality and sexual explicitness of these works, many readers have responded with anger and disgust while also marginalizing these texts by categorizing them as pornographic, an assessment which ultimately leaves the important contributions of these works unconsidered. However, a far more appropriate way to categorize these texts would be as counterpornographic, texts in which female authors willfully expropriate the traditionally male domain of sexually explicit, or obscene, language as a way of countering the phallocentric narrative of erotic life dominant in pornography and society at large. Taking into consideration a number of critics' affective responses and the implicit politics present in such responses, the first counterpornographic work I examine is Andrea Dworkin's Mercy. In this novel, Andrea, the narrator, runs up against a wall of language, language which consistently fails to successfully articulate the anger and painful experiences, sexual and otherwise, of growing up girl. To tell her truth as accurately as possible, Andrea feels she must not only use "true words," i.e. "dirty words," but must also develop a language of her own, which is made "in blood." Hers is a story told in a voice that many find both overwrought and disturbing, one often read as hysterical and excessive. The next set of texts I consider come from the graphic writers Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner. These authors utilize the obscene and affectively-charged quali