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.
In this article, I explore constructions of orphanhood in books about international adoption and irregular immigration tracing their relationship to broader sets of narratives on belonging, and, particularly, to the conceptual metaphor of Nation-as-Family. The stories about young adoptees aim to resist hegemonic discourses on the biological constitution of the family while justifying transnational adoptions overlooking the geopolitical order that facilitates them. Books portraying illegal immigrants, on other hand, unveil a broader discourse that presents third world countries as unsuitable for families and as unable to provide homes in which children can thrive. Stories about adoption and about immigration coincide in presenting kinship as the sole path for the belonging to the broader (national) community.
Beginning of the article:
There are very few Spanish books with narratives about people who have been forced to leave their countries. Amongst the numerous books recommended for children under 13 by the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruiperez, a prestigious institution in reading promotion based in Madrid, I could identify only four stories originally published in Spain —either written in Spanish or in another of the official languages such as Basque or Catalan—, in which a character features who could be classified as a refugee in a Western country. In this article I will explore these stories.
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