Boys in children's literature and popular culture. Masculinity, abjection, and the fictional child (review)

United States

For some time now, complaints have been raised in the USA and other countries that boys are not only reading less than girls, but in addition prefer books and other media considered mostly inappropriate by adults. In response to these pedagogic concerns, Annette Wannamaker, assistant professor of children's literature in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University, examines English-language children's books, films, TV programs, video games, manga, and anime from the last two decades to investigate what exactly attracts boys to these popular media and to consider which models of masculinity contemporary boy culture offers. In five chapters exploring Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan, Louis Sachar's Holes, the Captain Underpants series, manga, and the Harry Potter series, she documents the affirmative character of the works in close and careful readings of the texts: the male protagonists are generally white, heterosexual, and members of the middle-class. On the one hand, the popular media thus perpetuates conventional conceptions of boy- and manhood, oftentimes blatantly glorifying a hegemonic male "norm" that tolerates no deviation. On the other hand, however, Wannamaker convincingly argues that some male protagonists – especially in the Harry Potter series – escape gender stereotypes and instead display more nuanced and complex forms of masculinity. Indeed, Wannamaker's astutely structured and stimulating study makes a convincing case for not simply dismissing boy culture and reading as inappropriate. On the contrary, she argues that boys rather need encouragement to grow into independent, discerning readers who fully understand that hegemonic models of masculinity are but literary and social constructs.