Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children's Literature and Film (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children's Literature and Film Jeffrey B. Leak (bio) Ways of Being Male: Representing Masculinities in Children's Literature and Film. Edited by John Stephens. New York: Routledge, 2002. In what will surely prove to be a landmark essay collection on children's literature and film, John Stephens has gathered thirteen insightful and instructive essays that challenge the more stultified traditions and expectations of masculinity in cultural and expressive texts for children and teenagers. As part of the Routledge series on Children's Literature and Culture, Stephens sums up the project in succinct terms: "The chapters embody a broad spectrum of approaches, as contributors have been drawn from a wide range of academic cultures. Their writing is nuanced by local practices, while in touch with international discourses in literary criticism, social sciences (cultural studies, education), film theory, psychoanalytic criticism, Queer Theory and others" (xiv). Moreover, a number of these essays are by women and are coauthored, demonstrating a certain level of professional and intellectual exchange. Geographically speaking, the scholars come from at least three continents. In other words, the authors of these essays not only interrogate masculinities in children's literature and film, but also demonstrate the way in which discussions of masculinity cross all kinds of cultural and geographical boundaries. While I could easily comment on each essay, I will highlight three that for me represent the depth, breadth, and engaging cultural analysis so essential to understanding the ways in which masculinity is a potentially troubling and transformative social phenomenon. In his essay, "A Page Just Waiting to Be Written On: Masculinity Schemata and the Dynamics of Subjective Agency in Junior Fiction," Stephens articulates an understanding of literary texts that in some ways emerges in all of the other essays: Texts for young audiences are not mere narratives, but have an orientation toward models and ideologies already present in culture and, by giving these narrative form, may reinforce them and refract them back to the culture or may propose some modification of them. The former case conforms with the social-constructionist view of subjectivity, and we would then conclude that patterns of behavior are confirmed and reinforced. This is not a necessary and inevitable process, however, and many fictions produced for readers in the early reading years recognize that represented behavior may not only reflect actual behavior but also modify it (40). For Stephens, the social constructions of masculinity to which all children are exposed are rife with complexity and ambiguity, and our charge in each cultural moment in literature and film must be to assess the degree to which certain representations of young male behavior conform to the more patriarchal norms or offer modifications on "ways of being male." That is, Stephens does not discount all social constructions of masculinity, but he does challenge us to consider the way in which children, as blank pages (a reference to John [End Page 278] Locke), have been and can be written upon by the cultures that produce them. Following Stephens' thoughtful observations regarding the social dimensions of masculinity, Victorial Flanagan, in "Reframing Masculinity: Female-to Male Cross Dressing," provides a provocative, well-articulated analysis of a phenomenon in children's literature that has been woefully understudied. Through an analysis of children's stories like Little Red Riding Hood and twentieth-century films such as Some Like It Hot (1959), Tootsie (1982), and Boys Don't Cry (1999), Flanagan reveals long-standing children's narratives that involve boys and girls crossing gender lines through sartorial sleight. She is primarily interested in what motivates female protagonists in fiction and film to don the garb of boys and men. "There is," she writes, "a sharp disjunction between representations of the male and female cross-dressing experience in children's literature. For females, the cross-dressing experience is liberatory. It exposes the artifice of gender constructions, permitting the female cross-dresser to construct for herself a unique gendered niche which is not grounded within a single gender category, but incorporates elements of both" (79). In perceptive fashion, Flanagan delineates how the clothes can make both the man and woman and that our social narratives, which...