Already on the Shelf: Queer Readings of Award-Winning Children's

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Article

Already on the Shelf: Queer Readings of Award-Winning Children’s Literature

Caitlin L. Ryan1 and Jill M. Hermann-Wilmarth2

AbstractThis essay explores what it might mean to read children’s literature in elementary school classrooms through a queer lens. The authors argue that because queer theory has a history as a literary theory that destabilizes normative associations among gender, sexuality, bodies, and desire, it provides a set of analytical tools classroom communities can draw on to create alternative readings of a wide range of familiar texts. Such readings of books already on the shelves of elementary school libraries and classrooms can highlight experiences and subjectivities of nonnormative sexualities and gender identities in the hopes of making classrooms more inclusive. Specifically, we argue that four high-quality, award-winning children’s books already included in many schools and classrooms—Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are, Woodson’s (2001) The Other Side, DiCamillo’s (2003) Tale of Despereaux, and Patterson’s (1977) Bridge to Terabithia—can be fruitful sites for opening up these more inclusive readings and conversations. The article offers possible queer readings of these texts as well as suggestions for how to encourage elementary-aged students to think about both books and the socially constructed norms of real life through a queered lens. By first queering on-the-shelf texts and then asking students to think about how that queering connects to larger social issues, elementary classrooms can become places where strict identity categories—categories that can marginalize queer students and families—are made visible, are questioned, are stretched, and can even fall apart.

Keywordsqueer theory, children’s literature, elementary education, literacy practices

1East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA2Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA

Corresponding Author:Caitlin L. Ryan, College of Education, Department of Literacy Studies, English Education and History Education, East Carolina University, 122 Speight Building, Mail Stop 504, Greenville, NC 27858, USA. Email: [email protected]

479778 JLR45210.1177/1086296X13479778Journal of Literacy ResearchRyan and Hermann-Wilmarthresearch-article2013



Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth 143

In May 2011, the State Senate of Tennessee passed SB49, a bill that would prohibit teachers from discussing homosexuality in kindergarten through eighth grade class-rooms.1 The “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as it came to be called in the press, drew ire from liberal politicians and pundits, but it merely illustrated what those of us involved in schools already know to be true: Schools in general and elementary schools in par-ticular are spaces where only heterosexuality—and its accompanying categories of feminine girls and masculine boys—is assumed, approved, and allowed (Blaise, 2005; DePalma & Atkinson, 2009; Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, 2005; Human Rights Watch, 2001). In terms of literacy education, silences around nonnormative categories of sexuality and gender were firmly in place in elementary school language arts curricula well before the Tennessee Senate banned the word gay. Although speaking, reading, and writing only about heterosexual people and main-taining gender norms at this age may feel common sense to many, such silence around nonnormative identities has consequences. For example, even in elementary schools, students are often bullied and harassed for not fitting into strict gender categories because such students are perceived to be gay (Badash, 2012; Fishberger, 2009). Children as young as 11 years old have committed suicide rather than continue to endure such pain from their teachers and classmates (Blow, 2009; Simon, 2009). Many young children from lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT)-headed families also feel unsafe and harassed in elementary schools (Kosciw & Diaz, 2008; Ryan, 2010). Like their peers, they learn heteronormative messages about which kinds of people are worthy of love, respect, and protection and which are not, and they learn to guard and adjust the information they share about their families as a result (Ryan, 2010).

Given these silences, whether legally or culturally enforced, some scholars and educators have called for increased inclusion of children’s literature presenting LGBT characters or issues (Blackburn & Buckley, 2005; Casement, 2002; H. Miller, 1999; Swartz, 2003; Wolf, 1989). Although this is one possible strategy for teaching children about lives outside of strict heteronormative understandings of gender and sexuality, these books are often kept out of classrooms because of formal and infor-mal censorship (American Library Association, 2009; Bickmore, 1999; Stewig, 1994); parent, teacher, or administrator resistance, either actual or feared (Hermann-Wilmarth, 2007; Ryan, 2007); and limited classroom budgets, not to mention actual legal prohibitions like the one in Tennessee. If books with LGBT characters ever are read in classrooms (e.g., Schall & Kauffmann, 2003), they are often included in a single unit or even a single day and can be positioned in didactic ways that empha-size their nonnormative status (Clark & Blackburn, 2009). Therefore, although diverse children’s literature that includes representations of LGBT people may help classrooms be more democratic places and more welcoming for marginalized stu-dents, the reality is that these books rarely make it into classrooms, let alone in ways that could create permanent change. We must acknowledge that because current and future elementary school teachers continue to face legal or cultural obstacles (Vaznis, 2006), not to mention possible job termination, they frequently remain nervous



144 Journal of Literacy Research 45(2)

about—and sometimes resistant to—including books with LGBT people and issues in their classrooms (Thein, 2013; Williams, 2002).

As university teachers of literacy methods and children’s literature courses in con-servative small towns and rural areas, we have encountered these absences and this resistance firsthand. Yet, as out lesbians who were once in elementary schools our-selves as both students and teachers, as a mother of children with lesbian moms (Jill), and as scholar–activists who are sad and tired of losing children who are taunted and bullied for not fitting in, we are committed to helping teachers integrate more expan-sive ideas about gender and sexuality into their work with elementary school students. Even in the face of the rampant heteronormativity of schools (Blaise, 2005; Heffernan, 2010; Robinson, 2005; Ryan, 2010), including resistance to LGBT-inclusive literature, we believe that teachers already have access to texts and tools that can begin discus-sions of our overlapping and constantly shifting categories of subjectivity that can make elementary school classrooms more inclusive.

Using what we call a queer lens, one informed by a deconstructive strand of queer theory, we explore ways that classroom communities can engage books already on the shelves of elementary school libraries and classrooms to tease out and discuss experi-ences and subjectivities that have been too frequently considered inappropriate for school, including issues of sexuality and gender identity. Taking our cue from Hade (1997), who asks readers to approach every text multiculturally, we ask readers to approach texts that may or may not include gay and lesbian characters in ways that foreground more general notions of queerness, defined here as the disruption of nor-mative categories relating to sexuality, gender, bodies, and desire (Morris, 1998; Pinar, 1998; Sumara & Davis, 1998). In spite of queer theory’s use among academics as a literary theory (described in greater detail below), the thought of bringing a queer lens to reading in actual elementary school classrooms may seem odd initially. Surely we understand that “queer” may not be a word that most teachers have seen used in a posi-tive, nonderogatory way, let alone a word they would initially be comfortable using themselves. We maintain, however, that both the word and the notion, when applied to life and literature, invite an exploration of nonnormative sexualities and genders that can work against the silences around these experiences currently found in elementary school curricula without requiring the reading of LGBT-inclusive texts.

In this article, therefore, we theorize a model of reading literature with children that helps a wide variety of children’s literature texts become fruitful sites for opening up more inclusive conversations about gender and sexuality, and we demonstrate how this approach could be applied to four high-quality, award-winning children’s books already found in many schools and classrooms. These texts include Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are, Woodson’s (2001) The Other Side, DiCamillo’s (2003) Tale of Despereaux, and Patterson’s (1977) Bridge to Terabithia.

Following from our understandings of both queer theory and queer identities as multiple and shifting (Jagose, 1996), we have chosen a range of texts—two picture books and two chapter books—and approach each book using a different method—a page-by-page analysis, a holistic analysis, a themed analysis, and a gendered




analysis—to help us underscore that there is not a uniform way to put the diversity of queer theory to use when reading. As you will see from our discussion below, we would find a uniform or authoritative approach to texts to be problematic as well as not particularly queer. The queer readings that we offer are, therefore, meant not as definitive interpretations, but as examples of a process. However, we do envision such analyses as more than purely theoretical exercises. Because we hope that alter-native models of reading will have real effects for real children, we follow each reading with specific suggestions for the kinds of questions and practices that such interpretations might make possible for teachers’ own readings of these and other books and for discussions with students in elementary schools. In this way, we help to translate and transfer this process into classrooms. We demonstrate these potential readings and questions in the hope that teachers will explore books using a multi-plicity of queer approaches, seeking variety and deferring ultimate, authoritative meanings while still finding ways to bring these perspectives and issues to students’ attention. Therefore, we offer possible analyses of these well-known books to dem-onstrate how students and teachers can use a queer lens to create alternate interpreta-tions of familiar texts and highlight often unspoken moments in all kinds of stories that could have multiple, inclusive, or even transgressive meanings. First, we trace some histories of the word queer and explain how we define and use it in this article. We then discuss the reasons we use such a formulation of queer theory for this analy-sis, focusing specifically on the relationships between gender and sexuality and the history of queer theory as a literary theory. Finally, we detail our understanding of reading with and through a queer lens before offering these various queer analyses of our four example texts and suggesting ways such readings could be used in ele-mentary schools.

