Children’s literature is at the centre of many urgent cultural concerns, such as those involving development and psychology, family and social structures, and diversity and equity. Because children’s literature is thought to bear on these concerns and many others, scholars are continuously drawing on new scholarly methodologies to assess the impact that children’s literature has on culture. In this chapter I will examine some of the new methods that are changing our understanding of children’s literature. The first half of the chapter will look at Childhood Studies and cognitive narratology to assess their impact on the field, as interdisciplinary methodologies. Childhood Studies looks at how childhood is historically, socially, and politically constructed; these conceptions of childhood have profoundly shaped the literature produced by children. In turn, children’s literature has shaped notions of childhood. Childhood Studies has also inspired an increased attention to the voices and perspectives of actual children, with a sensitivity to the rights of children. There is also a movement towards a model of Children’s Literature study that involves children as participants and shapers of knowledge. Cognitive narratology concerns itself with the intellectual capacities that young people bring to their readings of texts. It builds on insights from disciplines such as biology and neuroscience, and longstanding work on childhood development, raising questions about embodied knowledge, representation, perception, temporality, and memory.
The second half of the chapter will consider how attention to diversity in the field is transforming it. Thinking about race, gender, sexuality, and disability in children’s literature suggests opportunities for social and political transformation in many spheres of human existence. Literary theory, activism, publishing trends, and authorial choices mutually influence this kind of cultural work. Work on race within children’s literature, including the insights of Critical Race Studies, has illuminated the role of children’s literature in constructing and maintaining racial hierarchies, with the particular objective of making children’s publishing and scholarship more equitable and inclusive. Recent studies on gender and sexuality in children’s literature consider how children’s literature has developed along strictly gendered lines, and how recent children’s literature has explored an expanded range of gender and sexual expression. Disability studies offer a sociological, political, historical, and cultural perspective on the portrayal of disability in children’s literature as well as the social construction of the ‘able-bodied.’ All of these approaches invite a renewed understanding of the ways in which the field has traditionally excluded many people and sparked a re-evaluation of its most fundamental debates and assumptions.
My case study, Cece Bell’s El Deafo, is an autobiographical novel (or slightly fictionalized memoir) that depicts the school experiences of a girl who copes with a profound hearing loss. El Deafo is interested in the whole life of its subject: her friendships, her burgeoning interest in boys, and her discovery of her own talents and strengths. The book can be productively illuminated by giving attention to theories about disability, gender, and child agency, as Wendy Smith-D’Arezzo and Janine Holc contend when they note that El Deafo ‘brings new approaches in critical disability studies to literature for children, and contributes to the movement in girlhood studies towards identifying girls as sources of insight, voice and power’ (Smith-D’Arezzo and Holc 2016, 73). The title refers to a superhero persona that Cece adopts, El Deafo, which offers her a form of imaginative empowerment and which she ultimately employs to connect socially with her classmates. El Deafo is an example of the ways in which autobiographical fiction or memoir can speak to wider cultural questions while remaining focused on one person’s experience.
Cognitive narrative theory and Childhood Studies approaches
When applied to a children’s literature context, the academic field variously termed ‘Childhood Studies,’ ‘Children’s Studies,’ or ‘Children and Youth Studies’ adds to our knowledge of how children’s literature both reflects and shapes the way we conceive of childhood. It considers the lived experience of children alongside the literature that is produced for them. This endeavour is fundamentally interdisciplinary, as sociologist Gertrud Lenzer explains when she notes that Childhood Studies brings ‘carefully chosen knowledge of children from different studies to bear upon the class or category of children to students in a Liberal Arts course of learning’ (Lenzer 2001, 183). Childhood Studies promises to break down existing disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. Anna Mae Duane argues, in fact, that Childhood Studies ‘defies the easy divisions of biology and culture, body and book’ (Duane 2013, 3). The Children’s Literature scholar who works within a Childhood Studies framework looks beyond literary text to consider its function in the whole culture of childhood, and the ways in which the culture of childhood itself shapes the text.
‘Childhood’ as a cultural construction is of paramount interest for Children’s Literature scholars. Karen Coats, for example, uses a Childhood Studies framework to describe tensions between three visions of childhood: a Romantic vision of childhood as the apex of sensation and delight; a post-Freudian ‘modernist’ vision which stresses development and the attainment of strength through maturation; and a ‘postmodern’ vision, where the child is surrounded by and immersed within a plethora of sometimes conflicting voices and influences (Coats 2001, 146). The very definition of what it means to be a child has shifted, often dramatically, and the age range defining childhood has changed with time and culture. The literature crafted in response to those changing visions has also shifted. The various theorizations of childhood that we saw in Chapter 2 comprise some examples, whether it involves Locke’s emphasis on the blank slate (tabula rasa), Rousseau’s fascination with the ‘natural’ child, or the modernist ‘child mechanical’ who is a creature not of a nostalgic past but a technologically innovative future.
Childhood Studies scholars have also considered fiction and poetry seeking to ‘imaginatively reenter the world of childhood’ by authors such as Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Dylan Thomas, and countless others (Travisano 2000, 26). Creative practice is often imagined as a way to bridge the gap between adults and children. Yet these literary imaginings of childhood add to our store of cultural imaginings about childhood, and become constructions of childhood in their own right. The Edenic childhood of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ (1945), for example, gives us a child deeply in tune with his surroundings as he visits his Aunt Annie’s farm, ‘young and easy under the apple boughs.’ This expansive pleasure over his environment, and the relaxed control he exerts over it, ends as he leaves the state of childhood for adulthood. ‘Fern Hill’ contributes to the rhetorical creation of childhood as a space of joyful ease, fantasy, unselfconscious leisure, obliviousness to the constraints of time, and connection to nature. Anna Mae Duane calls such cultural constructions of childhood ‘the rhetorical child,’ as opposed to the ‘historical child’ (which describes actual children) (Duane 2013, 15).
Interrogating the myths we hold about childhood as a literary, cultural, and political ideal may seem quite different from studying and intervening in the lives of actual children. Responding to the question of whether research into children experiencing deprivation and poverty is more urgent than work on the ‘rhetorical child,’ Duane rejects the distinction altogether, arguing that ‘this scholarly hierarchy falsely suggests that we can indeed separate actual subjects from our literary, cultural, and political notions about them’ (Duane 2013, 16). For example, our cultural investment in individualist conceptions of autonomy leads us to think of children as dependent and vulnerable, which is ‘a block to full engagement and full humanity’ (Duane 2013, 16). We might also consider, for example, how the Romantic, ecstatic vision of childhood we see in Dylan Thomas contributes to our resolve to provide carefree and pleasurable encounters with the natural world for children. When we aspire to change or improve the lives of children, we also need to account for our own ideas about them, and Children’s Literature scholars can help us understand the visions of childhood that literary texts put forward.
