Stripping for the wolf: Rethinking representations of gender in children's literature

Abstract

ABSTRACTSThis essay seeks to broaden theoretical paradigms commonly used in the social sciences to analyze representations of gender, especially girlhood, in children's literature. In particular, this project seeks to add to liberal feminist frameworks for conceptualizing textual representations of gender and sexuality in literacy studies. Liberal feminisms theorize gender through the lens of sex‐role theory, a paradigm in which social roles are allocated to men and to women on the basis of biological sex. The author acknowledges this important theoretical tradition, which brings attention to sex‐role stereotypes in children's literature, and approaches the topic of gender representation from another perspective. Drawing on feminist and literary theories informed by poststructuralism, the author analyzes how discourses of femininity produce the contested subjectivity of the “girl.” Through a textual analysis of four variants of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the author illustrates how poststructural feminist literary theory allows for a reading of the girl as less a natural category than as the product of evolving, culturally situated, and contradictory discourses. In this wayanother possible direction for analyzing gender in children's literature is offered.