Mapping the Meanings of Queer Theory

Outside of academia, the word queer has two separate meanings. One is a term for those who identify as nonheterosexual, historically used as a slur but more recently embraced and used by many LGBT people, often in politically radical contexts. The other meaning is, simply, “strange.” Queer theory as an academic idea—or, more pre-cisely, a diverse set of ideas—tends to bring these two meanings together, focusing on the relationship between the kinds of identity categories that are considered “normal,” such as heterosexuality, and those that are considered “strange,” such as LGBT identi-ties and many others outside of this narrowly defined group. The recognition that such binary categories of identity often treated as stable, coherent, and reasonable—man, woman, gay, straight—are actually messy, slippery, and always in flux (i.e., strange) is common to most of queer theory’s many definitions and applications. Queer then serves both as a way to name identities and practices that complicate or fail to fit the normative, stable formulation of these categories and as a way to name the process of that disruption and recognition. In either case, queer theory is theory that highlights




strangeness, especially around the constructed classifications and relations of genders, sexualities, bodies, and desires.

Queer theory as we use it in this project is a poststructuralist, deconstructive approach that maintains a critique of identity more than it delineates or names any specific identity category (Jagose, 1996; Warner, 1993). Therefore, although queer theorists pay particu-lar attention to sexual and gender identities, an interest in troubling the normative, binary structures that create identity categories in the first place leads some scholars to also highlight the possibilities of movement among many various and intersecting nonnor-mative subjectivities such as race, class, citizenship, or disability (Cohen, 1997; Ferguson, 2003; Luhmann, 1998; Puar, 2007; Sullivan, 2003), or even the suspension of classification altogether (Pinar, 1998).2 For example, Halperin (1995) and Sumara and Davis (1998) use queer to indicate a general disruption of what is considered normal, writ large, drawing attention to “the polyvalent ways in which desire is culturally pro-duced, experienced, and expressed” (p. 198). In this way, queer theory is an inherently destabilizing analytic approach, a “necessarily unfixed site of engagement and contesta-tion . . . in constant formation” that “locates and exploits” incoherencies in terms that seem to be solid and unproblematic (Jagose, 1996). By critically locating a range of subjectivities vis-à-vis normative expectations, queer theory helps to make visible the wide variety of possible ways of being, living, and loving, therefore creating an always-shifting “archives of alternatives” (Halberstam, 2008) that resist many binary, fixed, and taken-for-granted types of social organization. In other words, it explores bodies that matter (Butler, 1993), highlights and encourages a proliferation of identity categories, and both denotes and celebrates outlaw, uncontrolled, unruly subjectivities.

The Relationship(s) Between Gender and Sexuality

As scholars employ queer theory to question and disrupt identity categories, they also point out the ways these categories are dependent on each other. Chief among these interrelated classifications are gender and sexuality. We understand queer theory to speak to issues of gender identity as well as sexuality, in spite of varying opinions on this question, for several reasons. Most important, we believe that normative perspec-tives on gender and sexuality in our culture have meaning only within the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 1999). This “grid of cultural intelligibility” (Butler, 1999, p. 194) assumes the existence of only masculine men and feminine women who desire each other. Through this interlocking system, gender identity is solidified as binary and reinforced via a stable, oppositional, and compulsory heterosexuality. It is via the het-erosexual matrix that “bodies, genders, and desires [cohere and] are naturalized” (Butler, 1999, p. 194), or, we argue, can be queer. As Turner (2000) argues,

“Queer” indicates a failure to fit not only categories of sexual identity, but also categories of gender identity. The conditions of possibility for queer theory involve not only resistance to prevailing definitions of sexual identity but—equally and antecedently—resistance to prevailing definitions of gender identity as well. (p. 11)




In other words, because gender and sexuality work as an interlocking system of signi-fication, troubling part of this matrix has the potential to trouble the entire set of relations.

This aspect of and perspective on queer theory is particularly important when think-ing about the ways that elementary-school-aged children experience their sexual and gendered identities. Although sexuality may not regularly or explicitly be an identity category applied to children, gender—in all its normative pink-and-blueness—certainly is. Therefore, we need not harp on whether or not children are sexual beings or in what ways they understand the sexual lives of themselves and others for queer theory to be relevant to the lives of children. A queer approach, rather than a focus on LGBT iden-tity specifically, does not get caught up in current or future identity labels, but rather acknowledges how binary gender and heterosexuality are co-constructed categories that, when expanded, can address the lives of children who do not (or do not appear to) fall into the neat and tidy categories of boy and girl, therefore troubling the entire matrix. This theoretical approach turns attention to perceptions and the ways that such subjectivities are constructed and maintained in the first place, taking the focus off whether or not children eventually come out to identify as gay themselves. In other words, our use of queer theory is not focused on whether or not people (or characters, as we will see) are gay, but rather assumes that categories around gender, sexuality, bodies, and desire are artificially strict to begin with. Such an expanded approach, therefore, respects and acknowledges the multiple subjectivities chosen and expressed by people in the worlds of our students. Because the relationships between the catego-ries of gender and sexuality create potential for change in one part of the matrix to affect others, investigations of both gender and sexuality are productive aspects of a queer project. Therefore, we feel this approach is productive for elementary educators because a broad focus on the myth of normalcy implicates not just those who identify as LGBT, but people of all ages, bodies, races, desires, and sexualities. It recognizes that people of all experiences and inclinations are caught up in “conditions of norma-tive heterosexuality” (Butler, 1999, p. xii), which regulate us all. The binary com-monly used to label sexuality masks how both hetero- and homosexuality are both constructed, diverse categories.

Queer Theory as a Literary Theory

Because early formulations of what is now called queer theory have their roots in tex-tual interpretation and literary theory, such an approach is particularly appropriate for literary analysis. Michel Foucault (1978) and Judith Butler (1999), key thinkers in many formulations of queer theory, reinterpreted historical records and theoretical, psychoanalytic texts, respectively. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) and Judith (Jack) Halberstam (1998) took up queer theory in relation to novels. Scholars such as Teresa de Lauretis, Diana Fuss (1991), and D. A. Miller (1990) explored literary and visual texts, including film. Alexander Doty (1993) searched out queer elements in a variety of popular culture texts. Although these and other scholars understand and employ the




details of queer theory in different ways, with different emphases, and for different purposes, they have in common a general approach of textual deconstruction (Sullivan, 2003). If texts of all sorts are understood to be social and political practices organized by cultural and social systems, literary theory is one way to investigate the arbitrary kinds of social and political arrangements and hierarchies that structure texts (Seidman, 1995). Deconstruction (i.e., Derrida, 1967/1978) works against a humanist belief in oppositions and polarized essences that structure much of our thinking and texts,3 showing the instability of their terms, analyzing the relations between them, and inves-tigating the effects they produce. Queer theory, generally, focuses such practices on the assumed polarized essences that structure (hetero)normative knowledges and insti-tutions, including texts.

Queering texts, then, makes visible the ways texts depend on a variety of binary constructions, including those that make up the heterosexual matrix, for their composi-tion and intelligibility. Disturbing and displacing these terms allows readers to “acknowledge the constructedness of meaning and identity and thus to begin to imag-ine alternative ways of thinking and living” (Sullivan, 2003, p. 51).

Reading Through a Queer Lens

Given this history and our definition of queer theory, reading through a queer lens does not require mining texts for the presence of stereotypical gay cultural elements like fastidious, fashionable men and Birkenstock-clad women (cf. Huskey, 2002), although it certainly could do that. Instead, we suggest that the art of literature supplies “set[s] of relations where things not usually associated with one another are juxtaposed, allowing language to become more elastic, more able to collect new interpretations and announce new possibilities” (Sumara & Davis, 1998, p. 199). Just as queer theory reminds us to look again at the complexities of our lives and desires rather than rely on a stock set of identity labels, it can also remind readers how much more may be available in texts than what school teaches us to look for and understand. As Britzman (1995) writes,

Reading practices might well read all categories as unstable, all experiences as constructed, all reality as having to be imagined, all knowledge as provoking uncertainties, misrecognitions, ignorance, and silences. The point is that what is at stake is the capacity of the educational apparatus and its pedagogies to exceed their own readings, to stop reading straight. (p. 164)

This is an expansion that pushes all definitions of subjectivity to become messy, calling into question all the “categories through which one sees” while reading (Butler, 1999, p. xxii). Just as teachers already recognize the use of different books read in different ways for different purposes and occasions, the readings and textual analyses we are advocating here pay attention to contradiction, ambiguity, and things not said while drawing attention to the play and multiple meanings of stories (e.g., Bakhtin, 1981; Davies, 2003; Morrison, 1993; Pinar, 1998; Spivak, 1999; Wright, 1995) to highlight and include those outside the heteronormative categories of straight, female, and male.




