Invitation to participate. Issue 20. Gender aspect in children's literature
Тoday, gender research in children's literature has become a noticeable and already quite traditional direction. Children's literature is often viewed as a material for the study of gender identities, their construction, transformation, etc. We propose to consider the formation and circulation of gender representation in children's literature as a natural part of literature as a whole. These representations (images of boys/girls, men/women, older adults / older women, gender models of behavior, etc.) should obviously be studied as a common system for adult and children's literature. At the same time, in both adult and children's literature, the functions of gender identities have (possibly) their own specificity, which can only be understood concerning literature for a different age audience. In other words, the construction of the image of a woman/girl/girl and a man/boy/boy in both literary systems (both adult and child) can be viewed from the same epistemological perspective.
We invite you to discuss the following issues:
1. How does the symbolization of femininity and masculinity differ in children's and adult literature? Does the content of stereotypes about males and females depend on the readership's age to which the author is addressing?
2. How does the representation of femininity/masculinity change in formulaic genres aimed at reproducing traditional gender identities, hierarchies, and relationships but addressed to different age audiences: «female novel» and «novel for girls»? Encyclopedias «for real men» and encyclopedias «only for boys»? etc.
3. What are the features of the poetics of realistic works of the XIX-XXI centuries, if we apply «gender optics» to them: at what age does the child's gender identity in children's literature begin to play a noticeable role in the development of the plot choice of narrative forms and methods of describing heroes? How is «gender empowerment» related to the socio-historical (legal, economic, etc.) context? How are agender («asexual») characters, ideas of gender symmetry presented in children's literature?
4. Gender and satire: in what artistic forms in children's and adult literature is it allowed to laugh at the deviation in a child's behavior (and an adult) from gender norms? Children's authors' perspective on gender norms of behavior.
5. How are the symbolization of femininity and masculinity differ embodied in children's folklore?
6. Social contexts of gender representations: how can psychological interpretations of gender identities be refined by characters' social characteristics? Noble girls in 19th-century literature and girls from intelligent families of children's literature of the «thaw»? The «bagmen» boys of the 1920s and the «krapivinsky» boys? Refugee girls in 1940s literature and yard girls in 1990s literature? Etc.
7. How did different groups of adults (critics, educators, publishers, official departments, public and informal organizations) shape and shape the gender filters of children's literature?
8. Gender aspects of children's sociology and youth reading and reader reception (reading boys and reading girls, reading fashion, censorship).
9. Features of the image of gender issues in national children's literature.
10. Are there reputations for «writers for boys» and «writers for girls»? How are they formed? Does the gender of the author correlate with one or another interpretation of gender themes and with the target audience? How is this contextualized in social movements?
We invite you to participate. We ask you to notify your colleagues who may be interested in these issues.
In addition to submitting articles to the main block, we welcome submission to the following sections of the magazine: REVIEWS, ARCHIVES, INTERVIEWS.
Recommended length: within 40 thousand characters
The deadline for submitting articles is August 1, 2021.
The deadline for submitting the final version of the article after passing the blind double review process is October 30, 2021.
This issue is scheduled to appear in December 2021.
Please send the articles to the email address of the editorial board: detskie.chtenia@gmail.com.
