Gender

Abstract

The OED informs us that “gender” has at its root the Latin genus, meaning “race,
kind,” and emerges as early as the fifth century as a term for differentiating between
types of (especially) people and words. In the following 1500 years, gender appears in
linguistic and biological contexts to distinguish types of words and bodies from one
another, as when words in Indo-European languages were identified as masculine,
feminine, or neuter, and humans were identified as male or female. It is telling that
gender has historically (whether overtly or covertly) been a tool of negotiation
between our understandings of bodies, and meanings derived from and attributed to
them.
Within the field of children’s literature studies, as in other disciplines, gender in
and of itself is rarely the object of critique. Rather, specific constructions of gender
structure understandings of subjectivity; allow or disallow certain behaviors or
experiences on the basis of biological sex; and dictate a specific vision of social
relations and organization. Critical approaches to gender in children’s literature have
included linguistic analysis (Turner-Bowker; Sunderland); analysis of visual
representations (Bradford; Moebius); cultural images of females (Grauerholz and
Pescosolido); consideration of gender and genre (Christian-Smith; Stephens);
ideological (Nodelman and Reimer); psychoanalytic (Coats); discourse analysis
(Stephens); and masculinity studies (Nodelman) among others. In the adjacent fields
of education and literacy studies, gender has been a sustained point of investigation,
often deriving from perceived gendering of pedagogical practices (Lehr) or of reading
preferences and competencies, and in recent years, perceptions of boys as “reluctant
readers” (Moss). The ideology of patriarchy has primarily come under critical scrutiny
2
because it has been used to locate characters and readers within the specific binary
logic of gender relations that historically subordinated the feminine to the masculine.
Just as feminism might be broadly defined as resistance to existing power structures, a
gendered reading might be broadly defined as a “resistant reading” in that it most
often reveals or contests that which a text assumes to be the norm.