It is important to emphasize that reading with and through queer theory does not add or impose sexuality into a book or other material. Instead, queer reading provides a lens and an approach to “excavate and interpret the way [cultural material] already is sexed, and, further that it begin to interpret the ways in which it is explicitly hetero-sexed,” by turning our attention to the subjectivities that we take for granted (Sumara & Davis, 1998, p. 199, italics original). This type of reading emphasizes the action of queering, where queer is a verb, rather than limiting queer to a label for a person or a type of behavior. It suggests that teachers and students can read queerly and disrupt normativity by paying attention not exclusively to particular subjectivities, but to sex-uality understood as a relation rather than an object (Morris, 1998) and to “identities as they are invested with varying degrees of normative power” (Cohen, 1997, p. 452). Following our understanding of queer theory, the queer readings for which we argue pay attention to the sex/gender/desire matrix that is at the center of queer theory, but never without also looking at the various other intersections and relations of subjectiv-ity. This move shifts the theoretical justification and focus of queer readings from a “literal queer” to a “figurative queer”—away from recuperating the stereotypes of queer people and toward exceeding them (Britzman, 1995, p. 153). As Kidd (1998) writes, “What is often most interesting about literary texts, after all, is not how they fit certain categories, but how they complicate and/or evade them” (p. 115). By making all types of difference explicit in their very specificity and multitude, we complicate the traditional homogeneous, heteronormative binaries of normal and perverse and make elementary language arts curricula more inclusive.

Queer readings of children’s literature texts have been done by other scholars (cf. Hermann-Wilmarth & Souto-Manning, 2007; Horning, 2005; Huskey, 2002; Martin, 2010; Rabinowitz, 2004; Tribunella, 2002), although rarely with such a direct eye toward expanding classroom practice. Furthermore, in our analysis we focus on queer-ing the often-normalized expectations of gender, bodies, subjectivity, and love/desire. We maintain that reading through a queer lens is especially useful for elementary educators because such approaches to texts provide a point of entry to discuss queer issues, while not necessarily requiring the explicit mention of or reading about homo-sexuality. While disrupting heteronormative assumptions in a heteronormative world will always carry some risk, a queer approach may, ironically, avoid censorship and therefore be more possible for some teachers to implement in their classrooms than reading literature with LGBT characters. Reading through a queer lens could be a way for teachers to read generally accepted texts at the same time they disrupt the taken-for-granted nature of a single, monolithic heterosexuality. Such a practice provides a degree of comfort in the traditional, homophobic school environment, but is still pow-erfully queer since finding queerness where it isn’t “supposed” to be is in some ways a more significant disruption than finding it in places you would expect (Huskey, 2002). Finally, it opens up a way for teachers to use familiar titles that incorporate a wider range of characters and situations than are currently available in children’s lit-erature with LGBT characters. These choices open up more inclusive analyses of diverse characters and stories. In the sections that follow, we sketch out queer readings




of several well-known children’s books to give teachers a sense of how this work might look in their own readings in their own classrooms.

The Possibilities of Bringing a Queer Lens to Award-Winning Children’s Literature

Through the close readings of four award-winning titles, two picture books, Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) and The Other Side (Woodson, 2001), and two chap-ter books, The Tale of Despereaux (DiCamillo, 2003) and Bridge to Terabithia (Patterson, 1977), we lead readers through a process of analysis that asks them to “look at the work the [book] does to limit, shape, make possible, one kind of world or another” (Davies, 2003, p. xx). We also offer these extensive textual analyses because even Davies’s (1989) own research has shown that children’s responses to texts are complicated, often supporting rather than disrupting normative expectations. Although literature remains a powerful site for interpreting ourselves and our world, such against-the-grain readings are not automatic for students. For example, Schall and Kauffmann (2003) and Epstein (2000) both found that simply introducing texts with LGBT characters to children did not result in breaking stereotypes or changing chil-dren’s heteronormative frames of reference. Yet in both studies particular pedagogical practices and mediations of texts and discussions did create some change in students’ perceptions. When Sumara and Davis (1998) read Lois Lowry’s (1993) dystopic novel The Giver with a class of fifth and sixth grade students and their teacher, they built on the discourses of sexuality that were already assumed and circulating among the stu-dents and brought out new understandings of queer issues in the text. These studies remind researchers and teachers alike that providing exposure to books is only a first step in the process of facilitating social change through literature. No single, specific reading of a text is ever guaranteed, nor desired, but the mediation of these texts, including the social and pedagogical settings in which this mediation occurs, makes a difference to student response and the new ways of thinking that may result.

Therefore, in an effort to provide guidance for the types of mediation teachers may find effective when exploring queer-inclusive readings, our analysis of each text is followed by two sets of questions. The first questions are to help teachers expand their own readings and learn to see traditional texts through a queer lens. We also provide possible ways to translate those questions into language they could use with students as they explore our example text or other literature together. Following those questions about the literature are questions that will help connect the queer aspects of those books with the lives of readers. These include questions teachers can ask in discus-sions with their students. It is these kinds of theoretically informed questions about texts that make new kinds of interpretive space in classrooms possible and that help classrooms become more inclusive of queer perspectives. The exact questions that bring commonsense categories of knowing into focus certainly vary from classroom to classroom and book to book, but readers can bring the process of asking these kinds of questions to other texts on their shelves.




The books we chose are easily accessible because of their award-winning status and are, for all intents and purposes, fairly traditional trade books. In other words, these are books that already have traditional readings in the school lexicon. We enjoy books such as Wiesner’s Three Pigs (2001) and Banyai’s Zoom (1998), which invite nonlinear, poststructural readings, but we wanted to be intentional about choosing books that have a tradition of more straightforward interpretations. We picked them not only for their accessibility to classroom teachers and because we see classroom teachers and hear our pre- and in-service students talk about their use of these books with their own students, but also because we know that there is high interest in these texts and authors. Three of the books (Where the Wild Things Are, Tale of Despereaux, and Bridge to Terabithia) have been made into movies in the past several years, and we’ve seen teachers flock to talks by these authors at confer-ences. We also wanted to choose both picture books and chapter books, as well as different narrative genres—specifically contemporary fiction and fantasy—so that teachers could see how these ways of reading are available across the elementary grades. We imagine readings that use a different lexicon—one that expands catego-ries and expectations present in classrooms—with questions that create space for seeing new, queer possibilities.

Where the Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are is a well-known, Caldecott Award–winning picture book. Max, the main character, creates a world where he is the king of the wild things after his behavior resulted in him being named “WILD THING” by his mother, and sent to his room with no dinner. The story defies linear time as Max’s imagination helps him travel across waters and hours (and back again), return-ing in time for a hot supper. With this book we perform a detailed, page-by-page analy-sis, looking at both illustrations and text to queerly explore Max’s journey. Although other analytical approaches could certainly be utilized, we chose a page-by-page anal-ysis as a way of engaging this text through a queer lens because of Sendak’s illustra-tive style. The art covers the pages, bleeds from one page to the next, and draws the reader to examine both text and pictures from corner to corner.

We begin our analysis on the title page, where Max is costumed as a wolf and stand-ing in a threatening pose that is mirrored by two wild things on the facing page. A young child dressed in this way brings to mind “a sheep in wolf’s clothing,” disrupting the innocence of childhood. Furthermore, the use of a costume indicates the ways that Max is taking on social roles that are not expected of him. This title page demonstrates a certain complexity where Max is simultaneously child and wolf, teacher and imita-tor. As he grimaces at the wild things, he imitates their fierce pose. Likewise, the wild things teach Max the pose, while their faces indicate a sense of trepidation about what he’s learned. It is common for elementary school children to look to adults for a model of how to perform in the world, so children who are uncomfortable trying to fit into expected categories of gender and sexuality must work to create role models for




themselves just as Max does with the wild things. He is investigating and reinventing the “categories through which [he] sees” (Butler, 1999, p. xxii).

Page 1 introduces the concept of mischief. The text has Max wearing his wolf suit and making “mischief of one kind” (n.p.) while the illustration shows Max, hammer in hand, grimace on face, clutching a nail. It is interesting that this designation of misbehavior is accompanied by Max’s construction of a domestic space for himself, complete with a pink flowered sheet. When read among culturally dominant texts and media that situate women in domestic roles and men doing heavy lifting and handy activities, these details bring gender into the text wordlessly. Even if his actions are seen as destructive, readers may also wonder what part of the “mischief” might be attributed to Max’s gender transgression of domesticity. Max is pictured as off-balance as he stands on a stack of books, a disequilibrium that could be read as his being off-balance in his own skin or in his own space. Therefore, since Max is per-forming a combination of traits that are constructed as both traditionally, rather than inherently, masculine and feminine, what exactly about Max that is labeled as mis-chievous is in question, as is the unknown being who is counting this act as mischief. Max mixes his gender symbols, rather than chooses one normalized form of gender expression over another, which might well be the mischievous act. On the second page, Max displays a position of power over the dog, equilibrium restored, gender expectations of masculinity powerfully enacted. On the third page, we see how Max’s performance of gender—with elements of both traditional masculinity and feminin-ity—results in his mother labeling him a “WILD THING.” In a moment of defiance, we see Max resisting the formation of this subjectivity category when, hand on hip, pose struck, he glares at his bedroom door from within his stark bedroom. Being misunderstood in his everyday world leads Max to create another world, one where he can be his fully complex, contradictory, rebellious self. He has threatened to “EAT YOU UP!” signaling a desire to control the labeling and the labeler.

