Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature ed. by Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel (review)

Twenty-two years ago, Roberta Seelinger Trites's Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children's Novels (1997) actively reframed the manner in which scholars approached both traditional and contemporary texts for young audiences, encouraging readers to consider the possibilities of inclusivity. While Trites's book was certainly not the first scholarly work to engage with gender and sexuality in children's literature, it signaled a growing interest in these topics. Last year, Trites's Twenty-First-Century Feminisms in Children's and Adolescent Literature (2018) revisited the earlier volume's claims in order to more fully engage with questions of intersectionality, ecocriticism, and other concerns relating to the study of gender and sexuality in young people's literature and media. In the years that passed between Trites's two texts, these topics have been the subjects of a number of other monographs, essay collections, and special issues, indicating a widespread and varied investment in exploring representations of gender and sexuality, especially with an eye to how they evolve and intersect with other identity markers. Contributions such as Christine Wilkie-Stibbs's The Feminine Subject in Children's Literature (2002), Annette Wannamaker's Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child (2008), and Lance Weldy and Thomas Crisp's 2012 special issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly on sexualities in children's literature, to offer only a very small sampling, have all centered gender and sexuality in their approaches to literature and media for young audiences.

Tricia Clasen and Holly Hassel's collection Gender(ed) Identities: Critical Rereadings of Gender in Children's and Young Adult Literature thus enters a lively, frequently evolving conversation, offering nineteen essays about a number of mostly recent texts that are read through a variety of disciplinary and theoretical lenses. It's surprising, then, that the editors introduce the collection with little recognition of the existing scholarship; aside from a fairly extensive discussion of Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth B. Kidd's Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature, the editors mention other key works of children's and young adult literature scholarship in passing only or not at all. It's unfortunate that the collection's introduction and the brief overviews that precede each section don't do more to locate this collection within the current critical conversation on gender and sexuality in children's and young adult literature; the editors have missed an opportunity to more effectively articulate what is fresh and needed about the essays they have gathered.

The collection is organized into five sections, beginning with "Gender(ing) Communities." This grouping of four essays focuses primarily on representations of adolescent womanhood, beginning with Terry Suico's "History Repeating Itself: The Portrayal of Female Characters in Young Adult Literature at the Beginning of the Millennium," which focuses on the portrayals of teen girls in three popular series from the early 2000s: Ann Brashares's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girls; and Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. This opening chapter does the useful work of establishing the growing popularity of young adult literature more generally, though its interrogations of the novels themselves are relatively unsurprising. The following two essays, Victoria Flanagan's "Girls Online: Representations of Adolescent Female Sexuality in the Digital Age" and Amy Cummins's "Academic Agency in YA Novels by Mexican American Women Authors," likewise investigate representations of adolescent womanhood, each offering a clear focus and useful insights. The final chapter in this section, Angel Daniel Matos's standout "Queer Consciousness/Community in David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing: 'One the Other Never Leaving,'" focuses on representations of young men, who receive notably less attention than young women in the volume as a whole.

Section 2, "Developing Gender(ed) Identities," loosely organizes its four essays around "the relationship between...