Abstract
As Amanda Diekman and Sarah Murnen (2004) note, studies of “nonsexist” children’s books tend to focus on girls performing stereotypically masculine behaviors without consideration of how boy characters perform gender (p. 381); however, this narrow focus on girl figures in the identification of nonsexist works has two side-effects: appearing to devalue traits traditionally considered feminine and losing sight of male characters’ subversive gender performances. The field of performance studies, focusing on codified performative acts rather than on physical traits such as biological sex, presents a new avenue for understanding how works challenge a sexist hegemony. For example, by examining characters’ performance of food-sharing, traditionally encoded as feminine/motherly, it is possible to identify nuanced performances that enrich our understanding of how gender operates in children’s literature. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Bruce Coville’s Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, such an examination draws attention to two boy characters, Will Parry and Jeremy Thatcher, who perform a similar combination of feminine/motherly and more traditionally masculine behaviors. Further explorations of this type present the possibility of identifying new sites of gender subversion that further expand our definitions of masculinity and femininity, and of what it means to be nonsexist.
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Notes
The intersection of gender expression and animal advocacy is a fruitful area for another research project. In addition to Harris’s Men’s Studies approach to the subject, other scholars examining other fields of identity performance, such as Emily Gaarder (2011) and Una Chaudhuri (2007), have also contributed to the study of this intersectionality, and the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies has much more to offer on the subject.
The controversy over the list, most of which plays out in the comments section of the web log entry providing access to the list, arose from the removal of three titles in response to online comments that those titles might be “triggering” or promoting “rape culture.” The Golden Compass was not implicated in this debate.
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Danielle Bienvenue Bray is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Georgia. Her research interests include food studies, performance studies, and gender studies theory, particularly in relation to middle grades and young adult literature.
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Bray, D.B. Sissy Boy Mothering: Male Child Mother Figures in Middle-Grade Fantasy Literature. Child Lit Educ 46, 160–174 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9248-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-015-9248-0