As I mentioned in the last class, here is a lo-fi version of the workshop I would have done. Enjoy, and feel free to comment on the questions! Happy Holidays!!

Video:

Steven Universe (2018): first gay wedding televised on a children’s cartoon / Andi Mack (2019): Disney’s first gay character and coming out scene

Articles and links:

https://www.them.us/story/rebecca-sugar-steven-universe-interview

https://ew.com/tv/2018/08/22/steven-universe-voltron-kids-cartoons-lgbtq-characters/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCecsVoeJcsXbAra7Sl4mOPw Queer Kid Stuff – an independent Youtube show: “LGBTQ+ vids for kids! I’m your host Lindsay and with the help of my best stuffed friend, Teddy, we’ll be teaching you what gays mean, what LGBT stands for, what’s up with marriage equality and so much more!”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/parenting/2019/07/31/ltbtq-representation-growing-childrens-television/1875892001/

https://www.glaad.org/sites/default/files/GLAAD%20WHERE%20WE%20ARE%20ON%20TV%202019%202020.pdf GLAAD annual “Where We Are On TV” Report

PowerPoint:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TkXfw9e-WCfnIDxlVsSEpm7j5t5UqbiQ/view?usp=sharing

Discussion Questions:

1. When discussing whether queer content is ok in children’s tv, it’s often a conversation around “appropriateness”, if it’s “wholesome”, even if the characters in question are doing nothing different from straight/cis characters. Queer content is often sexualized even when it is not in any way. Why do you think this is, and why and how do you think it came about? How does this contribute to the internalized homophobia queer children might experience?

2**. Many queer creators writing about queer characters face much higher standards in their work than straight creators do. What responsibility do creators have to share their own experience, when the media they make is for children? Do they have an obligation to teach with what they made, and does everyone? In what way do these higher standards manifest, and how do they contribute to the lack of and missed opportunities for queer creators even as LGBTQ characters are increasing? 

3. When did you first feel you saw yourself (your entire self, or only a piece of your experience) represented in a piece of television? Was it as a child or an adult? Has it still not happened? 

4. Looking at children’s media, it is common for creators and critics to take a long view approach. While things have improved over the years, especially the last handful, it has happened slowly – in many ways, more slowly than in media for adults. Recently there has been pushback against this, with many saying change should happen faster. What are your thoughts, and how do you see things changing over the next few decades in children’s television? 

**as a queer woman who writes fiction professionally, this is something I’m always thinking about.

1. In trying to make childism a discrete category, does Wall overlook opportunities a third wave of childhood studies would have to be more intersectional? How would you create a third wave that looks different from what is presented by Wall?

2. Wall discusses the use of media and children with platforms to really be listened to about important issues. Now we see this all the time – young climate change activists and survivors of school violence among many other things. While allowing that children deserve and are capable of being activists just as anyone is, how do we also create care and safety around work that is traumatizing even for adults at this stage of their lives? How does that care and safety inform or improve what’s available for activists at other stages of life? 

3. If the goal of Wall’s ideal version of childhood studies and philosophy is to allow for changing moral horizons throughout life/“moral play” and adaptation, how do we account for different styles of learning and understanding and ways of thinking – “competence” that may be neuroatypical – in a discussion based around a standardized idea of what morality is? 

4. How has the conversation about diversity in children’s literature become flattened or simplistic, as it prioritizes certain kinds of children and childhoods? What are some examples of children’s media that centers “child-oriented ideologies” in ways that might not be immediately apparent?

5. How would the children’s literature and criticism landscape look different, and maybe improved, by children’s literature not just for children but BY children? 

I wanted to post about some things that might be of general interest to the class:

1. Beasts of the Southern Wild (you can rent it a bunch of places like Prime, Youtube, etc, but it’s not on streaming anymore unfortunately) a 2012 movie with so many parallels to The Florida Project I felt remiss not to mention it – freeform childhood within poverty and an amazing young actor playing a young girl raised by a not traditionally “responsible” yet still loving parent, with more explicit magic than Florida Project but that same real life little represented marginalized community in the South, within this larger, magical feeling world. It’s really good!
2. Someone – Jamie? – had asked about how certain books enter the curriculum canon in an early class, and while I can’t speak to the teaching side of that, on the publishing side it has to do with librarians and the somewhat controversial awards system. But one part of that that’s a big deal, and which has participation by kids, is the Texas Bluebonnet.
3. Everyone probably knows about WNDB already but they’re cool and give out a lot of grant money for children’s lit related in and outside classroom stuff. Disability in Kidlit doesn’t update anymore, but that’s a resource I have more complicated opinions about, it’s at least a well-curated collection about the intersections of those two things.

My research interests are disability studies and children’s media, in particular speculative fiction and the history of depictions of illness and embodiment in young adult literature. I’m writing my thesis on the idea of the monstrous adolescent and how magic/curses/fantastic imagery can be a useful and even empowering shorthand in exploring the lived experience of disability for younger readers. I’m really interested in the fact that this isn’t a solid, uncomplicated thing, within the realm of more radical critical disability studies/social model vs the realm of what we consider good for a young person in education and medical model spaces, how non-explicit disability metaphor is a way into understanding yourself as a disabled person as a child. I’m also really interested in how the use of imaginative spaces works within trauma, in particular medical intervention, where the child patient may or may not have a voice or agency at all.

Another potential workshop interest is the construction of queerness and non-normative family structures in children’s media, in particular the current boom of comics and animation for young viewers by queer creators examining these concepts. I think there’s an interesting line to be drawn from the idea of queer sexuality being an especially policed area of children’s lives even within our general culture with regards to children that has been discussed. Growing up in that environment, many creators are making the content they never had as children where queerness is both transgressive just by existing, but also “wholesome” in the way of media created for (default) heterosexual children. What kind of needs are both being fulfilled for the child viewer, and for the adult creator, who were themselves once a child? How does this feed into the idea of reciprocal care and meaning?