Childhood Studies also argues for an expanded role for children in knowledge production, articulated, for example, by John Wall’s argument that ‘Children should be empowered to help formulate research questions, contribute to academic and policy conferences, and take part in larger social and political processes’ (Wall 2013, 70). Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak suggests that children should ‘become peer researchers whose contribution to generating knowledge about what they read has an intrinsic value similar to insights offered by adult readers’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak 2016, 217). Children’s voices have, to be sure, been incorporated in scholarship before, especially in the fields of education, media studies, and librarianship; I considered some of these efforts in my first chapter. Recent Childhood Studies work, however, proposes that young people be seen as complete equals in researching their literature. This might seem unrealistic or counter-intuitive to many people. It presumes that children are interested in becoming researchers in the field of Children’s Literature and that they have time and energy to devote to such a study. It demands an institution where children and their contributions to knowledge are treated ethically and with respect, one where adults are willing and able to share their roles as knowledge-makers in the field with young people. These are very challenging conditions to meet, perhaps beyond the reach of the current academy. Yet such an approach, if it were to be pursued, could go some way to eroding the boundaries and inequities between children and adults. It would necessitate a profound transformation of our modes of knowledge production in the field, as well as a recalibration of the usual power differences between adults and children.
Childhood Studies sees childhood and its insights as potentially transformative for all human institutions. Wall, for example, advocates that Childhood Studies should emulate some of the ethical and epistemological advances of feminism, which he notes ‘reconstructed ethical ideas, for both women and men, around new understandings of gender, agency, voice, power, narrative, care, and relationality.’ He notes:
He uses ‘childism’ differently from the way in which Peter Hunt uses it as we saw in Chapter 1, which might be described as ‘trying to read from the perspective of a child.’ Wall uses ‘childism’ to mean that our ethical life should be completely transformed by children’s needs and perspectives. For Childhood Studies scholars such as Wall and others, children’s literature is less a space of acculturation into adult values and more a space to explore what the world would look like if children’s ontologies, needs, perceptions, and lived experiences were the dominant force in shaping culture. Children’s Literature scholars working within a Childhood Studies framework are inspired to think about how the representations children encounter in children’s literature affect their lives, and how a focus on children’s actual needs and potentials could transform that literature.
Cognitive literary criticism
Throughout this book we have identified a concern with the gaps between child reader and adult producer of literature, as well as a desire to better understand the reading experiences of young people. Cognitive narratology promises to offer fresh insights into the cognitive capacities that young people bring to their readings of texts, as shaped both by biology and culture. It draws on understandings of childhood development and cognition from the disciplines of biology, neuroscience, and psychology, as well as child development.
Literary cognitive criticism in the field of Children’s Literature is sometimes known as cognitive poetics or cognitive narratology. Alan Richardson characterizes it as ‘an attempt on the part of scholars with many different aims and methods to bring literary studies into dialogue with the new sciences of mind and brain,’ developing models ‘for understanding subjectivity, agency, consciousness, language, and psychosocial development through critical engagement with the best contemporary work being produced in university departments of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind’ (Richardson 2006, 544).
Many critics turn to cognitive narratology to learn how child readers make meaning. For example, schemas and scripts assist ‘readers in connecting fictional, vicarious knowledge with real-life knowledge as well as previous fictional knowledge’ (Nikolajeva 2014, 4). Roberta Seelinger Trites notes that:
Also influential in cognitive narratology as applied to children’s literature is Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier’s idea of blending, which places ‘greater emphasis on the productive character of metaphorical and other conceptual mapping strategies, paying attention to the emergent ideas that arise from a given blend’ (Richardson 2006, 547). Cognitive critics are interested in how the brain makes sense of different ideas, and also how metaphors blend different concepts together to make new ideas.
Can recent brain research actually help literary scholars understand more about children and their reading? In 2014 Maria Nikolajeva expressed optimism about the field’s achievements to date:
Mainstream cognitive literary studies, however, have not been as interested in child readers, ‘although some children’s classics have been used as exemplars’ (Bullen, Moruzi, and Smith 2018, 7). Nikolajeva points out that the study of ‘brain processes during fiction reading’ has been completed only on adults to date (Nikolajeva 2014, 7). The question of how much cognitive literary studies need to be based on empirical studies of cognition is an interesting one, and, as Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer note, several models of the field are restricted in terms of the ‘certain aspects of cognition to be observed – for example, metaphor or frames and scripts.’ In their own work on picture-books, they prefer to ‘stick to the results of those sciences which devote themselves to the study of children’s cognitive development,’ including ‘developmental psychology’ but also ‘disciplines such as linguistics, epistemology, and the study of emotion and vision that contribute to a comprehensive theory of children’s cognitive development’ (Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2013, 144). Cognitive literary study doubtless benefits both from studies focusing on metaphors, frames, and scripts, and those that draw on empirical studies of children’s cognitive development.
Cognitive narratology can offer insights into the ways in which children make sense of the world and the ways in which texts are structured to facilitate that sensemaking. But it can also underscore the cognitive and experiential differences between children and adults. Nikolajeva states this bluntly: ‘Children’s literature is a unique literary mode in that the sender and the receiver of the text are by definition on different cognitive levels’ (Nikolajeva 2014, 13). A focus on the different cognitive levels of adults and children may, once again, draw a wedge between readers of different ages. On the other hand, the field can make use of the enormous body of work about child development already available to consider children as readers who are growing in sophistication.
Affect theory has emerged alongside cognitive theory as a fruitful method for the study of children’s literature. Cognitive theory often encompasses questions of affect in that it is interested in ‘the often unconscious mental and affective processes readers use to understand texts and each other’ (Bullen, Moruzi and Smith 2018, 6). In the words of Elizabeth Bullen, Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, affect theory offers a ‘catalyst for new ways of thinking about the body, cognition, subjectivity, society, ideology, and texts …’ (Bullen, Moruzi and Smith 2018, 2). The fact that cognitive theory and affect theory are both making their presence felt in Children’s Literature testifies to the ways in which thinking and feeling are understood as entwined and mutually dependent processes. Nikolajeva notes that ‘cognitive criticism, supported by neuroscience, has shown that the brain, through recently discovered mirror neurons, reacts to fictional worlds (descriptions, events, characters) as if they were real’ (Nikolajeva 2014, 8). Bullen, Moruzi, and Smith believe that children’s texts are ‘used as tools for emotional socialization, enculturation, political persuasion, and moral or ethical education’ (Bullen, Moruzi and Smith 2018, 2). In this vein, Marek C. Oziewicz has looked at cultural and cognitive scripts for models of justice in imaginary worlds and speculative fiction: from the retributive justice of an ‘eye for an eye’ to what he terms Open Justice, which views justice unfolding across physical and social differences, and with a sensitivity to individual environments (Oziewicz 2015).
