In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children’s picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ+ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly. In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality.

"In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ Children's Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children's picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ children's picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ children's picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly. In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ Children's Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ children's picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ children's picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality"--

A foundational look at the way children's books shaped views of the LGBTQ+ world

In The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books, Jennifer Miller identifies an archive of over 150 English-language children’s picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ identities, expressions, and issues. This archive is then analyzed to explore the evolution of LGBTQ+ characters and content from the 1970s to the present. Miller describes dominant tropes that emerge in the field to analyze historical shifts in representational practices, which she suggests parallel larger sociocultural shifts in the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities. Additionally, Miller considers material constraints and possibilities affecting the production, distribution, and consumption of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books from the 1970s to the present. This foundational work defines the field of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books thoroughly, yet accessibly. In addition to laying the groundwork for further research, The Transformative Potential of LGBTQ+ Children’s Picture Books presents a reading lens, critical optimism, used to analyze the transformative potential of LGBTQ+ children’s picture books. Many texts remain attached to heteronormative family forms and raced and classed models of success. However, by considering what these books put into the world, as well as problematic aspects of the world reproduced within them, Miller argues that LGBTQ+ children’s picture books are an essential world-making project and seek to usher in a transformed world as well as a significant historical archive that reflects material and representational shifts in dominant and subcultural understandings of gender and sexuality.

Contributions by Sara Austin, Robert Bittner, J. Bradley Blankenship, Gabriel Duckels, Caitlin Howlett, Isabel Millán, Jennifer Miller, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Tim Morris, Dana Rudolph, j wallace skelton, Jason Vanfosson, River Vooris, and B. J. Woodstein Picture books are books aimed at children where the illustrations are as important, or more important, than the text. Picture books, the effects of their simple text and importance in the literary cannon, have been studied by scholars for decades, but little attention has been given to LGBTQ+ picture books. Reading LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books is a collection of essays that identifies and interprets children's picture books that explicitly represent LGBTQ+ content. Contributors to the volume include established and emerging scholars with expertise in the fields of children's literature, young adult literature, cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and education. Each essay introduces readers to several children's books that denote unmistakable LGBTQ+ content. Essays bring various interpretive frameworks and intellectual commitments to their unique readings of LGBTQ+ children's picture books. The essays in Reading LGBTQ+ Children's Picture Books produce innovative new scholarship about a range of topics including representations of LGBTQ+ marriage and parenting and LGBTQ+ history and culture. The topics explored, and theoretical frameworks applied, significantly expand available and accessible up-to-date scholarship on the growing field of LGBTQ+ children's picture books.

Since its inception in the 1970s, the Philosophy for Children movement (P4C) has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in children’s classics, especially Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature in significant ways. Offering a novel take on this phenomenon, Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. Examining everything from the rise of French Theory in the United States to the crucial pedagogies offered in children’s picture books, from Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events to studies of queer childhood, Kenneth B. Kidd deftly reveals the way in which children may learn from philosophy and vice versa.

Recent decades have seen remarkable changes in the cultural visibility, legal status, and social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, from positive representations of queerness in television series like The L-Word and Will & Grace, to films about queer intersectionality like Moonlight, to openly-gay and lesbian elected officials and leaders in the business community, to the end of anti-sodomy laws and marriage discrimination. With these advances have come assimilation of the queer subculture into the mainstream and, with it, loss of both some of the stigmatization of non-heteronormativity and the very cornerstones of the distinctiveness of LGBTQ+ communities, including queer neighbourhoods, bars and nightclubs, bookstores, publications, and other queer businesses. Queer couples and their children are migrating from LGBTQ+ enclaves to neighbourhoods with better schools, queer singles meet in virtual spaces rather than in bars, and LGBTQ+ bookstores and community centres, once the hub of queer communities, are closing, replaced by Amazon.com and social media. These changes raise the question of how LGBTQ+ culture is changing and whether, like many assimilated subcultures before it, it may be in fact endangered. This book examines these seismic changes, their sociological and cultural implications, reminisces about what has been lost and gained, and hints at what the future may hold for LGBTQ+ people. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality.