"Doing" Gender Differently: Exposing the Porous Nature of Gender Norms through Children's Literature

The texts under review in this essay all focus on protagonists who challenge gender norms. In Leah's Mustache Party, Leah wears a pirate costume and mustache at Halloween, while the other girls wear princess and fairy costumes. She then decides to wear her mustache in other environments and in doing so disrupts gendered notions of costuming and appearance. In Hand over Hand, the idea of women's work and men's work is challenged in a Filipino fishing village as a young girl convinces her grandfather to take her fishing. The other fishermen in the village are quite convinced she will not catch any fish because she is a girl. A Boy Named Queen explores gendered notions of appearance, roles, and names alongside bullying, friendship, and individuality.

In exploring these books, I draw on Judith Butler's conception of gender as performative. The notion of performativity challenges perceptions of gender as "natural" and innate, instead positioning gender as an effect of repeated material and discursive acts within a regulatory framework. From this perspective, gender is not something we are; rather, it is something we do, that is, perform. Thus, while gender expression may appear to be a natural outcome of one's sex, gender is actually reproduced and generated through unconscious repeated speech and bodily actions. It is in the repetition over time that performance of gender is concealed and appears as being caused by one's sex. These gendered performances are regulated and policed in multiple ways to (re)produce normative and socially acceptable (intelligible) ways of doing gender (Butler, Gender Trouble). In other words, gendered meanings are regulatory fictions inscribed onto bodies and produced through performative practice (Bunch 39-40). These normative meanings are framed by the heterosexual matrix, a cultural grid of intelligibility through which sex, gender, and desire are constructed and interpreted as intelligible and through which normative ideals of "femininity" and "masculinity" are produced as a hierarchical binary (Butler, Gender Trouble). The heterosexual matrix demonstrates how the production of gender is concealed over time and therefore the normative constructions of gender and sexuality are naturalized rather than acknowledged as an effect of regulatory practices. The production of power, indicating what is culturally acceptable and not acceptable, intelligible and unintelligible, designates who is marginalized and excluded in dominant culture (Butler, Gender Trouble).

While the concept of unconscious reiteration of gendered performances within the heterosexual matrix could be considered to imply a subject "trapped within a discourse it has no power to evade or to alter" (Salih 58), Butler considers subjects to have agency. This concept of agency, also known as "performative resignification" (Gowlett 406) is useful for this review essay. For Butler, the social and psychic, performative process of becoming gendered occurs as a part of the paradox of subjection, whereby power is both external to the subject, acting from the outside, subordinating, regulating and constraining the subject, as well as productive in that it also forms the subject. As a part of this process, therefore, the subject relies on subjection in order to live. Butler contends that "if conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated [and] the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration, a repetition that is never merely mechanical" (Psychic 16). Here, Butler contends that subjects repetitively perform gendered discourses and power relations and in this repetition conditions of power are maintained and generated. Butler claims that performativity, therefore, is "reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (Bodies 2). This production is concealed to the point that the effect appears natural and to be that which is named. The notion of performativity as a reiterative and a citational practice is important when one considers Butler's notion...