Macarena García-González – Challenging the Status of Children’s Literature Studies

We are becoming increasingly aware of how adultism – the prejudice and discrimination against young people – shapes our institutions, interactions and ways of knowing. This concept, examined within the children’s rights movement and the sociology of childhood (LeFrançois 2014), becomes gradually more crucial in the field of children’s literature studies when juxtaposed with the lack of acknowledgement of children’s creativity (Deszcz‐Tryhubczak, García‐González 2023). Addressing adultism requires both cultural and epistemological shifts. In this essay, I present questions, reflections and tentative proposals to guide us towards these shifts. I discuss different ways to challenge the current status of the research focused on children’s literature as well as its potential link to a broader call to further develop the studies and practices related to arts and children.

The question of age and power imbalances stemming from it has been discussed for decades in our field. We see Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Rose 1984) as the starting point of this conversation. Rose argues that children’s literature is impossible to create because it is always determined by adult fantasies about what a child needs or wants. Her diagnosis was later echoed by Perry Nodelman’s concept of children as colonised by adults who want to exert control by creating certain narratives in which such power is disguised (Nodelman 1992). Later, Maria Nikolajeva coined the term aetonormativity to explain how the norm persisting in children’s books is to become an adult, and being a child is inferior, which suggests that children’s literature is one of the multiple means to produce future adults (Nikolajeva 2009, 2010). The concept of aetonormativity was further developed (and contested) by Clèmentine Beauvais’s notion of the “mighty child” (Beauvais 2015) signalling that a child holds a certain power over an adult by having more future ahead of them. The child-adult power imbalance has been at the core of the discourse on the children’s literature studies, but there have not been many interdisciplinary exchanges with other fields such as arts or education. When speaking of children’s art, we imagine art created by children. However, children’s literature and books are always assumed to be written by adults.

Yet the inquiry around the child-adult power imbalance has also revealed more affirmative notions of power. I use the term “affirmative” in the same way in which Rosi Braidotti (2013) uses it to signal that power is not always oppressive, but can also be creative, enabling and capable of catalysing positive transformations. Such a perspective shifts the notion from purely critical to the one that acknowledges the productive capacities of power, and emphasises its potential to foster new possibilities and affirmative engagements. Scholars of the children’s literature studies have started to consider the relation between a child and an adult not only in terms of domination but also of collaboration, resistance and solidarity.

In Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, Victoria Ford Smith (2017) examines the collaborative nature of creating children’s literature during the Victorian era. She argues that children actively contributed to the creative processes whose products were later addressed to them. By analysing letters, manuscripts and other historical evidence, Smith demonstrates that children’s input was integral to the development of many works, and she proposes that children and adults functioned as creative partners. Smith contends that the adult authors not only valued children’s imaginative contributions, but also encouraged them and incorporated their ideas into the final, published works. This collaboration shaped the genre and broadened our understanding of how children influenced literary creativity. Smith’s notion of collaboration aligns with Marah Gubar’s proposal of a “kinship model” (Gubar 2016) since it addresses the shared capacities and possible collaborations between children and adults. Both Gubar and Smith challenge the idea that children were only passive recipients of literature. Smith builds upon Gubar’s monograph, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Gubar 2009), which offers a critical analysis of Victorian children’s literature, and confronts the traditional perception of the genre. Gubar argues that contrary to the dominant idea that children were portrayed primarily as innocent and pure, Victorian authors often depicted children as active, imaginative and complex participants in their own right. Gubar explores how writers like Lewis Carroll, J.M. Barrie and others created works which gave children agency, allowing them to subvert adult authority while navigating social norms. Gubar and Smith provide an inspiring view of how children’s literature during the Golden Age was not a top-down, adult-centric endeavour, but rather a dynamic field where adults and children worked together in creative partnerships. Despite these historical revisions of children’s active and agentive engagement in the making of children’s literature, the field remains organized by adult gatekeepers, who decide what gets published, recommended and awarded, thus reproducing rather adult-focused worldviews.