Growing from his discontent, Max begins to create an alternative world. His blank room is populated with trees and his facial expressions change from anger to glee as the pages are turned. We read this need to create as a queer impulse—creating worlds that fit when the everyday world does not. As queer people experience every day, Max’s created world is not separate from an everyday reality, even as it “[becomes] the world all around.” Nor is it the world of domestic and ordered spaces. It grows among, and is superimposed on, the common reality; there is fluidity among these spaces of comfort and discomfort. As Max’s created forest continues to overtake his room, the moon, a traditional symbol of the feminine, grows larger and brighter, and his pleasure is more obvious. Max is in control of this world he’s creating. The world that he’s cre-ated is a contrasting image to his empty, angry room earlier in the book.

The literal journey that Max takes in his private boat doubles as a metaphorical journey into his own queer world. In the way that children grow into their own subjec-tivity over a period of time, Max’s journey unfolds “through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year.” The result of this journey connects him to a whole new community, in this case, the wild things. This world Max imagines into




existence is no utopia. It takes a while for him to find others like himself. And, once he does, he’s skeptical, as evidenced by his posture from the boat as he glimpses these creatures for the first time. As it was earlier in the story when he felt out of place in his home world, Max’s hand is on his hip and a frown is on his face as he surveys the landscape. This particular scene is scary—there are terrible roars, teeth, eyes, and claws, and Max is unsure as to how to act with the wild things. Thus far, he has been treated as one who does not fit in, and being different has become a part of his subjec-tivity. Thus, when he finds a new community, he has to negotiate a role within it.

In this negotiation, Max draws on his experiences from the common world. Perhaps wondering what will be the same, he shows his bravery. He might be worried that these bigger figures will act in the same way as the big figures in his other world. Telling the wild things to “BE STILL!” he tries words with these new “adult” creatures in the way that he used them with his mother. The text and the illustrations don’t pro-vide a clear answer to how this new world works, and what the reaction is to Max’s arrival. Although the text says that the wild things are frightened by Max’s disembar-kation from the boat, the illustrations show wild things that appear to be relaxed and grinning. The conflict between text and illustration demonstrates Max’s confusion about where he fits in this world. When the wild things call him “the most wild thing of all” (n.p.), however, Max knows he has a place here. Contrary to the other world where labels constrained him, in this world they provide him security and a sense of belonging. By being spoken into the community, Max takes up the power of leadership and is able to relax in his wolf skin with the monsters. At this point, the wildness of being a wild thing is acceptable, particularly because he was labeled the most wild. He has nothing to worry about because he is as wild as they. The shared subjectivity takes the mischief away from being called “wild thing.” When his mother labels Max using the same language, he is alienated from the common world; his and his mother’s sub-jectivities do not sufficiently overlap before his journey to the new world for him to feel that he can perform his subjectivity in a way that works for him. Instead of paral-leling the common world, he queers this common, domestic space, so that his perfor-mance of power with these others is, actually, powerful.

As he relaxes in this new world, participating fully in the wild rumpus, Max’s joy is expressed through the expansion of the illustrations. No explanations are needed; the pictures alone illustrate the ways he is a part of this newly created/found commu-nity. Once Max brings the rumpus to a close, however, he finds himself on the outside of the group once again. At this point, he feels unsatisfied, unable to slumber peace-fully like the other wild things. This disquiet leads him to give up his title of king (not the label of wild thing) and return “across the world” in search of those who love him “best of all.” When he announces his plans to leave, the wild things react by crying out, “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!” With this, Max hears the same words he spoke to his mother, this time framed explicitly with affection and love. He smiles as he recognizes that anger and love can occupy the same space, reframing his interaction with his mother and breaking the isolation that drove him to the wild things’ world in the first place.




Max has realized that even though he may indeed be a wild thing, he is not fully himself in the world he has created. Through a queer lens, subjectivity categories are not about the creation of completely new subjectivity markers, with each piece of an individual cut off from the rest of the self. Rather, they can queerly coexist. Max dis-covers he can’t simply escape to a world where he is cut off from his home, regardless of how easy and comforting that world may feel in the short term. A queer journey is about finding ways to live safely in all worlds, creating a queered hybrid world that draws on traditional places of home and those communities created through shared subjectivities. When Max knows that he can move between both safely, he is saved from succumbing to the loneliness he might feel isolated in either his home or his cre-ated world. Upon Max’s return to his bedroom, he is noticeably more relaxed than at any other point in the story. He no longer needs his wolf costume because he has found that he belongs in the hybrid world he has created. His days of overt performing are over, and he can rest in the knowledge that he can and does belong to multiple worlds, one where he can be wild and one where he can be taken care of and where his supper is kept warm.

This queer reading of Max’s journey creates a both/and narrative that could be help-ful for students who struggle to perform expected subjectivities—that of obedient child, of stereotypically defined boy or girl. Max’s life, like that of many children, is messy and fits in multiple worlds—one where he has power because he has ordered and created the context, and one where the discipline is imposed. Both are valid, even as they are separate from each other, and Max draws on his own strength, experiences, and creativity to navigate between the two kinds of spaces, at least in this particular moment in time.

An alternative reading of Max and his journey such as we’ve suggested here could lead teachers and students to reflect on other literary characters’ and our own (queer or outlaw) performances of self in various contexts and categories. When considering other texts, teachers may look for books where characters mediate wildly variant worlds or lives. If characters act or behave differently in these different places, teach-ers could reflect on what may account for such variation. Specifically, they could look for texts where characters make literal and figurative journeys in response to their treatment in their everyday worlds. For example, Harriet in Harriet the Spy, like Max, literally puts on an outfit to shift her identity to one she can respect for its authenticity. Teachers can ask students to consider characters’ emotions before and after these changes to worlds or identities that fit their sense of gender and their sense of self more thoroughly. For example, why is Max so angry at home in the beginning of the story? Do we think he fits better in the land of the wild things? Why might that be? How can we tell that his experience there made a difference for how he feels about himself? Do we see other characters in other stories making similar kinds of journeys that result in different feelings? General questions for teachers to think about before queerly analyz-ing similar texts with students could be these: How do characters define the subjectivi-ties that they claim, and how do they perform them? In other words, with which identities would characters describe themselves? What groups would they say that




they do/don’t belong to? Where is it hard for them to fit in? Where is it easiest? What is it about those spaces that make a difference for them? Do characters behave differ-ently in different spaces and places? What different expectations do characters face in those various contexts? In the case of Max, why does what feels natural to him at home get labeled “wild” when that same behavior is accepted in his created world? Are there characters in other stories who get in trouble or feel out of control in one place, but have power with the same behavior in another place? How do characters deal with these different rules? How do characters travel to or create places where they feel more accepted?

When relating this kind of queer reading to readers’ own lives, teachers could reflect on questions such as these: Who has the privilege to define identities? What ways of being are privileged in homes? In other spaces? Why? What pressures do we feel to perform others’ definitions of ourselves? What happens when we resist those definitions, and how can we create spaces where our many different identities can coexist? How might we have experienced queer, hybrid worlds in our own lives, and how did we feel in those spaces? These questions could be translated for students in various ways: How do you describe or label yourself: boy, girl, brother, sister, son, daughter? What do those labels mean to you? What are some characteristics that you believe come with that label? Are those characteristics true for everyone with that label? What happens if they’re not? Who gets to decide what those labels mean? What happens if we decide not to have a characteristic that most people think belongs with our label? Is that more acceptable in some places than in others? Where do you fit in most? Why? How do those places make you feel? How do you feel when you can’t be in them?

The Other Side

Jacqueline Woodson’s (2001) The Other Side is a picture book that tells the story of a Black girl and White girl, neighbors testing the boundaries of race and friendship. They’ve each been instructed by their mothers not to cross the fence that marks the property line between their yards, but the girls eventually become friends. With this text, we take a holistic rather than page-by-page approach for several reasons. First, we believe that there is more than one way for readers to approach analysis, and we want to illustrate a range of such approaches. In classrooms, teachers can ask students to think broadly or more specifically, each serving a particular curricular purpose. In addition, although Sendak’s text lends itself to a tightly attentive analysis of words and pictures as they work hand in hand to unfold Max’s queer journey, Woodson’s text invites a queer reading of a subtext beyond the text’s more salient assertions about race relations. Woodson’s book, although clearly making a statement about historical racial divisions, also can be read with an eye toward exclusion and marginalization of people based on sexuality and on the intersection of race and sexuality (cf. Anzaldúa, 1987; Cohen, 1997; Crenshaw, 1990). When selecting this type of analysis, we also take into consideration the ways that the main characters in the text take a holistic view of their




own lives, challenging the systems of rules and social expectations that govern their actions within a particular setting. In other words, although we agree that the main system of regulation the characters in this text are learning to navigate relates to race, additional interpretations that foreground other systems of regulation are also possible. Here we provide an alternate approach to the text that highlights the less obvious roles of desire and subversion around gender and sexuality, particularly in how they play out in intersection with racial subjectivities.

