Reading gender: a feminist, queer approach to children's literature and children's discursive agency

ABSTRACT

Children's literature helps young people make sense of gender. However, while books offer children the imaginative ability to create their own worlds, normative gender can manifest in characters and stories. The study described in this article draws upon ‘disruptive’ storytimes with 114 preschool children, interviews with 20 parents and staff, and observations at 20 preschools. Employing a feminist, queer approach, I develop two derivative books that switch a boy-hero for a girl and vice versa. These books are read to children in educational settings. This method interrogates gendered characters and stories’ attachments to such concepts as love, acceptance, bodily agency, and adventure. Results show how children interact with these characters and stories and how they use categorisation and narrative construction to make sense of gender. I focus on the gender discourses at play and moments of childhood discursive agency. Themes include literature, doing and being, positioning, bodies, and feminist tales.

KEYWORDS:

• Children's literature
• gendered representations
• interaction
• discursive agency
• feminist post-structuralism
• queer theory

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my research team, including Eva Earles, Kelly Wagner, Elaine Taylor, and Karianne Nixon. I would also like to thank my mentoring professor, Maralee Mayberry and the USF Graduate Student Research Challenge Grant program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Storytime population included: 55 girls (18 Black, 9 Latina, 1 Asian, 4 Multi-racial, and 23 white) and 59 boys (35 Black, 5 Latino, 4 Asian, 3 Multi-racial, and 12 white). Interviewed childcare workers included: 9 women (2 Black, 2 Latina, and 5 white) and 1 white man. Preschool staff helped secure parent interviewees which included: 1 Black mother of a boy; 1 Black mother of a boy; 1 Black mother of a girl; 1 Latina mother of a girl; 1 Latina mother of a boy; 1 Latina father of a girl; 2 white mothers of boys; 1 white mother of a girl; 1 white father of a girl. All married adults were in heterosexual unions; single-parents did not discuss their sexual orientations.

2. Since data collection, the four other team members went on to pursue applied work in other organisations. With their permission, I completed the data analysis, report writing, and journal submission.

3. By easily accessible, I refer to those books found (at the time of my search) at large, nationwide bookstore chains. The books were prominently displayed in sections of the store dedicated to books for our targeted age group. I narrowed my search for children's books to those available in bookstores within the three-county area of our study. I eliminated specialty and college bookstores and any store that was located more than 20 miles from our target zip codes. In total, I scouted two Books-A-Million and six Barnes & Noble stores. I chose four books per gender category and an additional two feminist books. Collectively, these books also were cited in 470 book review lists (e.g. Horn Book Guide Review, NY Times Book Review, etc.). As a research team, the five of us chose one book from each category for our study.

4. In our derivative, we also switched the gender of the admiring boy ladybugs to girl characters. While I recognise that maintaining a heterosexual connection between these characters does not seem queer, I rely on Boellstorff's (2010) notion of ‘surfing binarisms' to highlight the possibility of a queer method that could recognise emic social efficacy and heuristic power of binarisms without ontologising them into ahistoric, dominant categories. In other words, as this move (and its association with the ‘normal') remained unnoticed by both adult and children, this research draws attention to its discursive invisibility. In addition, we transformed the romantic admirers pictured in the ladybug book from male to female and the unaware pursuant from female to male. In the original, the young boys chase the seemingly oblivious girl who undoubtedly adheres to the heteronormative notion that girls must ‘perform childishness as if unaware of their [romantic] appeal' (Holland 2004, 180). As a research team, we agreed to switch these parts in order to queer this notion.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of South Florida Graduate Student Challenge Grant Research program [0068147].