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Trans/Forming Girlhood: Transgenderism, the Tomboy Formula, and Gender Identity Disorder in Sharon Dennis Wyeth's Tomboy Trouble

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2008.0007

1080-6563

Michelle Ann Abate,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Trans/Forming Girlhood:Transgenderism, the Tomboy Formula, and Gender Identity Disorder in Sharon Dennis Wyeth’s Tomboy Trouble Michelle Ann Abate Since the appearance of John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969)—the first young adult (YA) novel to openly address the topic of homosexuality—YA narratives depicting same-sex relationships or addressing gender identities that exist outside the confines of traditional notions of masculinity and femininity have increased exponentially. Michael Cart and Christine Jenkins have documented that although novels for teenage readers with gay/lesbian/queer content rarely exceeded more than a handful of new titles per year during the 1970s and 1980s, they now consistently number more than a dozen. Given the steadily growing number of YA novels that question normative gender and sexual roles, these narratives now constitute their own literary genre and even narrative tradition. Nancy Garden's groundbreaking Annie on My Mind (1982) and M. E. Kerr's oft-discussed Deliver Us from Evie (1994) to Julie Anne Peters's award-winning Luna (2004) and Alex Sanchez's controversial Rainbow Boys series (2001–present), all have enjoyed both critical acclaim and commercial success. In spite of the sharp increase in narratives for adolescent readers that focus on youth who resist or reject conventional gender and sexual identities, there has been no accompanying spike in ones for pre-adolescent children. As genres that are intended for boys and girls who are thought too chronologically young, sexually "innocent" and socially impressionable for such "adult" issues,1 picture books and beginning readers suffer from a virtual lacuna of characters who exhibit iconoclastic forms of masculinity and femininity. [End Page 40] While a handful of relatively recent books for pre-adolescent children have presented nonheteronormative sexual identities—most famously Lesléa Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies (1989) and Michael Wilhoite's Daddy's Roommate (1991)—it is the parents who possess these traits and not the children. Reflecting prevailing societal beliefs that such complex issues ought to be introduced to young people one at a time, the adult characters largely conform to traditional notions of maleness and femaleness. The father in Wilhoite's text has short hair and a moustache and enjoys such stereotypically masculine activities as working in the yard and attending baseball games. Likewise, the two mothers in Newman's book possess many feminine traits, including having long hair and wearing skirts or dresses.2 Even those few books that do depict iconoclastic young characters generally present male ones, and they also routinely refrain from engaging in a critical examination of the gender roles and their social construction. In Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland's King and King (2000), for example, the central character's lack of a heteronormative sexual identity is not paired with his accompanying possession of a nontraditional gender one. Although the prince elects to marry another prince, he possesses many stereotypically masculine traits and is readily identifiable as male. Similarly, in Charlotte Zolotow's William's Doll (1985), the young title character may want a doll to hug, feed and cuddle, but this desire is ultimately presented as reinforcing rather than resisting traditional male gender and sexual roles. William's grandmother, who finally purchases him the doll, asserts that the toy will not make the young boy a "sissy," as both his father and brother believe, but rather will help him learn how to become a more loving and affectionate father someday. As even this brief overview suggests, while child readers in general and pre-adolescent girls in particular can witness iconoclastic gender identities in numerous facets of U.S. popular and material culture—like the shape-shifting Pokémon figures or gender-amorphous world of animé—they can't find these images in narratives written for them. In spite of massive changes in women's social, political, and economic standing in the past thirty years, female characters in picture books and beginning readers are still presented with traditionally feminine qualities such as demure dispositions, comely long hair and a strong interest in cultivating traits such as kindness and goodness. As Angela M. Gooden and Mark A. Gooden have noted, "Although female representation has...