Gender in Children’s Books Harmful?

After “queerifying” various children’s books, our class came to a unanimous consensus regarding the depiction of gender within them. As nearly everyone observed, the illustrated characters within these books are given aesthetic features “typical” of either males or females. The book I queerified, Little Miss Christmas, was no exception. For example, Little Miss Christmas is given long hair, pigtails, and heeled shoes to indicate her femininity. On the other hand, most of the male characters lack any defining physical features at all. Mr. Christmas is the same shape as Little Miss Christmas, but lacks her feminine features, indicating that he is male. All of the female characters within the book had “Little Miss” preceding their names while all the male characters simply had “Mr.” preceding theirs. The book’s creators evidently decided that the female characters should be smaller, since a typical perception of gender is that women are smaller than men. This is a perception that can easily be shattered if one simply observes that in real life, people come in different sizes. The discrepancies between the way gender is depicted within children’s books and the possibility illuminated by some theorists (e.g. Butler) that suggest gender does not even really exist creates a question: If these books are conditioning children to perceive gender according to a superficially gendered discourse, should this be a concern?

In “The Rhetoric of Sex / The Discourse of Desire,” Samuel R. Delany relates sitting down to read the children’s book, Corduroy, to his young daughter. He tries to change Corduroy’s gender from male to female as he reads, but his daughter catches the error and argues that Corduroy is male due to his depiction within the book (“Because he’s got pants on!”). Despite wearing the same overalls as the bear, she understands that the character’s gender is determined due to the discourse of children’s books. He is male because he wears pants, and because most protagonists in children’s books are male. The fact that Delaney’s daughter wears pants too isn’t incongruent because she does so within a different discourse, her life. “I was wrong. Corduroy was a boy. No matter how unfair or how pernicious it was or might prove, the discourse of children’s books made him a boy” (7). Delaney suggests that the predetermined nature of some discourse creates its own truth, which is why even his young daughter understands that even though she and Corduroy both wear pants, no contradiction exists because the pants exist within different discourses.

What if not all children recognize this however? Do some expect the gender determinants within children’s books to hold true in reality? I think that this is a strong possibility, but I am not sure that it should be a concern. Even if children do begin expecting males and females in reality to look and act like their illustrated counterparts, it won’t necessarily lead to a closed-minded or confused post-childhood. I was read Corduroy as a child by my parents, and I don’t use overalls as a visual gender determinant today. Though children’s books do present a gendered world usually only minimally similar to reality, I don’t think the inaccuracy will lead to lasting harm. Delaney is correct in recognizing that a separate discourse exists within children’s books that depicts gender in superficial, stylized ways. Because these discourses are inherently separate, I think that most children will eventually realize that not all women wear dresses, and that men sometimes do. Other things such as family, friends, culture, religion, and experience will have more of a hand in determining whether that child will be closed minded about it.

Mapping Queerness At MSU

As I first looked at the map of MSU and tried to think how I could “queerify” it, I came to the conclusion that it would be best to simply look at the map and think of unique characteristics of some of the places on campus. Certain buildings were the first things that stood out. Fee Hall, on the East side of campus contains a morgue, for example. This building, as it relates to embodiment, reverses the separation between live bodies and dead ones as students often walk by doctors in scrubs wheeling corpses if they happen to have a class in the building. This was one of the strongest examples of queer buildings on campus.

Other buildings I circled were Van Hoosen and Yakeley Halls, for being all-gril dorms; the IM sports buildings, for the strange aggressive vibe within them that results from people being places made for physical exertion; the MSU surplus store was circled because it sells things that are deemed to be no longer useful, and I thought this related to queerness in that it is a store that sells “rejections.” The incinerator was circled for the same reason, it utterly destroys whatever it is that the university decides to put in it. I circled the psychology building because the façade at its entrance displays carvings relating to physics and astronomy, and I believe that this incongruence between its name and its aesthetics is queer.

Buildings were not the only queer thing on campus, of course. There is a strange, abstract sculpture called “The Funambulist” which was recently put in behind Snyder Hall. This steel, black and red sculpture does not really fit in with the aesthetics of the collegiate brick dorms around it. As we discussed in class, many of the bridges around campus display graffiti, and this subversion makes them queer. A bit North of Brody Complex on campus is a teepee with an orange traffic cone in it that someone built in the woods. There are buildings on Michigan Ave. that have been unused since I was a freshman that are marked as “future redevelopment sites.” The ways in which all these structures exist, whether it has deviated from its original purpose and exists in limbo, or sticks out like a sore thumb among the structures around it, this abnormality makes them queer.

I titled my map after I marked it up. The title I came up with was “Concentrations of Queerness at MSU.” It fit because it related to the process by which I marked up my map, looking for spots on it that contained something that was unique, or didn’t fit in some way. These spots are concentrations of queerness, they have to be concentrated because they are queer due to the majority of “normalcy” that surrounds them.

-Ziev

The Death of the Author’s Gender

I’d like to use this post to explore some of Elizabeth Grosz’s theories regarding the relationship between author, text, and reader. In particular, I’m interested in the way Grosz uses Roland Barthes’ famous theory, the “death of the author,” and uses it in a context of gender and feminist politics.

According to Grosz, “The sex of the author has…no direct bearing on the political position of the text, just as other facts about the author’s private or professional life do not explain the text” (21). I think the first response for many when analyzing a feminist text is to do just the opposite. If an author is producing a feminist text, I think that most readers will take the author’s background into consideration when forming their analysis. Grosz must point out that the opposite should be true. If a text is to stand alone, as Barthes believes it does, demographic considerations such as the sex of the author must have no bearing, and are not productive for analytical purposes.

Since feminist texts are often perceived to be inherently political, how can Grosz’ four features concerning feminist texts (the sex of the author, the content of the text, the sex of the reader, and the style of the text) be acknowledged in an apolitical context? Is it really possible that the sex of the author has “no direct bearing” on the political position of the text? We can certainly use the sex of the author to analyze a text, claiming, for example, that the author chose to make her protagonist female because the author is female. Whether this is true or not, analysis such as this inevitably leads us to analyzing the author rather than the text.

So how can we acknowledge that a being known as “the author” produced a text, and that this being has certain demographic and personal characteristics and experiences, without opening the door to an analysis of these features? The interesting concept Grosz brings up, that of the authorial “signature” within the text, allows us to acknowledge what Barthes says we should not: the background of the author, without forcing us to inform our analysis using it. “There are ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces or marks on the texts produced, just as we in turn must recognize that the processes of textual production also leave their trace or residue on the body of the writer (and readers)” (21). In other words, texts include traces of the author’s “corporeality.” The way we make the traces of this signature useful is by following Grosz when she says, “I am interested in the way ways in which the author’s corporeality, an always sexually specific corporeality—not the author’s interiority, psyche, consciousness, concepts, or ideas, intrudes into or is productive of the text” (21). We must look for the way that the author’s corporeality, their material nature, is in the text. In essence, with the signature we are trying to see how the author embodies a text, with the author’s body being within the text, rather than how their body affected the text as a separate unit.