Fascinating work on empathy, following on from the studies of Suzanne Keen and others, helps us consider whether children’s literature facilitates insight into another person’s thoughts and feelings, and encourages readers to share those feelings. Many people still think of children’s literature as fostering empathy, as the many lesson plans and reading lists on this topic would indicate. Literary works are believed to help children think outside of their own situation, attending to other people’s experiences with both heart and mind. How fully, however, does that emotional response translate into action in the world? Kerry Mallan argues that ‘fiction that engages a reader with the emotional plight of a character does not necessarily translate into actions in the real world towards people who are similarly suffering, marginalized, or victimized’ (Mallan 2013, 106). This is perhaps true, but it is useful to think back to the ‘mirror neurons’ mentioned by Nikolajeva above, which cause readers to respond to fictional texts as if they were real (Nikolajeva 2014, 8). It is perhaps premature to discount the reactions of young people to some of their fictional texts and the potential for these texts to inspire greater social and political awareness and action.
An emphasis on cognitive and affective development, especially if combined with a set of protocols connected to ‘normal’ development, might lend itself to a normative ideal of child and adolescent development, one that fails to take account of neurodiversity: the many different ways in which cognition and perception are experienced by an individual reader, including conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and others. Yet the conversation between cognitive narratology, affect theory, and disability studies has the potential to yield helpful insights into differences of perception, embodied cognition, and emotional states. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003), a detective novel where a young boy investigates the mysterious death of his neighbour’s dog and untangles his fraught family history, is read as the portrayal of a character on the autism spectrum, given the protagonist’s thought and language patterns, particularly his verbal repetition, difficulties with social interaction, and obsession with detail. Problems arise when it is meant to stand in ‘as a singular representative for autistic experience’ (Tougaw 2018, 128). Jason Tougaw considers the book as a case study in ‘the tensions between aesthetics and ethics—or form and politics—that ensue when a novelist crafts a voice composed of symptoms of a neurological syndrome’ (Tougaw 2018, 121). After studying reviews of the book, including those by people with autism, he concludes that the novel both ‘dramatizes the destigmatization of neurological difference’ and ‘perpetuates stereotypes and circulates misinformation when Christopher is read as a singular representative for autistic experience’ (Tougaw 2018, 128). Tougaw advocates that debates about the politics and aesthetics of the representation of neurodiversity be foregrounded when the book is taught. This is an exemplary approach to many of the challenges of cognitive theory and affect theory as they bear on children’s literature, since many of the questions of embodiment and cognition in the field continue to be unresolved. The field will change as it responds to new research in the sciences and humanities, as well as to cultural change. Cognitive narrative criticism and affect theory inspire reflection on how children’s minds, bodies, and affective processes shape their experiences as readers, and stimulate advocacy, both inside and outside the academy, for books that represent cognitive differences with accuracy and genuine understanding.
Diversity
In her essay ‘Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Doors’ (1990), Rudine Sims Bishop describes children’s reading using the metaphors of ‘windows’ (where readers can look into both familiar and unfamiliar lives), ‘mirrors’ (where books reflect a child back to him or herself), and ‘sliding doors’ (where children enter imaginatively into the world of a book). When young people from marginalized groups cannot find representations of themselves in books, or encounter images that are ‘distorted, negative, or laughable,’ Bishop writes, they ‘learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part’ (Bishop 1990, ix). Children from dominant social groups face a different problem: ‘If they see only reflections of themselves, they will grow up with an exaggerated sense of their own importance and value in the world—a dangerous ethnocentrism’ (Bishop 1990, xv).
Bishop’s ideas have served as a rallying cry for scholars and activists in the field of publishing who seek more, and better, representation of children of colour, as well as other embodied and cultural differences such as gender, social class, disability, and queerness. The ‘We Need Diverse Books’ group is a non-profit organization that declares its vision as ‘A world in which all children can see themselves in the pages of a book’ (diversebooks.org). In his role as the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature (2016–2017), Gene Luen Yang, himself a noted writer for children and young adults, issued a ‘reading without walls’ challenge to young people: to read books about characters who are different from you in appearance and experience, a topic you know nothing about, or a format (like the graphic novel or play) you have never tried. His challenge seems like one productive way to combat insular and ethnocentric reading practices.
The role of children’s literature in upholding and perpetuating racism and white supremacy and its entanglement with empire has spurred new approaches which aim to foreground the voices of people of colour and to seek a decolonization of children’s literature. Critics and authors have sought to articulate more expansive and flexible constructions of femininity, masculinity, and nonconforming gender identifications for all children and adolescents. A focus on sexuality has facilitated an examination of the ways in which books of the past have upheld heterosexism and heteronormativity; for example, fairy tale books that glorify passive female princesses and brave male characters, and that presume the union of a male prince and a female princess to the exclusion of all other bonds. At the same time, critics have searched children’s books of the past for their articulation of queer desire and encouraged narratives of queer lives and queer community in contemporary works. The next sections of this chapter will explore the efforts of many scholars to reckon with problematic representation in children’s literature and to seek a more inclusive publishing industry and scholarly community.
Race
Children’s Literature scholarship has recently been invigorated by keen attention to race, with a focus on biased representations of marginalized communities as well as the under-representation of people of colour. The study of race within children’s literature has, first of all, necessitated a reckoning with the ways in which traditional canonical children’s literature has underpinned Eurocentrism, rooted in the white or European dominance over people of colour, and ideologies of white supremacy. Donnarae MacCann looks at how explicitly racist characterizations of African Americans in children’s literature from 1830 from 1900 fed into systematic discrimination: ‘By making Black children the brunt of racist humor, the mainstream’s effort to discourage African American education through segregation, inadequate funding, short school terms, and other measures was given additional impetus’ (MacCann 2001, 233–234). Robin Bernstein has studied how ‘childhood innocence’ was racialized in the 19th century, with white children increasingly associated with innocence and black children excluded from that innocence (Bernstein 2011a, 165). The subtler narrative structures that marginalize children of colour also have an effect. As one example of many, Frances W. Kaye notes the ways in which a ‘secure and rhetorically powerful white author or reader’ can ‘turn the person of color into a perpetual victim or sidekick’ (Kaye 2000, 126). Scholars consider these racist portrayals of the past, but are just as keenly interested in the ways in which these kinds of biased or distorting structures persist in the present.
The history of anti-racist work in the field of Children’s Literature is in fact decades old. In the mid-20th century the Civil Rights era and Black Arts Movement promoted, in the words of Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Debbie Reese, and Kathleen T. Horning, ‘a bourgeois ideology of racial uplift’ encouraging ‘young people to lead the race politically and socially toward American ideals of progress and individual achievement,’ which celebrated ‘the victories and achievements of African Americans in spite of collective trauma and monumental odds’ (Thomas, Reese and Horning 2016, 8).