The first thing we can see through this queer lens is how the text depends on chil-dren noticing and being affected by differences and divides they don’t feel fit their lives and desires, yet are still powerful, pervasive, and confusing to navigate. This is an experience that queer children know intimately. In the text, the unnamed restric-tions and the repercussions for violating them are introduced when the narrator’s mother warns her that it isn’t “safe” on the other side of the fence. Peers further rein-force this unnamed system of social control and its associated dangers. For example, on the third page of text the White girl who lives on the forbidden side of the fence asks permission to play with Clover (the narrator) and her friends, all of whom are Black. Because one friend, Sandra, clearly denies the possibility of this social interac-tion, Sandra’s response saves Clover from having to make her own public declaration. Clover’s reflections indicate her uncertainty about where she stands in relation to these established social categories and rules; as she narrates, “I don’t know what I would have said. Maybe yes. Maybe no” (n.p.). Later, the book highlights how these divi-sions that have always been present take on particular importance for Clover as she gets older. When Clover asks about the reasons for such separations between groups of people, her mother explains, “Because that’s the way things have always been.” As a child, Clover hasn’t been fully socialized into the expected norms of behavior that are so established for adults, so she sees possibilities for interaction that others con-sider egregious. She questions and breaks the rules that others take for granted. Again, although those transgressions are most explicitly around race, reading with a queer lens reveals characters challenging all types of normativity, including the prohibition against same-sex desire. Clover is beginning to reject the conventional idea that cer-tain bodies are prohibited from interacting in certain ways with other certain bodies.

Desire—captured in the text by looks, touch, curiosity, and longing that stretches over physical distances—shapes many of the fleeting interactions between Clover and her neighbor, Annie. In Woodson’s book, Foucault’s (1977) notion of the gaze as a tool for mastery and knowledge of the Other becomes a literal component in the narrative. At first, Clover looks at the girl from afar, scoping out a body that she is instructed not to notice and not to know. As the text reads, “Each morning, she climbed up on the fence and stared over at our side. Sometimes I stared back.” But because everything to do with “the other side” referenced in the title of the book is labeled as unsafe, even looking in that direction is a dangerously transgressive move. Clover gets disciplined by her mother for this type of looking: “‘Don’t stare,’ my mama said [when Clover sees the other girl with her mother in town]. ‘It’s not polite.’” Clover’s mother’s admonishment could be interpreted in multiple ways. The obvious subtext of the book




is that Black children do not interact with White children in public spaces. A queer reading highlights a gendered, heteronormative aspect: Girls don’t stare “that way” at girls. Nevertheless, this draw is powerful and the girls continue to watch each other in spite of adult concerns.

Eventually, this gaze becomes a searching for each other. “[E]very time it rained, I looked for that girl” (n.p.). Again, Clover’s mother interrupts that connection. When Clover asks to join her friend in the rain, her mother insists that staying inside will keep her “safe.” When the rain stops, Clover decides to stop just watching the girl and instead explicitly acknowledge her desire for connection. She walks over to the fence, and after introductions, they gaze at each other and smile. It is once the girls meet that their gazes are able to notice each other’s physical features and attractiveness, and they bask in this moment of close physical connection. The text reads, “She [Annie] smiled then. She had a pretty smile. And then I [Clover] smiled. And we stood there looking up at each other, smiling” (n.p.).

After this first connection, Annie and Clover both touch the fence, contemplating moving closer to each other. Annie, the text says, looks at Clover sideways, as if shyly inviting her to catch her gaze. By this point, Clover and Annie have lost their initial, objectifying, and oppositional gaze, and, while in the uncertainty of this new phase of their connection, take on gaze that is increasingly shared. Their touch also follows this pattern: Clover’s arms begin behind her back as they begin to talk at the fence, she reaches out toward Annie as they stand together smiling, and they finally hold each other’s hands as they prepare to sit together on the fence for the first time.

It remains important to notice, however, that these moves are still racialized. In every case Annie, the White child, initiates interaction while Clover is still unsure about breaking the norms she has learned. In spite of living under similar social rules about who they are supposed to be, Annie’s racial privilege allows her increased safety when queering these norms and reaching out toward a body that she shouldn’t be close to. This safety also gives her the flexibility to imagine alternative ways of interacting. As Annie says, “My mama says the same thing [that Clover’s mama says about not going on the other side of the fence]. But she never said nothing about sitting on it.” When Clover answers, “Neither did mine,” the girls sit together for the first time. Through a queer lens, it is not just notable they are together, but they have countered the rules by creating a way to supersede them in spite of the fact that their respective participation is still marked by unequal degrees of privilege.

These transgressions do not go unnoticed. Now that the girls are together in this unsanctioned way, they draw the attention of both peers and family. Again, this is an experience common to queer people who are public about their marginalized identi-ties. In response to this moment in the text, those around the girls employ a disciplin-ary gaze that implicitly urges Clover and Annie to change their behavior. For example, Clover says that “Sandra and them looked at me funny” and that “Some mornings my mama watched us” (n.p.). Clover expects her mother to challenge her transgression, but, as Clover says, “She never did.” After some time, Mama eventually responds to Clover’s lead by transgressing her own rule and accepting this new arrangement.




Again, this slow process of family change will feel familiar to many queer readers. Mama says to Clover, “I see you made a new friend.” Clover nods and Mama smiles. This acceptance of her behavior by her family leads Clover to a newfound freedom in her friendship with Annie, a freedom that eventually leads to Annie’s acceptance among Clover’s other friends. The book ends with Clover, like Max, queering her world by uniting her newly created transgressive world of forbidden bodies and desires with the world she has grown up in.

A queered narrative for Clover and Annie opens the possibility for students and teachers to queer the stories of relationships that have been socially constructed in ways that create and highlight intentional borderlands—relationships between people of the same gender as well as between people of different races or cultures. This nar-rative also highlights rule breaking, even in public, as powerful rather than as deviant. Clover and Annie coyly and cleverly challenged the rules set by their parents, fol-lowed their own desires, and in doing so also broke unwritten rules about race. Thinking with children about how and when rule breaking is discouraged and for what reasons as well as how subjective categories have been used to create both spo-ken and unspoken rules could lead to reimagined ways of reading and being. This queer reading of Clover and Annie’s connection also creates space for teachers to explore notions of desire with students. The queer aspects of concepts such as these—borderlands, contested relationships, powerful rule breaking, and desire—can be explored and highlighted in a wide variety of texts. For example, teachers might consider applying such an analysis to texts with characters who challenge the notion of “this is just the way things are.” Teachers could select books where characters, like Clover and Annie, continue to occupy contested spaces or participate in unauthorized connections against the advice of others. Such reading could reflect on how charac-ters’ lives become more complicated, more nuanced, or even more dangerous because they find or enter into such unsanctioned relationships. As with our analysis of Clover and Annie, teachers could ask questions about what characters who break social rules truly want from those experiences. What might the benefits be? What are the dan-gers? Does anyone in the story get mad about those characters’ decisions? If so, why do they get upset? Why might characters have such desires in the first place given that they fall outside social norms? Why wouldn’t Cover and Annie, for example, just listen to their mothers and not go near the fence? Teachers could also think about these forbidden connections and desires as part of the literary structure of a text. For example, how is a given story shaped by a character’s refusal to conform to social norms? How is desire for something forbidden—whether it be desire for a specific thing or for friendship, love, connection, acceptance—a part of the way that the plot of a text moves forward? What happens to the characters when/if their desire is met? A book like William’s Doll (Zolotow, 1972) may be a good example of a text where this kind of approach is especially productive.

When thinking about relating the text to their own lives, teachers could ask them-selves, how might desire be experienced differently given the layers of our various identity categories? What does that mean for choices that we make individually? What




does this mean for how we talk about the multiple ways that people experience desire? They could then talk with students about what is okay (for certain people) to do/want and what is considered unacceptable. They could lead students in discussing questions such as these: Are all people allowed to be friends with all other people? What are some of those boundaries that keep people apart? What kinds of friendships or rela-tionships do people make fun of? Why? What types of relationships and desires are allowed in our society? Which are frowned upon? Which have laws criminalizing them? How did those laws come to be? How have they changed? What are the “unspo-ken” rules that we follow about ourselves and our bodies and the things we want, even if those rules aren’t actually written down? Do some people have more power to make choices about their relationships than others? Why?

