New materialist and posthuman thinking denote a range of approaches that have in common a focus on materialities as a turn against the persistence of Cartesian dualisms (mind/body, subject/object, nature/culture, for example). In this article, we explore how the feminist new materialism of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, among others, may provide openings to research in our field, especially when considering what is recurrently taken up as one of its central problems: the positioning of the child in a world ruled by adults. We first discuss recent approaches in children's literature studies that show interest in these theories and then use these to offer a toolbox of terms and notions – from ethico-onto-epistemology to diffraction – that may open possibilities for research in more-than-human environments.

Reading is often regarded as a public good and an essential part of developing almost every aspect of human potential. In this article, we survey the "affective economies" (Ahmed, 2004) of literary reading through a textual and visual analysis of documents issued by Chile's Ministry of Education. Through a critical and diffractive reading of these documents with Ahmed's and Braidotti's (2018) conceptualizations of the affective, we claim that when reading is presented as beneficial, pleasurable, and promising, an assemblage of exclusion is set into motion. We describe how the affective repertoires in these documents reinforce oppressive and exclusionary neoliberal values under the guise of the promise of future happiness. The pleasure and happiness that can be achieved through literary reading, however, is only accessible to those who are willing to orientate themselves in the "right ways." In this orientation, the cognitive is privileged over the emotional, and readers are supposed to learn to postpone any current demands for the promise of future happiness.

This article explores the question of how to assess children’s literature as feminist. Drawing upon a revision of the concept of postfeminism as a gendered neoliberalism that cultivates the ‘right’ disposition for succeeding in a neoliberal society, I bring together two possible objects of study upon which I outline some problematic aspects. I begin by focusing on a publishing phenomenon of the last few years: the biography compilations, such as the crowdfunded Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, that, in a more or less explicit manner, aim to provide younger generations with new repertoires of gendered agencies. Then I analyze two picturebooks that have been recommended by reading promotion agencies and praised for their anti-sexist values: Tirititesa and La bella Griselda. In both these picturebooks, we find two protagonists tran sgressing gender norms and heteronormative ideals of romantic love. Yet, I argue that they reproduce systems of exclusions that are quite problematic if read from feminist intersectionality. The texts analyzed  are modeled by a postfeminist sensibility in which a celebratory “girl power” is put forward, while obscuring how (gendered) exclusions work.

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This chapter argues for a new materialist and posthumanist understanding of children’s cultures as formed by naturalcultural assemblages destabilizing anthropocentric notions of childhood, adulthood, agency, age, creativity, and text. The chapter provides an overview of recent developments in childhood studies – in particular around the decentering of the child (Spyrou 2017, Diaz-Diaz & Semenec 2020) and the “after childhood” approach (Kraftl 2020) – to propose that they may enable new methodological openings in textual and empirical work with texts and media (co-)created for/by/with young audiences.