The formation of the Council on Interracial Books for Children (CIBC) and the publication of Nancy Larrick’s landmark article ‘The All-White World of Children’s Books (1965) in the Saturday Review (Capshaw 2011, 191) are other landmarks. The CIBC, founded in 1965, published the Bulletin, which sought to identify stereotypes, racial biases, and misrepresentations of history. Larrick’s article brought attention to the under-representation of protagonists of colour in children’s literature. A period of relative growth of writing by authors of colour in the 1970s was brought to an end by the disinvestment in progressive educational and social programmes of the 1980s, a situation lamented by noted children’s book author Walter Dean Myers in his 1986 article for the New York Times: ‘I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize the Industry.’
In the 21st century there is a pressing sense that children’s literature still has a long way to go in terms of diversity and equity. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center in the USA, for example, reports that 37 percent of the US population are people of colour but that from 1994–2015 only 10 percent of children’s books contained what they term ‘multicultural content’ (Lee and Low [2013]). In 2014 Walter Dean Myers wrote another article for the New York Times, entitled ‘Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?’ (Myers 2014), and his son and frequent collaborator, Christopher Myers, published an article in the same issue: ‘The Apartheid of Children’s Literature.’ Walter Dean Myers ended his article with the sobering reminder: ‘There is work to be done’ (Myers 2014).
In 2017 the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) looked at the books published in the UK and found that only 4 percent featured black and/or minority ethnic (BAME) characters, with just 1 percent featuring a BAME main character. Philip Nel identifies the ‘considerable distance between mainstream children’s publishing and the multicultural society in which we live’ when he notes that writers of colour often have to seek small presses or self-publish (Nel 2017, 184). Publishers Lee & Low, who maintain a blog about diversity in children’s literature, note that the majority of publishing staff and review journal staff are white, cisgender (meaning they identify with the biological sex which they were born with), heterosexual, and able-bodied/ without a disability, which might account at least in part for the lack of diversity in children’s publishing. They pinpoint several areas where publishers can work towards better representation, such as making sure that all staff have a strong understanding and comprehensive training in issues surrounding diversity (Lee and Low, 2016).
The #OwnVoices hashtag on Twitter was inaugurated by Corinne Duyvis for books that feature a protagonist with a marginalized identity written by an author who shares that identity, as an attempt to encourage literary production that emerges from marginalized communities. Many diversity activists seek to encourage and support #OwnVoices writing as a way of combating the under-representation of marginalized groups within publishing. They also encourage authors writing about communities and identities to which they do not belong to take special care in their portrayals of what they have not directly experienced. Literary production has always relied on the representation of vicarious experience, as we see, for example, in Molly Bloom’s rapturous soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which has often been praised as a powerful representation of a women’s subjectivity evoked by a male writer. To restrict writers to what they know from their direct experience would be an impoverishment of the imaginative potential of literature. That being said, the #OwnVoices movement has been important in foregrounding some of the politics inherent in representation, so that stories of people from marginalized groups are not always being told by people from outside their communities. Writers who rely on vicarious experience are asked to be receptive to the feedback of members of marginalized groups, including critiques and objections.
The balance between freedom of expression and a community’s autonomous control over its stories is, in fact, a delicate one. This is complicated by concerns that an over-reliance on ‘authenticity’ might lean ‘toward the ahistorical, embracing the idea of pure identities untouched by modernity and globalization—or of identities that are singular in lineage’ (Capshaw 2014, 246). What is hailed as the quintessence of authenticity by one cultural insider might not be greeted with the same spirit of recognition by another. In the process of creating a literary work, a writer from a marginalized community might do an excellent job of telling his or her own story but might produce a less authentic portrayal of another community, or appropriate cultural ideas and experiences that do not belong to him or her. None of this implies that authenticity is not worth striving for in children’s literary texts, but rather that the intersection of literature and identity politics is always complex.
Anti-racist Children’s Literature scholars have looked at patterns within the publishing industry that curtail the types of literature people of colour are encouraged to publish. For example, Katharine Capshaw decries an ‘official multiculturalism’ that demands ‘the right story’ of Civil Rights triumphs ‘as the truth of black culture, easily consumed, for a young readership’ (Capshaw 2014, 243). She adds: ‘One might also think about the ways in which Latino/a, Jewish American, and Asian American texts have gravitated to topics of immigration and holidays in the 1990[s], sites that might serve official multiculturalism in similar ways’ (Capshaw 2014, 244). Nel notes how the publishing world tends to steer Indigenous people and people of colour towards realistic genres, and in particular historical fiction (Nel 2017, 190–191). These genres are valuable, but writers, scholars, and activists have been calling for more diversity in fantastic and non-realist texts. In her scholarship on African American fantasy literature, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas identifies ‘the success of new narratives from Black Panther in the Marvel Cinematic universe, the recent Hugo Awards won by N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, and the blossoming of Afrofuturistic and Black fantastic tales’ as proof that ‘all people need new mythologies: new “stories about stories”’ (Thomas 2018, 8).
There have been several landmark studies of the achievements of people of color within the field of Children’s Literature (Capshaw 2004; Martin 2004; Capshaw and Duane 2017; Aldama 2018). Some of this work involves looking at moments of intense cultural ferment, such as the children’s literature that emerged from the Harlem Renaissance: the efflorescence of social, artistic, and intellectual productivity that took place in the 1920s in Harlem, New York. Capshaw notes how major writers of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes ‘were deeply invested in the enterprise of building a black national identity through literary constructions of childhood’ (Capshaw 2004, xiii). Langston Hughes, the iconic African American poet and novelist, published The Dream Keeper in 1932, his only book of poems for children. Poems such as ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ and ‘The Weary Blues’ were influenced by black musical traditions such as spirituals and the blues, as well as scripture and prayer.
Work on race in Children’s Literature has the potential to challenge and change our most fundamental definitions of children’s literature. Marilisa Jiménez García argues that Anglo-centric and Eurocentric biases have determined our answers to fundamental questions such as ‘What is childhood?’ and ‘What is children’s literature?’ (Jiménez García, 2017, 115). As the voices of writers of colour become central to the conversation, ideas about childhood and its literature are expanding. Jiménez García notes:
Rather than being a mere ‘elective’ addition to the ‘core’ concerns of American culture, Jiménez García reveals that the literary and cultural work of people of colour has always been central to North American culture, and should be acknowledged as such. Her own work on children’s literature of the Puerto Rican diaspora is a case in point:
Work on race in Children’s Literature involves a re-examination of the field’s epistemologies and the scope of its inquiry. Addressing Children’s Literature scholars, Jiménez García asks:
Work on race in Children’s Literature helps us make sure that when we speak of ‘children’s literature’ we mean the corpus of works that reflect the lived experiences of all children, not just white children. This cultural work is unfolding through the combined efforts of scholars, educators, activists, and publishers.