The Tale of Despereaux

Our third analysis takes a thematic approach to Kate DiCamillo’s (2003) The Tale of Despereaux. This Newbery Award winner is a tale of love, loyalty, and complications involving, as the subtitle reads, “a mouse, a princess, some soup, and a spool of thread.” The main character is Despereaux Tilling, a mouse who is born exceedingly small and never fits in with the other mice around him. Despereaux’s physical stature, the activities he participates in, and the person he loves all fail to meet his commu-nity’s standards of what a “good” mouse should do. In other words, his body, his behaviors, and his love are all deviant from the normative perspective. Together, these three categories of transgressions divide Despereaux from his community and mark him as a queer character. Sadly, these offenses have significant and often vio-lent consequences for the small mouse. He endures punishments imposed by more powerful members of his community, all in an effort to rehabilitate him to proper mouse ways. As DiCamillo writes in warning, “An interesting fate . . . awaits almost everyone, mouse or man, who does not conform” (p. 25). With its focus on confor-mity around issues of body and love, Despereaux’s tale is a fitting book to illuminate the experiences of queer bodies and lives in a heteronormative world. In the thematic analysis that follows, an approach selected because of its fit with this fairy-tale-like genre that freely employs particular archetypes and tropes to communicate with the reader, we examine the queer aspects of these three types of transgressions Despereaux commits.

Despereaux’s deviant body. From birth, Despereaux is shown to be a survivor since he is the only one of his litter to live. Rather than being rewarded with praise, wonder, or positive attention for this accomplishment, however, his existence becomes “cause for much speculation in the mouse community” (p. 16). When presented with her surviv-ing baby, Despereaux’s mother says, “All that work for nothing . . . it is so sad. It is such the disappointment” (pp. 11-12). What makes Despereaux “nothing,” specifi-cally, is his irregular body, which attracts significant negative attention. Even as a newborn, his ears are huge and his eyes are wide open when they shouldn’t be.




Certainly, these features function metaphorically in the story to indicate Despereaux’s interest in and awareness of the world around him, but within his mouse community these physical differences are read as signs that Despereaux is queer/unlike the rest of them. For example, Despereaux’s siblings crowd around their new brother and remark about how his ears “are the biggest ears [they’ve] ever seen” and how “his eyes are open. They shouldn’t be open” (p. 13). Despereaux’s father even assumes that Des-pereaux is “not well” (p. 17) because he understands Despereaux’s open eyes as a sign of sickness that he will not be able to survive. The extended family and community offers Despereaux no additional support. When Despereaux’s aunt sees his small stat-ure and large ears she remarks on how he doesn’t fit in, saying, “It’s ridiculous. No mouse has ever, ever been this small. Not even a Tilling” (p. 16). This remark makes clear that Despereaux is seen as an outsider in the world of mice in general and in his own family of Tillings more specifically.

As Despereaux grows up, his body and its movements continue to mark him as an outsider. He is sickly and uncoordinated, he faints at loud noises, he is not preoccupied with food, and—perhaps most significantly—he does not know how to scurry. These are not signs of a strong, virile mouse, so his family intervenes. The narrator explains, “Despereaux’s siblings tried to educate him in the ways of being a mouse” (p. 20). Despereaux’s brother gives clinics in scurrying, and his sister teaches him how to nibble paper.4 In each case, the tutelage seems to make no difference in Despereaux’s behavior. He doesn’t fight the perception he is a queer kind of mouse. Rather, Despereaux is fully conscious of his outsider status:

He said nothing in defense of himself. How could he? Everything . . . said was true. He was ridiculously small. His ears were obscenely large. He had been born with his eyes open. . . . He fainted at loud noises. (p. 17)

Through ignoring the lessons of proper behavior provided to him by his community, he embraces his differences and continues to live in his own way, further frustrating those around him.

Despereaux’s deviant activities. In addition to his physical stature and abilities, the things that interest Despereaux are also decidedly un-mouselike, and therefore queer within his world. Despereaux’s body may be marked as different, but it is his attraction to inappropriate activities that solidifies his marginalization within his community. As the text says, “Most alarming of all, he showed no interest in the things a mouse should show interest in” (p. 17). Predominant in these prohibited desires, and entirely fitting with his queer characterization, is Despereaux’s attention to aesthetics and the arts. First of all, he shows an early fascination with, and attraction to, light. This desire leads Despereaux’s father to claim “there’s something wrong with him.” As he gets older, his senses continue to open up new worlds to him that his mice family ignores. When his siblings are busy eating, Despereaux hears the “sweet, sound [of music] that no other mouse seemed to hear” (p. 19). When he is being taught to scurry, he pauses




in front of a stained glass window with his handkerchief over his heart, and asks, “What are all these colors? Are we in heaven?” (p. 21). And when being instructed in the tastiest parts of paper to nibble, he instead studies the words on the pages until he makes out a “delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time” (p. 22). Instead of eating, he reads the entire story—and happy ending—that follows.

Ironically, although Despereaux seeks out these aesthetic experiences—especially reading—because they bring him pleasure and help him cope with his marginalization from the community, these new habits further compound his nonconformity and isola-tion. In fact, it is his desire for the arts (again an interest frequently marked in the real world as stereotypically effeminate) that brings him closer and closer to the humans in the castle and eventually leads to his most serious mouse transgression: falling in love not with another mouse but with a human; specifically, in Despereaux’s case, with a princess.

Despereaux’s deviant love. For Despereaux, not being the proper kind of mouse extends to more than just what his body looks like or what he wants to spend his time doing. It also means that the object of his desire, the being with whom he falls in love, is forbid-den. In a clearly queer experience, he loves not only the wrong individual, but also the wrong kind or category of individual. According to his community, this type of love is unnatural. This prohibition isn’t just about association; it forbids physical desire in a very concrete sense. In fact, what sets off the trial that eventually separates Despereaux from his community is the physical act of touch. When Princess Pea touches the top of Despereaux’s head, he falls in love and his brother runs off to report his offense to the others. Upon the “terrible, unbelievable news” (p. 33), Despereaux’s father despairs. “[Despereaux] cannot, he simply cannot be my son” (p. 34), and his parents debate which of them is to blame for their child’s disordered behavior. Again, queer readers will likely find such a scenario quite familiar. Finally, a formal tribunal is called against Despereaux to hold him accountable for his crimes, which are later labeled as “sins” (p. 44). The Most Very Honored Head Mouse explains how the touching is worse than any of Despereaux’s other offenses. After hearing accounts from Despereaux’s brother and father, the head mouse says,

“Something . . . is wrong with your son. He is not well. This goes beyond his fevers, beyond his large ears and his lack of growth. He is deeply disturbed. His behavior endangers us all. . . . A mouse who consorts with humans, a mouse who would sit right at the foot of a man, a mouse who would allow a human to touch him”—and here, the entire Mouse Council indulged in a collective shiver of disgust—“cannot be trusted. That is the way of the world, our world.” (p. 43)

With this decree, the Most Very Honored Head Mouse gives clear voice to the norms of Despereaux’s community. The reader has no doubt where the bounds for proper mouse behavior lie and knows that Despereaux is clearly (queerly?) in violation of these norms.




Despereaux again agrees with the leadership about what actions occurred, but he attributes vastly different meanings to those acts. He explains, “I let her touch me. It felt good” (p. 53) and, “I broke the rules for good reasons. Because of music. And because of love” (p. 54). Despereaux’s sincere plea for the purity of his love is quickly dismissed. The leader of the proceedings silences him, reminding all the mice gath-ered, “We are not here to talk about love. This trial is not about love. This trial is about you being a mouse” (p. 54). Although the mice elders can focus only on particular acts, Despereaux gives a queer voice to the feelings, meanings, and desire behind his choices; he acknowledges the pleasure and love he experienced while behaving as he did. This alternative way of acting is contrasted with the mouse community who pride themselves on being civilized even while enacting punitive and exclusionary practices that deny Despereaux’s desire and joy.

Our queered narrative of Despereaux calls into question traditional and taken-for-granted notions of love, bodies, and desire. This analysis through the lens of love, desire, and disappointment can be used with myriad texts in a given teacher’s class-room. This includes classic canonized literature about forbidden love (Romeo and Juliet comes to mind), to stories where characters don’t fit into their families (think Harry Potter, who seemed so odd to his biological family that he had to spend his childhood literally in a closet), to stories where characters resist having their hobbies/work/relationships predetermined by the specifics of their identity. Teachers could ask students, what made the other mice so upset about what Despereaux liked and what he did? Why was it such a problem that Despereaux didn’t look or act like a proper mouse? Why did his family want to change him? Why was it forbidden to be touched by a human when Despereaux thought it felt good? Gender identity and expression could be central to more general discussions, engaging questions such as these: Are there stories where characters don’t act “appropriately,” where perhaps girls act “too much” like boys, or boys act “too much” like girls? Do we know books where characters’ preferred behaviors shock their communities into punishing them for their digres-sions? Are there books where characters refuse to accept the narrative that is written on their body by the expectations of others? In other words, does the way a character looks to others match the way the character understands himself or herself? Does the character change or try to make other people’s perceptions match his or her own? What happens if they ask others to see them the way they want to be seen? If they don’t make this attempt, what is lost? What does their life become? How do characters navi-gate families and their (dis)approval, especially characters who live and love in ways that people disapprove of? Students could think about multiple ways that characters’ lives could be affected by these kinds of judgments.

