Reading LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books
An engaging collection of original scholarship on LGBTQ+ children’s picture books
Description
Contributions by Sara Austin, Rob Bittner, J. Bradley Blankenship, Gabriel Duckels, Caitlin Howlett, Isabel Millán, Jennifer Miller, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Tim Morris, Dana Rudolph, j wallace skelton, Jason Vanfosson, River Vooris, and B. J. Woodstein
Picture books are books aimed at children where the illustrations are as important, or more important, than the text. Picture books, the effects of their simple text and importance in the literary canon, have been studied by scholars for decades, but little attention has been given to LGBTQ+ picture books. Reading LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books is a collection of essays that identifies and interprets children’s picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ content.
Contributors to the volume include established and emerging scholars with expertise in the fields of children’s literature, young adult literature, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and education. Each essay introduces readers to several children’s books that denote unmistakable LGBTQ+ content. Essays bring various interpretive frameworks and intellectual commitments to their unique readings of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. The essays in Reading LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books produce innovative new scholarship about a range of topics including representations of LGBTQ+ marriage and parenting and LGBTQ+ history and culture. The topics explored, and theoretical frameworks applied, significantly expand available and accessible up-to-date scholarship on the growing field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books.
Reviews
"Reading LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books is a timely, engaging, and arguably groundbreaking volume. This book will be of interest to scholars of children’s literature and childhood studies but also a wider public invested in queer children’s literature, including teachers, librarians, parents, and other advocates."
- Kenneth B. Kidd, coeditor of Alt Kid Lit: What Children’s Literature Might Be
"The ostensible simplicity of picture books belies their formative role in worldmaking for all children, queer or otherwise, as the essayists of this volume so richly detail. Reading LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books explores this rich landscape in loving yet precise detail, illuminating the joys of representations for too long denied."
- Tison Pugh, author of Queer Oz: L. Frank Baum’s Trans Tales and Other Astounding Adventures in Sex and Gender
"Given the widening availability of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books, this edited collection is both timely and necessary. . . . This book or chapters from it would make valuable additions to courses on children’s literature, LGBTQ+ studies, education, or English. Highly recommended."
- A. Droog, CHOICE