Gender and sexuality
Children’s literature developed historically along gendered lines. M.O. Grenby (2008) acknowledges this when he notes that it might be more accurate to talk of a ‘boys’ literature and a girls’ literature’ as opposed to a ‘children’s literature’ (Grenby 2008, 8). Critics have worked to account for these gendered traditions, and the ways in which children’s literature has functioned as a space for young people to come to an understanding of their gender and sexual identities. Feminist work has been particularly vigorous over many decades, covering topics such as gender stereotyping, gender roles, male dominance in children’s book authorship, and an intersectional feminism that, building on the ideas of legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, acknowledges that oppression is shaped by race, class, disability, and sexuality (Paul 1987; Reynolds 1990; Clark and Higgonet 2000; Trites 2018).
Recent years have seen several compelling studies of girl readers. Sara K. Day has studied ‘narrative intimacy’ in the experiences of girl readers ‘that reflect, model, and reimagine intimate interpersonal relationships through the disclosure of information and the experience of the story as a space that the narrator invites the reader to share’ (Day 2013, 3). In Out of this World: Why Literature Matters to Girls (2004) Holly Blackford challenges the orthodoxy that women and girls identify primarily with female protagonists, using interviews with 33 girls from diverse backgrounds from the Bay Area and Philadelphia. When questioned, these girls repeatedly stressed that they wished to encounter protagonists who did not mirror them, which Blackford expresses as a desire to ‘enter alterity’ through a preference for omniscient narrators (as opposed to first-person narratives) and genre fiction like the Gothic (Blackford 2004, 29). While the search for alterity in reading might be seen as a way of meeting the ‘Reading Without Walls’ challenge issued by Gene Luen Yang above, because these specific girl readers prefer to explore experiences unfamiliar to them, one cannot help but wonder if their craving for ‘alterity’ emerges from a cultural expectation that girls should pay more attention to the experiences of other people than to their own. It is fascinating, however, to see girl readers standing up for their own readerly preferences. Anne Boyd Rioux points to the 19th century history of girls reading their brothers’ books: ‘If they had to remain at home in life, they didn’t want to do so in their reading’ (Rioux 2018, 169).
Scholars have also looked at the range of boyhoods that children’s literature makes available, and their relationship to traditional masculinity. Here the perception that boys are falling behind their female peers in social adjustment and educational attainment, sometimes known as the ‘boy crisis,’ has a role to play. In her consideration of popular books for boys, Annette Wannamaker found that they were meant for a very specific audience: ‘straight, white, middle-class boys struggling with hegemonic masculinity’ (Wannamaker 2008, 8). She goes on to note that ‘Gay boys, poor boys, and minority boys are often invisible in popular texts or, worse, are presented as the Other against which a protagonist’s subjectivity is defined’ (Wannamaker 2008, 8).
The narrative and literary possibilities for boy readers within mainstream children’s literature, unfortunately, seem to be limited. As one example of many, Anne Boyd Rioux considers why Little Women, despite a history of appreciative male readers, including Theodore Roosevelt, is now almost exclusively associated with a female readership. She laments, ‘Boys’ distaste for girls’ books, a product of the gender distinctions in everything from toys to books that children pick up very early, seems to arise as they discover that girls and everything associated with them are inferior’ (Rioux 2018, 167–168). Her own experience of successfully teaching Little Women to male students shows that this is a barrier that can and should be surmounted. Part of that process is exposure to a broader range of books than those narrowly defined within gender categories. A book such as Adib Khorram’s Darius the Great is Not Okay (2018) is an example of a text that might expand the possible narratives available to boys, with its portrayal of a tea-loving, nerdy hero Darius, a Persian-American boy who copes with depression, body image, and a strong suspicion that he does not live up to his father’s expectations. When he travels to Iran to see his extended family he strikes up a tender friendship with a boy named Sohrab, which helps him to become more comfortable in his own skin, more able to embrace his own interests and passions in life, and less susceptible to the bullies at his school.
Despite the fact that children’s literature overall has tended to reinforce conventional gender roles, scholars have also looked at how children’s literature challenges these roles, overtly and subtly. Kenneth Kidd explains: ‘If children’s literature has heteronormative tendencies, which it assuredly does, it also homes all sorts of queerness’ (Kidd 2011a, 185). Scholars are discovering queerness throughout the history of children’s literature, including gender identities that challenge the male-female binary. For example, Susan Honeyman sees ‘neuter’ possibilities in Peter Pan and Ozma of Oz, with the girl Princess Ozma living during childhood as a boy named Tip. Honeyman notes: ‘if not representing the end of gender, childhood at least makes a free space before gendering becomes imaginable … In this light, romantic childhood can be seen as a theoretical precursor to the queer/postmodern end of gender’ (Honeyman 2013, 168–169). We might also think of the ‘tomboys’ and ‘sissy boys’ of both classic and contemporary children’s literature. Recent works explore transgender, non-binary, or gender fluid identities and expressions. Transgender people identify with a gender identity and/or expression different from the sex they were assigned at birth. Non-binary people do not identify as either a man or a woman, either because they identify as a man or woman at different times, consider themselves to be in-between the categories of man and woman, or define their gender as outside these categories altogether. Gender fluid people do not identify with any fixed identity.
Alex Gino’s middle-grade novel George (2015) is a good example of a work that explores transgender identity. George features a transgender girl who yearns to play Charlotte in her class production of Charlotte’s Web and who faces resistance from her teacher and classmates because they do not view her as female like Charlotte the spider: a friend stealthily assists her in taking the role for a performance of the play. By the end of the book the protagonist explains that her real name is Melissa and that she wishes to live fully as a girl. In a recent interview with journalist Neda Ulaby, Gino noted that the title George was shortened from Girl George, intended originally as a tribute to gender nonconforming 1980s pop star Boy George, but expressed considerable regret about calling the book George. That name was assigned to the protagonist at birth and is not her chosen name (Ulaby 2015). If publishing it now, Gino would title it Melissa. This is a good example of how the evolution of culture changes our understanding of what is important.