After pulling these kinds of queer elements out of the subtexts of fictional stories, teachers and students can relate these texts to readers’ lives through an examination of how and why these notions circulate in our own society. Discussing these tensions around bodies and their appropriate identities and expressions that stories explore can acknowledge and legitimize traditionally marginalized queer expressions of love and desire. Teachers can ask themselves, what ways do I reify traditional notions of love




and desire? How does my classroom, school, or district encourage/require me to do so? With students, teachers can ask, who doesn’t fit in? Why? Which bodies, activities, and kinds of love are looked down on? Why is that? Who are the people who suffer most from those restrictions? Who benefits? What happens when people seem to have broken those rules? Who gets to be added in if we expand our versions of who should be included and minimize who should be excluded?

Bridge to Terabithia

In Patterson’s (1977) Newbery Award–winning Bridge to Terabithia, a classic book about love and loss during adolescence, queer subtexts circulate freely, even among the heterosexual characters. It is this seeming contradiction—queerness in the midst of heterosexual characters—that persuades us to use a gendered analysis when approach-ing this text through a queer lens. Jess, a fifth grade boy, starts the school year with a desire to be the fastest runner in school—a distinction, made clear, that is intended for boys only. When Leslie moves to town, the running title is only one of the gendered restrictions she challenges. By the end of the book, Jess’s friendship with Leslie has shifted how Jess experiences both school and family. When reading through a queer lens, transgressive acts of gender and desire are elucidated as Jess works to understand who he is becoming on his adolescent journey—a journey that can be paralleled to Max’s journey in Where the Wild Things Are. In this analysis, we first explore issues of gender, and then we look at how the identified gender transgressions are aligned with issues of desire.

The friendship between Jess, a lifelong member of the small town community that is the setting of the story, and Leslie, a newcomer from a big city, is centered on gender transgression. Leslie seems unencumbered by notions of girl and boy, and what is expected of each. As Jess struggles to figure out his place in the social structure of family and school, he is taken aback that Leslie doesn’t care what her place is. Jess’s family, and his father in particular, consciously remind him what boys and girls do and do not do, and that transgressing gender means being or becoming gay. Jess, a budding artist, knows that his talent is not masculine:

He would like to show his drawings to his dad, but he didn’t dare. When he was in first grade, he had told his dad that he wanted to be an artist when he grew up. He’d thought his dad would be pleased. He wasn’t. “What are they teaching in that damn school?” he had asked. “Bunch of old ladies turning my only son into some kind of a—.” He had stopped on the word, but Jess had gotten the message. It was one you didn’t forget, even after four years. (p. 11-12)

The implication, of course, is that Jess’s teachers were turning him gay, or any other term for homosexual that his father might have stopped himself from saying. For Jess to display the feminine trait of “artist” was to queer his male subjectivity enough for the ultimate—sexual—transgression. So he hides his art, keeping his supplies under his bed, and relegating his drawing to time in his room and hidden doodles at school.




Likewise, traditional notions of gender are a part of how Jess understands his school peers and teachers: “Everyone had had to write a paper about his or her favorite hobby. Jess had written about football, which he really hated, but he had enough brains to know that if he said drawing, everyone would laugh at him” (p. 33). Jess knows what is expected of him as a boy, and he does not transgress those boundaries publicly. Nevertheless, Jess is intrigued that his art teacher is unencumbered by the local gender expectations:

The kids would make fun of Miss Edmunds’ lack of lipstick or the cut of her jeans. She was, of course, the only female teacher anyone had ever seen in Lark Creek Elementary wearing pants. In Washington and its fancy suburbs, even in Millsburg, that was OK, but Lark Creek was the backwash of fashion. It took them a long time to accept there what everyone could see by their TVs was OK anywhere else. (p. 13)

This gendered structure clearly mediates how the people in Jess’s school community interact with and understand each other. And although Jess understands that he is dif-ferent than he is expected to be—even thinking to himself, “We’re alike . . . me and Miss Edmunds” (p. 14)—he publicly conforms to the gender norms, hiding his talents from his peers and family.

Although Jess’s notions of what boys and girls are supposed to look like are clear-cut, he is surprised that Leslie does not fit this image. When he first meets her, with her jagged haircut and blue top, he called her “it” and “couldn’t honestly tell whether it was a girl or a boy” (p. 18). Although she never expressly told him, and Jess never asked, he became suddenly sure that she was, indeed, a girl, and despite the fact that “she even had one of those dumb names that could go either way . . . he was sure . . . that he was right” (p. 18). Jess’s struggle to ascertain Leslie’s gender is also his strug-gle to maintain the gender binary accepted in his community.

Leslie’s actions are also not bound by gender expectations, even on the first day of school when first impressions can determine so much. Dressed in unfeminine cutoffs and a blue shirt, Jess “couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. It must be embarrassing to sit in front when you find yourself dressed funny on the first day of school” (p. 19). When she joins the traditional fifth grade recess running race (for which Jess has been training all summer), she is breaking all kinds of rules. This is a boy’s race. When Jess asks Leslie to run, he turns to his main (male) competition and, relying on the sexist notion that girls aren’t as good as boys, asks, “You ain’t scared to let a girl race are you?” (p. 26). Even when she wins her heat, which should guarantee her a place in the final, a male classmate condescends, “OK, you’ve had your fun. You can run on up to the hopscotch now” (p. 27). She is then told, “Girls aren’t supposed to play on the lower field. Better get up there before one of the teachers sees you” (p. 27). The message here: If you refuse to be regulated by your peers, the teachers will enforce the gender norms.

Throughout the novel, Jess’s acts of gender transgression trouble him, even when they are evident only in his choice of company—Leslie and Miss Edmunds—and in his chosen activity—creating art—but these remain mostly private and invisible to others. The transgressions of Leslie and Miss Edmunds make gender categories more




visible, and their transgressions become problematic for Jess only when others poke fun at him because of his association with these women. The clothing and actions of Leslie and Miss Edmunds and their disregard for established gender rules both mark them as female and trouble the category. They couldn’t be male, but could they be female? When Leslie does try to conform (by wearing a dress to church with Jess’s family), her “usual sparkle” (p. 82) is not as apparent; filling the female subjectivity category through the standard signs waters down the more complicated “Leslie” sub-jectivity that makes her who she is.

All of this gender trouble brings new light to the cases of desire in Jess’s life. Before Leslie arrives in town, his two main hobbies are art and running. The language that Patterson uses to describe his relationship with these activities is the language of deep desire, of obsession: “Jess drew the way some people drink whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body. Lord, he loved to draw” (p. 10). “Jess pumped his arms harder and bent his head for the distant fence. He could hear the third grade boys screaming him on. They would follow him around like a country-music star” (p. 4). Where art is his private desire, to be shared with only those who will not judge him or bind this love up in a falsely gendered category (Leslie and Miss Edmunds), running is public. But it is alone in the cow fields, running before his sisters are awake, that he dreams of his desire to be respected by his father for his very male talent (a talent, he hoped, would result in winning the school races).

The passion that he brings to his hobbies carries into the two most influential rela-tionships in this year of Jess’s life. His desire to be with both Leslie and Ms. Edmunds is not constructed as sexual desire, even if it could be imagined as Jess’s heterosexual love for either character, but rather as Jess’s desire to be in the company of someone who respects and accepts him at face value. Even when his peers attempt to construct a normalized heterosexual love relationship between Jess and Leslie, he rejects it wholeheartedly.

Perhaps it is this rejection of normative heterosexuality that helps construct his rela-tionships with Ms. Edmunds and Leslie as forbidden. When Jess wants to bring Leslie to church, “he could see his mother rooting around in her head for a good reason to say no” (p. 82). Not only does Leslie not “dress right” (p. 82), their class differences make her seem even more undesirable to Jess’s family. As Mama says, “I don’t want no one poking up their nose at my family” (p. 82). Likewise, when Miss Edmunds invites Jess to go to a museum in the big city (Washington, D.C.) with her, he knows that if his mother has full understanding of what he is asking, she’d never let him go. These rela-tionships are queer because of how Jess’s desire works within them. His attraction to people who transgress boundaries is how Jess queers his own adolescent experience.

In Bridge to Terabithia, gender gets regulated as a part of a larger desire to control sexuality generally and maintain a normative heterosexuality more specifically. Even desire becomes gendered in Jess’s life, with his art constructed as female and his run-ning as male. Because these categories are clearly normative and highly regulated, Jess’s moves in and out of desire and in and out of gender categories—both with and without Miss Edmunds and Leslie—are transgressive, queer, acts. Although this book




could certainly be read as a heterosexual Romeo-and-Juliet love story between Jess and Leslie, teachers reading through a queer lens could offer their students possibili-ties that expand traditional notions of gender and desire by noticing and foregrounding all the negotiations and complications around gender and sexuality present in the text. Teachers can encourage students to think beyond surface interpretations by asking, what else is going on here with Jess and Leslie besides a story of boy meets girl? How do they complicate that more traditional story? How are Jess and Leslie similar to and different from other kinds of heterosexually paired characters in books and films that students know (e.g., Bella and Edward in Twilight, perhaps)?

