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  • Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child
  • Kent Baxter (bio)
Annette Wannamaker . Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child. New York: Routledge, 2008.

"Boys will be boys." No tautological summation does a better job of cutting short the conversation of why our male children are the way they are—or the way we think they are. This axiom essentializes both age and gender as empirical fact, seamless and predictable. Just the way we like it. Or is it? Equally as comfortable might be the seemingly more complex notion that boys are what we make them—empty vessels to be filled to the brim with whatever notions of "boyishness" we know are normal, good, or at least going to serve them (us?) well later in life. Annette Wannamaker skillfully navigates these two monolithic approaches to boyhood in Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child, both exposing their predominance in popular (and [End Page 225] academic) discourse and destabilizing them as theoretical boxes used to contain and control the very thing they claim to explain. This thoughtful and theoretically savvy examination of boyhood offers new insight into this perpetually vexing yet often undertheorized subject and also suggests some new and productive ways to approach literature for and about boys.

According to Wannamaker, the nature versus nurture binary that has framed so many discussions of male childhood and its representation in literature have served to reify certain preconceived notions of age and gender rather than provide any insight into the discursive category of boyhood and the complex relationship between boys and the texts they read. At the root of these approaches are fundamental beliefs about gendered subjectivity. Letting "boys be boys," in this case, means letting them pursue biologically determined gender roles. On the other hand, teaching them to behave in ways outside traditional gender conventions—for example, in less hegemonic ways—posits that they are at the mercy of socially constructed codes. Such beliefs about gender and boyhood often inform interpretations of texts and justify recommended reading lists; however, they ignore the complex processes of gender identity that are not solely an effect of biology or environment, but are actually negotiated by subjects themselves. Wannamaker points out that underlying principle that seems to determine recommended readings for boys is that "the fictional child, the fictional character depicted in a text, functions as part of a cultural artifact or ideological apparatus working to interpellate the child reader as a subject of ideology" (16). She continues,

I don't necessarily disagree with this general assumption but believe that subjectivity—the ever-evolving construction of the conscious and unconscious self in dialogue with culture(s)—is far more complex, contradictory, fluid, and multifaceted than most of these recommendations lead us to believe. We cannot simply prescribe a list of books that will cure boys of a perceived adherence to stereotypical gender roles for multiple reasons: because there is no monolithic "Boy" in our diverse American culture(s); because children are not blank slates that can be written upon; and because the gendered self—even the fictional self—is layered, continuously shifting, and determined through a dialogue with(in) culture(s), not solely through a top-down imposition of culture . . . We must instead consider fictional texts and our interactions with these within a larger cultural context that includes children's culture, consumer culture, dynamic subject formation, and the myriad influences with which boys interact.

(16–17)

Wannamaker attempts to access this larger cultural context in a number of ways. One alarmingly self-evident tactic is simply to analyze texts that boys actually like. She devotes chapters to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan books (and the 1999 Disney adaptation), Louis Sachar's novel Holes, Dav [End Page 226] Pilkey's Captain Underpants books, the Japanese anime television show Dragon Ball Z, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels—all exceedingly popular with their reading audience to the embarrassment of many teachers, academics, and parents, for whom these works are not sufficiently "gender PC," as they say. Wannamaker suggests that the popularity of these...

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