Children’s Literature scholars have been considering the ways in which children’s literature reflects queer sexuality as well as gender identity. The presence of sexuality in a book for young people is often cited by critics such as Anita Tarr and Roberta Seelinger Trites as a ‘key determining factor between YA literature and preadolescent texts—if a book has sex in it, it’s YA; if it doesn’t, it’s preadolescent’ (Coats 2010, 322). That being said, there is increasing attentiveness to the question of childhood erotic and libidinal attachments, some of it inspired by Sigmund Freud’s insights in the early 20th century concerning childhood sexuality. Speaking of Freud’s work, Eric L. Tribunella notes: ‘Whether or not one accepts Freud’s account of the dynamics of childhood sexuality, his work is significant for calling attention to the erotics of children and to the ways that childhood erotics both do and do not mirror the erotic dynamics of later life’ (Tribunella 2010, 32–33). Tribunella studies the many boy-and-his-dog stories in children’s literature, reading them as a ‘kind of prototypical romance of childhood, a transitional moment from parental attachments of early youth to the explicitly romantic and sexualized attachments of adolescence and adulthood’ (Tribunella 2004, 156). He notes: ‘Through the boy-dog relationship the boy can practice mobile and shifting social relations in a simplified field’ (Tribunella 2004, 153). Yet, noting the frequency of death or sacrifice of dogs in works such as Jim Kjelgaard’s Big Red (1945) or Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller (1956), he senses that these exemplify ‘a culturally widespread disciplinary device that involves promoting intense affectional attachments and then demanding their sacrifice as a way of (re)forming social subjects that are properly gendered and sexualized’ (Tribunella 2004, 152). Having lost the dogs that they love so much, young boys in the American boy-and-his dog story are jarringly propelled into a heterosexual adulthood that requires a renunciation of the canine love objects of their youth.
Revisiting children’s literary classics to uncover queer subtexts and relationships has revealed that ‘many classics of Anglo-American children’s literature are fundamentally homosocial, or concerned with same-sex friendships and family bonds. In retrospect, some of these classics seem decidedly queer’ (Kidd 1998, 114). School stories like Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) were certainly charged with homoerotic desire, as were many adventure stories for boys (Clark 1996; Nelson 1998; Tribunella 2012). An emotionally charged friendship like that of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) is another example. L.M. Montgomery scholar Laura Robinson points out that, while Anne ultimately marries Gilbert Blythe, her most ardent emotions are reserved for female figures such as Diana or her friend Leslie Moore, whose beauty moves Anne to ecstasy (Robinson 2004).
While the classics have yielded insightful queer readings, there is also a distinct publishing market for gay and lesbian fiction, especially in the YA market, which is generally acknowledged to have emerged in the 1960s through 1980s with books such as John Donovan’s I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip (1969) and Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind (1982). Early gay and lesbian works, like Donovan’s, often had a melancholic attitude to queer sexuality and might even be termed ‘tragi-queer’ (Ellis 2018). More recent works have expanded the aesthetic and cultural possibilities for queer youth, with one landmark being David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy (2003). Boy Meets Boy offers a joyous vision of a high school that warmly embraces queer gender and sexual expression. The cheerleaders ride Harleys and the homecoming queen, Infinite Darlene, is also the head quarterback on the football team. Paul, the narrator, has been out of the closet since kindergarten, although his friend still faces opposition from religious parents. The book focuses on a romance between Paul and newcomer to the school Noah, with typical adolescent anxieties, and in its buoyant tone and overall optimism was considered a refreshing departure from the ‘tragi-queer’ narratives of the past.
While the expansion of queer children’s literature and its aesthetic potential has been justly celebrated, we are now at a good stage to challenge growing orthodoxies around lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or queer (LGBTQ+) literature, such as the reliance on narratives of ‘coming out’ to family and friends. Amanda Haertling Thein and Kate E. Kedley critique coming-out narratives ‘because they insist on characters settling on definitive sexual identities as narrative resolution rather than allowing for the kinds of complex and/or unsettled sexual and gender identities that Queer Theory would suggest we all experience to one degree or another’ (Thein and Kedley 2016, 6–7). Ryan Schey points out that ‘not all communities in the United States or the world’ would have used a model of coming out, with Caribbean and Latin American communities using a different model ‘to manage queer identities and practices.’
With this difference in mind, Schey calls for approaches to gender and sexuality
This is not to say that the coming-out narrative is completely exhausted in LGBTQ+ children’s literature, as the recent success of Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015), which centres on the main character’s struggle to come out to family and friends, would indicate, even if the book mainly reflects the concerns of a white, middle-class boy with a largely supportive family. We might also think of a book like Sabina Khan’s The Loves and Lies of Rukhsana Ali (2019), where the titular character deals with the challenge of coming out as a lesbian to her conservative parents. LGBTQ+ literature needs to be attentive to intersectional experience that expands the purview of queer children’s and YA literature and challenges its core assumptions.
One of the most interesting strands in recent feminist and queer scholarship is in keeping with what Maria Nikolajeva calls the ‘return to the body’ in the study of children’s literature (Nikolajeva 2016, 132). Over the past several decades, feminist and queer critics have argued that gender and sexual identity is largely constructed by discourse, which comprises the sum of social ideas and practices, including language and cultural representation.
However, after a long period of stressing the social construction of gender and sexuality, recent feminist and queer critical commentary has exhibited a new awareness of the embodied nature of gender and sexuality, as Roberta Seelinger Trites points out:
This ‘new materiality’ opens up a number of possibilities for feminist and queer criticism attentive to embodied and sensate experience in children’s literature. However, the interest in biophysical changes in the body and how they affect a character’s understanding of their gender does not foreclose work on how gender and sexuality are also constructed in language and culture. In fact, children’s literature is one shaping force for both gender identities and sexual desires, which is why publishers, activists, and scholars are so attentive to the ways in which gender and sexuality are represented in literature for young people.
Disability
Work on disability in Children’s Literature has emerged from a sense that disability is ‘a political identity, constructed in the same way that we now understand gender, race, and class to be constructed based on social norms’ (Resene 2016, 95). Children’s and young adult literature is a cultural space where social and political understandings of disability are shaped for a new generation. The urgency of this is clear when we consider Lennard J. Davis’s argument that ‘Disability is not an object—a woman with a cane—but a social process that intimately involves everyone who has a body and lives in the world of the senses’ (Davis 1995, 2).
Disability itself is difficult to define. Legal, medical, and social definitions differ significantly. Legal definitions of disability pay attention to impairments that restrict or limit participation in daily activities and/or have a negative impact on quality of life. Medical definitions of disability tend to stress bodily or cognitive irregularities, which Kathy Saunders notes as ‘a recognition that when compared to the majority of the population, a person experiences a difference in their physical, sensory, intellectual, emotional or psychological functioning’ (Saunders 2004). The medical model tends to read disability as ‘pathological,’ even though many conditions that ‘attract social consequences … do not involve ongoing illness or medical intervention’ (Saunders 2004). Almost all disability scholars and activists prefer the ‘social’ definition of disability (sometimes called the social model) to the legal or medical, because it
Disability studies allow us to understand children’s literature not ‘as a personalised, wholly biological and medically mediated characteristic’ but as a ‘social construction,’ where plots ‘both create and consolidate the attitudes and circumstances that are commonly found in contemporary society’ (Saunders, 2004). While a full articulation of disability as socially created is rare in children’s and YA literature, some texts pay attention to the ways in which social and infrastructural adaptations can transform the lives of disabled people. In Sharon Draper’s Out of My Mind (2010), for example, a young girl with cerebral palsy has never spoken to her family and peers, and is presumed to lack intellectual ability. When she receives an accommodative technology—a machine that helps her speak—she excels academically, although she still struggles with social integration. Changes in the infrastructure around her have proved transformative, fundamentally changing what it means for her to be disabled.