A gendered analysis of Bridge to Terabithia can thereby inform a gendered reading of other books that students read, particularly books where either (a) the characters are marginalized because they don’t conform to binary gender norms or (b) the characters’ plot line relies on their adherence to gender norms. Readers can discuss questions such as these: Would the story work if the main character were the opposite gender? Why do you think the author relies on the readers to understand what makes a boy and what makes a girl? Are there characters who buck the expectations of who they should be like and with whom they should connect? Are there situations where one characteristic is expected to accompany another? What happens to characters when those character-istics don’t come in such expected sets?

Troubling gendered norms and ways that relationships between male and female characters are constructed offer students models for understanding their own compli-cated lives. Teachers could explore with their colleagues and ask themselves, how can we create spaces where gender and sexuality aren’t mediated by strict social ideas of what is right or wrong for either category? How are those spaces already a part of our school and classroom culture? How are they not? What is my role in helping to carve out those spaces? Teachers and students could discuss, who is allowed or encouraged to participate in what hobbies or activities, and why are those hobbies constructed that way? Who wears what types of clothes, and what happens when boys or girls borrow from each other’s categories? Why does this happen? Are there rules for who is sup-posed to be friends with whom? For who is supposed to date whom? When and how are boys and girls in relationships with each other? What models are there for expand-ing those and constructing different kinds of boy–girl relationships?

Moving Queer Readings Toward Practice

We have used a deconstructive strand of queer theory to analyze four award-winning, popular, and easily available children’s books. Bringing this theoretical lens to these texts has allowed us to try on alternative interpretations and trace various constructions of gender and sexuality that often go unnoticed in heteronormative schools but that send clear messages about who fits in and who is left out. Although we have tried to give examples of the kinds of situations, patterns, experiences, and disruptions queer readings might highlight, it is important to remember there is no one best way to approach this task. In fact, we approached each book in a different way—a page-by-page analysis, a holistic analysis, a themed analysis, and a gendered analysis—intentionally. Though




there is no magic to these decisions—no ultimate right or wrong way to approach these texts with this lens—we did find that our approaches lent themselves well to the books we assigned them to. For example, Sendak’s art covers the pages and elements repeat themselves, which invites a page-by-page analysis about place and location. The holistic approach that we took in Woodson’s text mirrors, we feel, the watching of their lives that the girls engaged in and the systemic regulations they had to navigate. Like teachers often do with fairy tales, we pulled reoccurring themes out of DiCamillo’s text to inves-tigate each of them in a way that could stretch through the entire text. And Patterson herself highlights gender in a way that we couldn’t ignore. We may have found other possible interpretations if we had taken the page-by-page approach that we brought to Sendak’s work to Woodson’s book. Likewise, we could have done a chapter-by-chapter analysis of each of the chapter books. Or gender could have been the main lens through which we queered DiCamillo’s book. It might be interesting, for example, to investigate with students how Despereaux’s nonconformity is specifically rendered in gendered terms; many of his behaviors, including but not limited to his lack of physicality and his enjoyment of reading for aesthetic pleasure, are ones that counter traditional notions of masculinity. These are starting points and possibilities for exploration, not excavations of ultimate truths in these texts.

Likewise, teachers could bring a queer analysis to many other texts. Indeed, we hope that they will. Some teachers may find it interesting to lead students in thinking through the ways that normative identities operate in fantasy texts such as Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings series. Harry Potter, after all, not only lived in a closet until adolescence, but then he realized there was a whole world he didn’t know about that he fit into better than the world into which he was born. Readers who aren’t sure where to begin with this kind of work may want to start with the texts we’ve analyzed as examples or with one of the few additional texts (William’s Doll, Harriet the Spy, etc.) mentioned in the lists of questions at the end of the textual analyses. Our hope is that by seeing how a range of common texts can be queered, teachers take on the proj-ect of queering these and other texts with their students.

Certainly, it makes sense to ask how such readings work in actual classrooms with actual teachers and students. Although we think there is value in putting forth the mod-els and the questions themselves, we are also interested in exploring empirical situa-tions that apply these approaches. We are engaged in ongoing work with elementary teachers who want to look at the ways that they use texts with their students and who are excited to bring a queered lens to books that have become routine and expected, but that are already on their shelves. Although there is much work still to do, we have taken some initial steps to document what happens when we encourage this type of reading. Initial data from a multiple case study project (Hermann-Wilmarth, 2011; Ryan & Bednar, 2011; Ryan & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2012) suggest that when second, third, and fourth grade students are asked to think about these and other texts in queer ways, conversation becomes unscripted and messy, but it also opens up spaces for new inter-pretations. We saw discomfort in some students, and we saw an engaged energy in others. We heard students sharing information about their identities that they had pre-viously kept hidden. We noticed teachers sharing their own possible readings with




students and how that gave students permission to make their own queer, even trou-bling, interpretations. When they had models and vocabulary to apply to binary rela-tions and unspoken moments in texts, children’s ability to take on such lenses during their independent reading grew. They began to ask questions about the ways genders and bodies were portrayed even when reading texts that did not include LGBT charac-ters. We look forward to implementing, interrupting, refining, and recognizing the limits of these ideas as they are given life and depth in classroom communities.

Yet the theoretical foundation of this future empirical work remains significant because recognizing characters who make queer turns and create spaces where their subjectivities are alternatively safe or dangerous or powerful or queer or normal is a mirror of what children do. When teachers and students deconstruct and reconstruct these non-LGBT characters in queer ways, the performances that all people participate in as they play out their subjectivities are acknowledged. This acknowledgment, and this reconstruction of characters, could help students see that their own performances are not from a script that always has to be followed. Through our analysis, we offer models for queer readings of children’s literature and also guides for how to use this analysis to encourage elementary-aged students to think about both books and real-life socially constructed norms through a queered lens. Using multiple narratives for char-acters such as Max, Clover and Annie, Despereaux, and Jess as models, teachers and students can examine a range of social positions (including LGBT subjectivities) and the narratives surrounding them. By first queering on-the-shelf texts and then asking students to think about how that queering connects to larger social issues, elementary classrooms can become places where strict subjectivity categories based on the hetero-sexual matrix—categories that often marginalize students and their families—are made visible, questioned, disrupted, and expanded.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) declared the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or pub-lication of this article: The empirical studies putting this approach into practice cited in the article were generously supported by the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, the College of Education, and the Graduate School of East Carolina University.

Notes

1. While SB49 died without a vote in the House, the bill recently has been reintroduced in both the Tennessee Senate (SB0234) and House (HB1332). Both are awaiting action at the time of this publication.

2. This is not to imply that queer is a singular, utopic goal that acknowledges all difference simultaneously. Although consideration of multiple and/or intersecting marginalized sub-jectivities is the goal for some scholars, it is also important to note that “queer” can also problematically stand in as a “false unifying umbrella” (Anzaldúa, 1991, p. 250).




3. What Derrida calls “Western metaphysics” (Sullivan, 2003, p. 50).4. Readers may be able to imagine here a sports-oriented father taking his effeminate son out

to play catch or signing him up for a sports camp to “toughen him up.” Indeed, these kinds of retraining efforts are common enough for queer people that they have been displayed and satirized in queer films such as But I’m a Cheerleader (Babbit, 1999).

Children’s Literature Cited

Banyai, I. (1998). Zoom. New York, NY: Puffin.DiCamillo, K. (2003). The tale of Despereaux. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.Lowry, L. (1993). The giver. New York, NY: Dell Laurel-Leaf.Patterson, K. (1977). Bridge to Terabithia. New York, NY: HarperCollins.Sendak, M. (1963). Where the wild things are. New York, NY: Harper and Row.Wiesner, D. (2001). The three pigs. New York, NY: Clarion.Woodson, J. (2001). The other side (E. B. Lewis, Ill.). New York, NY: Putnam.Zolotow, C. (1972). William’s doll (W. Pene Du Bois, Ill.). New York, NY: HarperCollins.

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Author Biographies

Caitlin L. Ryan is assistant professor in the College of Education at East Carolina University. Her research interests center on the relationships among children’s literature, literacy, social positioning, and educational equity, especially at the elementary school level. Her current research examines the normative ways that gender and sexuality are communicated in elemen-tary school literacy curricula and how teachers might approach literacy instruction, classroom contexts, and multicultural children’s literature to interrupt such normative messages. Her work has been published in Language Arts, The Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts, and Journal of LGBT Youth.

Jill M. Hermann-Wilmarth is associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development at Western Michigan University. Her current research interests include examining issues of identity inside and outside of classrooms using the lenses of literacy, social justice, and critical and deconstructive theories. Among other places, her work can be found in Language Arts, The Teacher Educator, Journal of Teacher Education, and Journal of Early Childhood Research.



Already on the Shelf: Queer Readings of Award-Winning Children's

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