Children's Literature Association Quarterly 

About: Children's Literature Association Quarterly is an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Reading (process) & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 0885-0429. Over the lifetime, 1638 publications have been published receiving 5759 citations.

Risky Business: Talking about Children in Children's Literature Criticism

Abstract: If the last thirty years of children’s literature studies have taught us anything, it’s that talking about actual children is a very risky business. But today I’m going to argue that there’s no way to avoid this risk: children’s literature critics—even those of us who consider it “impossible” to say or know anything about this topic—are always talking about children, whether we admit it or not. 1 When we insist that we can avoid all reference to young people, I’ll suggest, what ends up happening is that we drift back to old, discredited ways of talking about children. In what follows, I’ll describe these problematic modes of discourse as “models”; I’ll name and briefly define a couple of them, because I think that articulating two well-trodden ways in which we tend to go wrong when we talk about children can help us avoid those paths. At the same time, however, I propose that we need to take the risk of theorizing in new ways about what it means to be a child, and to that end, I sketch out the parameters of a “kinship model” that can serve as an alternative to those two other rubrics, which I dub the “deficit model” and the “difference model.” Many of us, I know, would prefer to reject the category of “child” rather than theorize about it. But if you believe, as I do, that some ways of talking about children are more dehumanizing than others, and that disengaging ourselves entirely from such discourse is the real impossibility, then the act of theorizing starts to seem less risky than the alternative: however reductive, flawed, or potentially disabling our new theories about childhood may be, they can at least help us to avoid drifting back to still more demeaning options. So, first things first: Why is it so risky to talk about actual children? Why have children’s literature critics such as Jacqueline Rose and Karin Lesnik-Oberstein been so anxious to avoid saying anything about young people that they urge us to define children’s literature as “an adult practice” (Nodelman 4), and eschew

Heteronormative Heroism and Queering the School Story in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter Series

Abstract: In re-creating the venerable genre of the boys' school story, in which a middle- class boy is sent off to boarding school as he approaches adolescence, the Harry Potter series infuses twenty-first-century concerns with gender and sexuality into a literary tradition dominated by same-sex educational institutions. 1 The genre's typical focus on homosocial learning environments may appear to foreclose an interest in gender, yet as Beverly Lyon Clark notes of school stories, these narratives are "so marked by gender that it becomes vital to address questions of both the instability and potency of gender" within the genre (11). This tension between the uniformity of gender and its at times disruptive presence within the school story genre bears the potential either to undermine or to reinforce restrictive gender roles. In such a manner, the cross-gendered setting of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books appears to be both a fantastically post-feminist world where sexism no longer undermines women's power and agency and one in which a post-feminist facade merely camouflages the novels' rather traditional gender roles and its erasure of sexual orientation difference. 2 This incarnation of the school story challenges regressive constructions of gender and sexuality in its apparent treatment of boys and girls as equals, but heteronormative heroism ultimately squelches gender equality and sexual diversity in favor of the ideological status quo. 3