Boys in Children's Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child

by Wannamaker; Annette

• ISBN13: 9780415974691
• ISBN10: 0415974690
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-07-23
• Publisher: RoutledgeFalmer

Summary

Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child proposes new theoretical frameworks for understanding the contradictory ways masculinity is represented in popular texts consumed by boys in the United States. The popular texts boys like are often ignored by educators and scholars, or are simply dismissed as garbage boys should be discouraged from enjoying. However, examining and making visible the ways masculinity functions in these texts is vital to understanding the broad array of works that make up children’s culture and form dominant versions of masculinity. Such popular texts as Disney films, Harry Potter, Captain Underpants, and Japanese manga and anime often perform rituals of subject formation in overtly grotesque ways that repulse adult readers and attract boys. They often use depictions of the abject – threats to bodily borders – to blur the distinctions between what is outside the body and what is inside, between what is I and what is not I. Becauseof their reliance on depictions of the abject, those popular texts that most vigorously perform exaggerated versions of masculinity also create opportunities to make dominant masculinity visible as a social construct.

Author Biography

Annette Wannamaker is Assistant Professor of Children's Literature in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University.

Table of Contents

Prologue : the rhetoric of the current "boy crisis"	p. 1
Introduction : beyond stereotypes and role models : the abject and the American boy	p. 13
Me Tarzan, you other : the evolution of an icon	p. 37
Reading in the gaps and lacks : (de)constructing masculinity in Louis Sachar's Holes	p. 67
"The battle of the bionic booger boy," bodily borders, and B.A.D. boys : pleasure and abjection in the captain underpants series	p. 85
And Majin Buu said, "I'll eat you up!" : consuming Japanese cultural imports	p. 103
Men in cloaks and high-heeled boots, men wielding pink umbrellas : witchy masculinities in the Harry Potter novels	p. 121
Conclusion : marking masculinity	p. 147
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