Queering chapter books with LGBT characters for young readers: recognizing and complicating representations of homonormativity

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we consider the limited chapter book options with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) characters available for upper elementary readers. While these texts all include one or more LGBT character(s), the overall representations of LGBT people and issues highlight particular normative identities and silence others. We are concerned that these representations reify neoliberal ideas about sexuality's relationship to race and class, and encourage gay assimilation into normative but problematic, nonequitable institutions. Yet we also believe that an analysis of books focusing only on representations of LGBT characters’ identities limits the queer potential of texts. Therefore, in addition to looking at representations within these books, we also consider how a second look at these books through a queer lens can help disrupt normative representations of a range of identity categories. We undertake this dual analysis for several purposes: (1) to find and review LGBT-inclusive chapter books available for pre-YA (young adult) readers, (2) to analyze gaps in this corpus of literature so as to push back against normativizing frameworks, and (3) to show how bringing queer critique and analysis of such texts can be used to deconstruct and diversify representations of LGBT people and families until/in addition to the publication of additional and more diverse texts.

KEYWORDS:

• pre-YA literature
• LGBT children's literature
• queer children's literature
• queer theory
• homonormativity

Notes

1. We recognize that identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people are connected through their disruptions of compulsory heteronormativity and the heterosexual matrix (i.e., Butler, 1999; Rich, 1980), but that people who identify as trans* might also identify as gay or lesbian. Therefore, although we write LGBT for clarity, we mean this term to be understood as “LGB and/or T.” In instances where we mean only one of those identities, we will use that specific term. Otherwise, we will use this commonly accepted acronym as an umbrella term. Furthermore, we use the term trans*, with an asterisk, to acknowledge the ways this one word stands in for a variety of diverse non-cisgender identities. The asterisk has roots in online search notation that represents a search for a “wildcard” ending attached to a given prefix, in other words the letters you typed followed by any others. This term is seen by some queer and trans* activists to be more inclusive of the range of trans* folks’ identities and experiences, including people who identify as “transgender, transsexual, transvestite, genderqueer, genderfluid, non-binary, genderfuck, genderless, a-gender, non-gendered, third gender, two-spirit, bigender, trans man and trans woman” (Killermann, 2012, n.p.; see also Ryan, 2014).

2. Indeed, the representation is so vague that Jill's son, who has two mothers and is used to seeing LGBT-headed families represented in books, did not even believe India's father was gay the first time he read the book. Instead, he initially insisted that Richard was India's father's friend rather than his romantic partner.

3. We will change names and pronouns as Joan/John changes them. When she is living as a girl and not working to create and maintain an identity of John, we will call her “she” and use the name Joanie. When he transitions to dressing like, and actively trying to present as masculine, we will call him “he” and use the name John. When writing about the text as a whole, we will refer to the character as Joan/John, respecting the two identities that Joan/John claims during the story.