Classic children’s literature, especially from the 19th century, has shaped cultural understandings of disability in many ways, often stereotypically. Disabled characters in children’s literature are often either villains or victims. For villainy, we need only look to Captain Hook in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and its many adaptations: his bodily difference is a major part of the fear he inspires. Disabled children in Victorian novels are often victims, the objects of explicit pity, as we might see, for example, in Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843). Many disabled characters in classic children’s literature are caught up in an angelic death plot; like the fretful but gentle Beth in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, whose unknown infirmities make her withdraw from social life. In several cultural imaginings, disabled children are conceived as unable to grow up. Other damaging stereotypes include the notion of the supercrip, where a character with a disability or illness is portrayed as having an extraordinary skill or genius that helps them ‘overcome’ their disability. In a study of non-fiction children’s biographies of Helen Keller, for example, Peter Kunze notes how she is glorified as exceptional, which is typical of the ways in which disabled people are treated as ‘courageous heroes who succeeded despite their “limitations”’ (Kunze 2013, 306). With its traditions of ‘inspirational’ literature, children’s literature might be even more prone to these kinds of idealized portrayals than literature for adults.
Disability is also used as a punitive plot device, one that brings young people into conformity with desired social roles. In Susan Coolidge’s domestic novel What Katy Did (1872), for example, the tomboyish Katy Carr is temporarily disabled by an accident. As she slowly recovers she learns the virtues of patience (and the domestic arts) from her serene Cousin Helen, herself a disabled women. Disability tames Katy’s gender nonconformity, and she becomes a more conventional, domestically minded woman (Keith 2001). Earlier didactic children’s literature contains even more explicit punitive plots. For example, in Mary Jane Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pincushion (1780) a young girl tells a lie and is then disabled by a horse kick, which the text traces directly to her dishonesty. Katy’s experience, then, might be seen as a variation on narratives where disability is seen as a punishment for sin or social deviation.
David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder argue that many ‘stories rely upon the potency of disability as a symbolic figure’ but ‘rarely take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 48). Instead, disability ‘pervades literary narrative, first, as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 47). They coined the phrase narrative prosthesis to indicate ‘that disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight’ (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 49). Many works of children’s literature, for example, focus on the emotional growth of a non-disabled character who comes to ‘accept and understand’ a disabled family member or peer, or acquires other social values such as courage or persistence. In such plots the disabled person functions as something of a prop or ‘supporting player’ for the non-disabled protagonist, denying disabled people their own trajectories of growth, something which could be traced back to a tendency to infantilize disabled people. Many representations of disability in children’s literature, both in the past and in the present day, display the bias of ableism, which is the assumption that a non-disabled body is superior to a disabled one and that a disability requires a ‘cure.’ One of the most famous portrayals of a disabled person, both stereotypical and ableist, is the portrayal of Clara, a young girl in a wheelchair in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1881). Miserable in the city, and consumed by anger, she is miraculously healed in Heidi’s wholesome alpine setting. In Clara’s anger and self-pity we see another destructive disability stereotype, with a disabled person acting as ‘her own—and only—worst enemy,’ unable to recover because of a negative attitude (Rubin and Strauss Watson 1987, 61). Clara’s recovery is, first of all, medically unlikely, even impossible, yet all too common in classic children’s literature. Nikolajeva affirms that these narratives of miraculous healing emerged when ‘the young dead martyrs’ of the late 19th century were no longer culturally acceptable, but both are ‘dictated by the narratological demands of completeness: as an abnormality, a sick body must be either eliminated or repaired’ (Nikolajeva 2016, 140).
Accuracy and authenticity in the portrayal of children’s literature that foregrounds disability has been of ongoing concern to Children’s Literature scholars; spreading inaccurate information about physical or cognitive disabilities can do active harm to people with disabilities. Barbara H. Baskin and Karen H. Harris divide unsatisfactory books into three major types: ‘those that incorrectly describe symptomatology, treatment, or prognosis’; those ‘that misrepresent societal conditions by distortion or omission’; and those where either disabled people or other characters exhibit ‘highly improbable human behavior’ (Baskin and Harris 1977, 50–51).
Terminology is often tricky, with some people—and fictional characters—comfortable with descriptions such as ‘learning disability,’ ‘mood disorder,’ ‘girl in a wheelchair,’ or ‘mental illness.’ Others are uncomfortable with, even offended by, these terms. Some children’s and YA books explicitly discuss the issue of preferred terminology, as well as tackling moments where derogatory language about disability—words such as ‘cripple,’ ‘spaz’ or ‘retard’—stigmatize disabled people, often in scenes where a child is bullied by his or her peers.
Children’s and YA literature has a complex relationship with representing medical diagnoses directly in texts. In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) we learn about the protagonist’s hydrocephalus on the first page of the text. Some books delay diagnosis, such as R.J. Palacio’s Wonder (2012), where a chapter in the voice of Via, the sister of the protagonist Auggie Pullman, explains his facial difference as a result of mandibulofacial dysostosis, more commonly known as Treacher Collins Syndrome, after we have read a chapter in Auggie’s voice, one without a medical diagnosis. Other books eschew diagnosis altogether. In Jack Gantos’ Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key (1998), for example, we learn that Joey is often ‘wired’ and wears a medication patch, which might imply either ADD (attention deficit disorder) or ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), but his condition is never named. The book does make a link between Joey’s condition and his troubled home life; his family’s dysfunction makes his treatment inconsistent and therefore less effective.
How does the presence, or absence, of diagnosis affect a reader’s understanding of a character’s disability? A candid diagnosis at the beginning of a text could be read as resistance to the stigma of ‘withholding’ medical information; a delayed diagnosis might be an attempt to explore the character before offering a medical perspective; and an avoidance of diagnosis can be seen as an attempt to downplay the medical dimensions of disability altogether. Michael Bérubé laments the over-reliance on diagnosis in literary disability studies: ‘Disability studies need not and should not predicate its existence as a practice of criticism by reading a literary text in one hand and the DSM-5 in the other, even when a text explicitly announces that one or more of its characters is (for example) on the autism spectrum’ (Bérubé 2016, 20). The DSM, or Diagnostic Standard Manual, is published by the American Psychiatric Association and offers diagnostic criteria for mental disorders. By offering the image of the critic reading a work of fiction largely in the light of the DSM, Bérubé is expressing concern that a complex literary character will be reduced to their clinical symptoms. Additionally, when a character is explicitly diagnosed in a text they might be considered only in the context of their disability.
