Abstract
A number of previous studies have addressed gender role-stereotyping in Caldecott Award-winning picturebooks. Building upon the extensive scholarship examining representations of females in Caldecott books, this current study offers a critical investigation of how gender is represented in Caldecott Medal-winning literature from 1938 to 2011 by exploring the ways in which “femininity” and “masculinity,” biological sex, and gender are constructed in these texts. The investigators briefly address author and illustrator gender and the representations of males and females as characters or images in pictures and text before departing from previous scholarship to offer a rereading of books that feature “ungendered” leading characters, those that are not identified in the text as being either “male” or “female” and are therefore open to the interpretation of individual readers. By resisting cultural cues and normative constructions of gender and biological sex, these ungendered depictions extend the range of possible ways in which readers may see themselves or those in their lives represented in Caldecott Medal-winning picturebooks.
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Notes
We follow the lead of Wolfenbarger and Sipe (2007) and scholars such as Barbara Kiefer, Maria Nikolajeva, and David Lewis by using the compound word “picturebook” as opposed to “picture book” because it “recognizes the union of text and art that results in something beyond what each form separately contributes” (p. 273).
In fact, some researchers have argued that “the Caldecott winners are clearly less stereotyped than the average book, and do not include the most blatant examples of sexism” (Weitzman et al., 1972, p. 1127).
As Segel (1982) argues, in several of these studies, there is “a disturbing tendency…to assume that any illustrated figure of unspecified gender is male” (p. 31).
We acknowledge that this position presumes that only text (words) can specify gender (i.e., “he” or “she”) and privileges textual language by assuming that words are more “fixed” than visual images, a notion questioned by critics and theorists like Jacques Derrida. Written text is ultimately as slippery as visual images: as one example, in queer cultures, words that may previously have been assumed to have “fixed” meanings (i.e., “girl” or “she”) are often resignified and used across categories of biological sex and gender-identity.
Throughout this discussion, the gender neutral pronoun “ze” is adopted as opposed to “he” or “she.” Following this lead, “his” or “her” has been replaced with “hir.”
Some readers may interpret the burglar as a character temporarily cross-dressing to disguise hir identity and still not find humor in the sequence. Space does not allow for a full reading of this sequence in light of the literary traditions of male-to-female cross-dressing, a tradition explored in more depth in Flanagan’s Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children’s Literature and Film (2007). Particularly relevant here is Flanagan’s discussion of the use of male-to-female cross-dressing to invoke humor in children’s and young adult literature.
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Thomas Crisp is assistant professor of literacy studies at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee where he teaches courses in literacy and children’s and young adult literature, media, and culture.
Brittany Hiller is a fourth grade teacher at The Out-of-Door Academy in Sarasota, Florida. She completed her M.A. in Reading Education at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee in 2010.
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Crisp, T., Hiller, B. “Is This a Boy or a Girl?”: Rethinking Sex-Role Representation in Caldecott Medal-Winning Picturebooks, 1938–2011. Child Lit Educ 42, 196–212 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9128-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-011-9128-1