Thebes Troutman as Traveling Tween: Revising the Family Story.

Thebes Troutman in Miriam Toews's The Flying Troutmans (2008) is a quirky eleven-year-old Canadian tween. In this article I argue that Thebes's body, skin and movement offer a textual counterpoint to the rigidity of the story of the nuclear family as it is conventionally told. Aligning the deterritorialization of the family with that of the nation, I argue that Thebes's marking of her body in an engagingly bizarre tween performance proclaims her separation from the conventional family road trip and story, promoting new iterations of family, home, belonging and origins. It is Thebes as tween who, through creating a zany, sometimes disturbing, but articulate identity and culture on her own skin, raises new possibilities of the tween's role in breaking down borders. Thebes Troutman as a twenty-first-century fictional tween carves out space for new directions and a more fluid Canadian family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]