The engagement between children’s literature and disability studies has been productive, first of all for helping Children’s Literature scholars understand how many classic books offer a distorted vision of disability. It has offered tools to think about the political role children’s literature can play in creating political solidarities that seek to transform our cultural understandings of disability. It also shows that children’s literature has immense representative power for those who share a given disability, and the promise of offering deeper understanding to those who do not. My case study, Cece Bell’s El Deafo, offers a good example of a contemporary narrative that provides a window into one experience of disability while not claiming to speak for all deaf or hearing-impaired people.
Throughout this chapter we have seen how the publishing industry and individual writers have responded to developments in the scholarship around race, gender, sexuality, and disability, although such developments are often slow in nature and imperfect in their effects. In their turn, scholars are taking note of the conversations on social media and in the popular press around diversity, equity, and representation, and initiating those conversations themselves. We therefore see a loop between literature, scholarship, and politics, which testifies to the fact that Children’s Literature is of urgent cultural concern in many sectors of society.
Case study: Cece Bell’s El Deafo
Cece Bell’s El Deafo (2014) is sometimes described as a ‘slightly fictionalized’ memoir, and at other times as an autobiographical graphic novel. It tells the story of Cece, a young girl growing up in the 1980s with a profound hearing loss, focusing on her experiences at school and her childhood friendships. The pictures are rendered in the style of cartoons, with captions and speech bubbles. The colourist for the book, David Lasky, drew on bright palettes reminiscent of 1970s’ and 1980s’ cartoons, such as those produced by the Hanna-Barbera studio. One of the most striking features of El Deafo is that the characters are depicted as rabbits, which inevitably draws the reader’s attention to their long rabbit ears; as a child, Bell thought of herself as the only rabbit in school whose ears did not work properly.
Cece’s disability is portrayed through El Deafo’s narrative but also in the visual depiction of her hearing aids; including the Phonic Ear, which consists of a large box connected to Cece’s ears with prominent cords. The speech bubbles play a role in evoking deafness as well. Sometimes the words in the speech bubbles appear garbled on the page, like ‘Jerry’s mop’ for ‘cherry pop,’ indicating that the hearing aid has helped Cece hear the sounds but she needs to lip-read before she can ascertain their proper meaning. Sometimes the words fade out in the speech bubble to show diminishing hearing, and sometimes speech bubbles appear entirely blank as the batteries for her hearing aid run down or as she shuts it off. As Sara Kersten and Ashley K. Dallacqua note, ‘the constant visual reminder of the ears and the hearing aids’ serve to emphasize that ‘readers cannot forget this is a book about a girl with a hearing loss’ (Kersten and Dallacqua 2017, 21). Yet Wendy Smith-D’Arezzo and Janine Holc contend that it is not Cece, but the hearing people around her, who fail ‘in their attempts to make meaning’ when they misunderstand her (Smith-D’Arezzo and Holc 2016, 73). The hearing people are the ones who lack the correct perceptions. The fact that Bell is a memoirist (or perhaps an autobiographical novelist) and this is an #OwnVoices story plays a large role in the narrative’s focus on, and normalization of, Cece’s experience.
The novel is equally interested in Cece’s social development. For example, she learns to distance herself from her pushy, bullying friend Laura and to develop a genuine and sustained friendship with another girl, Martha. Bell uses the fantasy mode in the novel by using a superhero fantasy to explore her own shifting sense of powerlessness and empowerment. After seeing an after-school special on TV, where a character is addressed in a derogatory fashion as ‘Deafo,’ Cece creates a new persona for herself of ‘El Deafo’ (Bell 2014, 84). When she imagines ‘El Deafo,’ complete with a bold red cape, it is a means of vicariously taking power for herself in situations that are awkward or frustrating. El Deafo is often seen chastising or punishing Cece’s social enemies. While this is a vision of child agency, it includes an element of isolation: ‘Superheroes might be awesome but they are also different. And being different feels a lot like being alone’ (Bell 2014, 46).
Cece does, however, draw on her ‘El Deafo’ persona to establish a connection with her classmates, and that is through sharing the capacities of the Phonic Ear, which connects to a microphone worn by Cece’s teacher. When the teacher forgets to remove the microphone, Cece can overhear the teacher when she leaves the classroom, even in the bathroom, to her juvenile amusement and ultimately to that of her classmates. She summons up the courage to tell her first crush, Mike Miller, of her ability to hear the teacher all over the school (‘I have an amazing ability …’) and he concocts a plan where Cece can warn the rowdy class when the teacher is returning to the classroom so they can appear innocently to have been quiet the whole time (Bell 2014, 201–202). She thus becomes a hero to her classmates.
In El Deafo, the character Cece refuses to learn American Sign Language and attends a mainstream school where she learns oral speech. Before the book was released, Bell was worried that this aspect would prove troubling to some members of the Deaf community. Many deaf people view their deafness as a positive difference and consider themselves part of the Deaf community (capital D), in contrast to others who consider their deafness (small d) as a disability, perhaps seeking cures. Members of the Deaf community generally seek to communicate through sign languages (like American Sign Language, British Sign Language, and many others). Cece does not wish to learn sign language and uses hearing aids and lip reading; her approach is quite different from those who rely on sign language and who see themselves as part of the Deaf community. Acknowledging the different positions in the d/Deaf community, Bell carefully crafted an afterword that acknowledged: ‘I am an expert on no one’s deafness but my own’ (Bell 2014, n.p.). She explains that the experience of deafness varies significantly in terms of cause and severity, but most importantly in ‘what a person might choose to do with his or her hearing loss’ (Bell 2014, n.p).
The reception to El Deafo in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (HoH) community has, in fact, been generally positive. Amanda Lee, a library media specialist at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf, where the language used is American Sign Language, comments: ‘I was curious how kids would respond to it. I had only one or two who said, “that’s not me.” The rest didn’t care. It was a deaf person who has struggles like [the kids here have]. So much is universal to their experience’ (Bayliss 2017). This kind of reliance on individual experience is reminiscent of the unique properties of memoir, or the autobiographical novel, which nonetheless has the capacity to engage readers who do not fully share the writer’s experience. Returning to questions of diversity, it also points to the need for books that represent other forms of D/deafness, and the danger that arises when the field of Children’s Literature settles on a single book that might be taken to represent all forms of deaf experience.
In this vein, Smith-D’Arezzo and Holc argue that El Deafo ‘falls short in that it does not fully explore the racialized and classed implications of its female bodies. Cece’s taken-for-granted whiteness and middle-class milieu point to a need for further critical analysis of stories about girls and for girls’ (Smith-D’Arezzo and Holc 2016, 74). The book also does not engage with gender nonconformity or queer sexuality. Even if we appreciate a book’s achievements in capturing the experience of disability in an accurate and authentic way, no single book can do full justice to the many facets of intersectional identity, which in this case includes race, class, and queer identity but could also involve other types of embodied and social difference. Genuine diversification of the field relies on a proliferation of individual stories that capture a wide range of experiences and identities.