Reproducing and Resisting the Binary: Discursive Conceptualizations of Gender Variance in Children's Literature

This dissertation contends that within the slowly growing representation of gender variant characters in childrens literature, particular subjectivities of gender variance are often emphasized while others remain overwhelmingly excluded. This research encompasses an exploration of gender and childrens literature in an attempt to gain an understanding of the ways gender variance is constituted within 30 childrens picture books featuring gender variant protagonists. By implementing a feminist poststructuralist theoretical orientation, this study utilizes a critical discourse analysis to respond to the following three guiding research questions: 1) How is gender discursively constructed within childrens picture books on gender variance? 2) How do characters constitute and navigate their gender subjectivities and subject positions within the narratives of these texts? 3) What subject positions are available for readers to identify and align themselves with within these texts? Key findings that were elucidated through this analysis include that: 1) these texts emphasize a largely [trans]normative depiction of gender variance, wherein binary forms of gender variance are overwhelmingly overrepresented; 2) non-binary subjectivities were largely underrepresented as they were only marginally present; and 3) agender and genderless subjectivities were wholly non-existent. Considering that childrens literature serves as a tool through which children can learn about themselves, others, and the social world, the overrepresentation of binary subject positions alongside the underrepresentation of non-binary and genderless subject positions has significant implications for the children engaging with these books. Children belonging to the latter two groups are not able to identify with these characters and thus do not find themselves represented within this genre of texts. These children learn that their subjectivity is other, peripheral, and fundamentally erased as they become relegated to the margins of a genre of literature that is already marginalized to begin with. More importantly, the prospect of existing beyond and without gender is not a possibility within these texts as gender itself is principally naturalized and normalized. Given its distinct overlapping emphasis on childhood, gender, and discourse, this dissertation offers a contribution to scholarship within the fields of early childhood studies, gender studies, sociology, and discourse analysis, and thus is largely multidisciplinary in scope.