The dangerous deconstruction of gender: narrative inquiry of masculinities in a popular children's book

Abstract

The leisure pastime of children's reading transmits important cultural messages about gender and identity. The messages relayed through the guise of innocent characters, settings, and plots many times reinforce dominant discourses and expectations of cultural appropriateness. In order to highlight the ways that reading can become a mechanism for the dissemination of heteronormative notions of gender, we explored the popular children's book The dangerous book for boys. Using the methodology of narrative inquiry, we analyzed the text to illuminate the leisurely ‘tellings’ and ‘not tellings’ of meta-narratives related to the dominant discourse of masculinities. Data and results are presented using creative analytic practice in a quiz format that might be found in a young adult magazine. This quiz shows that only three typical archetypes, The Beav, Bond, and Boone, are presented as appropriate masculinities in the book. We concluded that ‘a book for all boys’ should be more representative of the multiple masculinities found within socio-cultural discourse.