Content area
Full Text
In 2014, Ellen Oh and over twenty other writers and publishing professionals launched the sorely needed We Need More Diverse Books movement. The campaign's definition of "diversity" is quite expansive and thereby, like this anthology, inclusive of the LGBTQIA+ community. However, while the former includes many historically disenfranchised groups of people and focuses exclusively on literature, the latter is concerned with representations of gender and sexuality in children's media, literature, and material culture.
Separated into an introduction, thirteen chapters by different scholars, and a conclusion, Heroes, Heroines, and Everything in Between references a broad array of media: television shows, film adaptations, cartoons, Webisodes, and music; fairy tales, comics, and children's picture books; and material culture such as the myriad of toys and dolls come to "life" from their media and literature portrayals. The authors all perform analyses, mostly qualitative in nature, within a range of frameworks and theories including, but not limited to, the (post) feminist, queer, reader-response/reception, genderbread, cultural, cultivation, and social. Ultimately, though, each has the same goal: to discover the extent that media, literature, and material culture reflect nontraditional representations of gender and sexuality and the messages conveyed by such representations.
Quite a few of the chapters in the book analyze media and literature produced by the Walt Disney Company, which has a long historical record of playing it safe and thereby maintaining the status quo. In chapter 4, Nancy Bressler references such a record, as do Annik Pellegrin (chapter 8), and Heike Steinhoff (chapter 9), but focuses more on recent counter-examples. Bressler analyzes five episodes from Disney Channel's domestic comedy Liv and Maddie that reveal opposition to dominant ideologies about representations of gender. Citing characters' actions and words in the episodes, Bressler maintains that the show reflects many of the philosophies of third-wave feminism. One prime example is how female characters break the gender binary by being complex, multidimensional characters who display individualistic and collective identities.
In chapter 8, Pellegrin debunks the myths circulated in fairy tales and romance novels, focusing in particular on French comics and fairy tales. She asserts that unlike French-oriented fairy tales...