Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children's Literature and Culture ed. by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys (review)

Reviewed by: Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children's Literature and Cultureed. by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys Jen Pendragon (bio) Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children's Literature and Culture. Edited by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys, Open Cultural Studies Special Issue, Volume 5, Issue 1, De Gruyter Open Access, 2021, 115 pp. Open Cultural Studies' January 2021 issue focuses on gender fluidity in children's literature and culture. The eight essays cover fairy tales and folklore, novels, and animated television shows, with primary sources ranging from the early nineteenth century to current day. The issue is broken into three generalized sections based on chronology. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century content is addressed in "The Early-Modern Legacy of Gender Bending onto the 19th Century." Examples of gender fluidity in twenty-first-century children's television programming, all adapted from late twentieth-century programming, are covered in "Post-Modern Revisions of What Was Perhaps Too Modern Back Then." Finally, contemporary scholarship and as-yet-unpublished manuscripts are examined in "Reflections on the Alternative Possibilities Offered by the Genre (Fairy Tales and Folklore) on Issues of Gender and Sexuality." This centuries-long survey of gender representation shows that, while "gender fluidity" and transgender representation may feel like modern phenomena, they are neither new nor deserve the blind eye to which they are often treated. This collection of essays does a solid job of defining its parameters and the issues it specifically wants to address, then placing those issues in a larger social context extending beyond the sphere of academia. Every essay makes an argument for, and some even offer concrete evidence of, the ways in which representations of gender fluidity in media must do a better job of supporting and representing lived experiences of the individuals it represents. In their introductory essay "Gender Fluidity: From Euphemism to Pride," editors Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys explain the impulse behind this special issue of Open Cultural Studies. The editors point out that, while the term gender fluidmay seem like a newer concept, there is in fact evidence of gender fluidity throughout folklore and fairy tales especially. They delineate between a gender fluid identity and the concept of cross dressing, often used in fairy tales for deception or adventure and not tied to the cross-dresser's identity. In that same vein, they discuss the complexity of queer lived experiences, the differences between trans and gender fluid identity, and the multitude of other ways in which these topics cannot be treated as though they exist in a vacuum. "The resources of the marvelous are infinite: it can question all identities: sex/gender, species, and class, and this potential is of great interest to us today when we interrogate intersectionality" (298). The essays in the special issue continue this idea and address both limitations of [End Page 127]past scholarship and expanding potential as visibility increases in mainstream media and journalism. While the editors aim for a global perspective, most of the source material hails from Europe and North America, limiting the scope of the content in some unintended ways. The first section of the journal is the most diverse as far as the essays' subject matter. Considering it has four essays where subsequent sections only have two each, the scope was bound to be broader. These four essays address the following source material: Theodore and Hippolyte Cogniards' The White Cat(1852); Comtesse de Segur's Les Malheurs de Sophie(1859); Nicole Claveloux's 1977 adaptation of another work from Segur, Histoire de Blondine, Bonne-Biche et Beau-Minon(1856); and J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan(1911) and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland(1865) and Through the Looking Glass(1871). Judith Butler's feminist writings feature heavily in most of these essays, even though three-quarters of the work was written before Butler was even born. Butler's theories on gender representation as performance are most relevant, and the characters of the source material are judged by how well they can display a socially accepted version of their birth-assigned gender. Each author brings the...

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