Gender in Contemporary French Children's Literature: The Role of Talents Hauts

Talents Hauts, a small French publishing house specializing in antisexist children's literature, has published almost 250 books since its startup in 2005. This article offers a critical reading of gender representations in Talents Hauts's corpus of picture books and illustrated junior novels. I analyze a variety of factors that allow gender clichés to insinuate themselves into storylines and diminish literary quality, creating a structural yoke that has been nearly impossible for the young, ambitious press to escape. The Talents Hauts case shows that even the most committed efforts to overcome sexism in children's literature are fraught with challenges.