From a Plot-Focused to Materialist Readings

My research in children’s literature and culture has grown towards examining the portrayal of childhood and the ways in which children’s voices and identities are produced by literary texts. I have been inspired by the metaphor theory of the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), who claim that we get to know the world through the metaphors which structure our way of thinking. In my first book, Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children About Immigration and International Adoption (García-González 2017), I explore how stories about immigration and international adoption shape children’s understanding of belonging, identity, and origin. I examine how the recommended books about immigration and international adoption reinforce ideologies of belonging, subtly promoting assimilation values and erasing cultural differences. I critique the power dynamics inherent in these narratives, particularly when adults control the storytelling process, even if they have good intentions of providing stories about welcoming citizens. I examine how adult agendas and interpretations are prioritized and how these narratives negate conflicts and experiences of racialised children. My writing was then strongly influenced by critical theory which tracks how the reproduction of power is closely related to the control over narratives and discourses. Yet, after having spent considerable time reading and examining some of those picturebooks, I grew aware of some cracks and deterritorializations – to use the Deleuzian term – in which language undermines power and norms. Some visual and verbal synergies came to the fore as modes of resistance, as well as aesthetic openings of the materiality of language. In other words, some picturebooks resisted the hermeneutics of suspicion which guided my critical account, and made me realise that power never comes to dominate without other movements of resistance and modulation. I do remember one specific book which challenged my research, and one interdisciplinary conversation which developed my understanding of what was at stake. Caja de cartón (Arnal, Amekan 2010) is a Spanish picturebook published in 2010 which tells the story of a girl who travels with her mother to Europe, because – as the narrator tells us – it is a place where girls do not sleep in cardboard boxes, and mothers do not cry. The boat carrying them sinks into the sea, but the girl and her mother survive. They live with other marginalized immigrants and refugees on the street. They build houses out of cardboard boxes which are at some point set on fire. After that atrocious event, the girl does not see her mother again (we are led to believe she died in the fire), but she is (happily) adopted. I analysed this book focusing on the plot and how it could be related to other narratives in which refugees and immigrants are welcomed only if their stay is temporary, or if they are adopted by local families. I noted how books in which foreign children were adopted were the only ones that were granted some sense of belonging, and how the happy endings did not address any structural injustice. I also pointed out how these narratives about adoption ended up reproducing the conservative trope of the nation-as-family (Lakoff 2002) and criticised them for that. In other words, I argued that books about refugees and immigrants gave a very superficial account of migration and asylum, grounding their educational message in the logic which discarded any political and ethical concerns about global injustices.

Caja de cartón was not to be superficially read. The visual narration of the book challenged my critical analysis, quite plot-centred, in ways that were not easy for me to explain. It was not easy to decode it since its relationship with the verbal layer was not as simply contradictory as in the books which follow two distinct views on events in an obvious and easily understandable way. The visual narration consisted of something that resisted my disciplinary knowledge and challenged the comforts of my epistemological knowing. It played with the form of a collage, the photographic rendering of different textures, as well as lines of perspectives which did not match each another. The book had been included on the White Ravens honour list, and, like other selected books, its copies are hold in the Internationale Jugendbibliothek (IJB) in Munich. I came back to this book during my research stay there, a few years after I had criticised it for the nation-as-family plot. The book sat on my desk for several days before I brought it to the neighbouring desk of Anita Wincencjusz-Patyna, a Polish researcher specialising in picturebooks as an art form. Wincencjusz-Patyna, PhD, was then writing her habilitation on the topic, and our joint fellowships allowed us to spend a lot of time together. Time may be the most valuable resource for interdisciplinarity. I brought the book to her and we read it together, noticing all sorts of details in the images, some numbers randomly distributed on the pages as if they were a code leading to some hidden message, the brownish tone of mourning, that impossible perspective lines. I read it quite differently with her. I was much more aware of the materiality of the language and realised the need to take time to experience and embrace works which cannot be quickly reduced to a standardised and straightforward conclusion.

Staying with the Questions that Trouble Us

Similarly, addressing adultism does not follow any standardised analysis. We need to resist naive understandings of power. When navigating the cultural constructs of childhood in my further work, I became aware of the need to rethink how power always finds lines of flight. Gubar’s concept of kinship and its stress on similarities and shared capabilities of children and adults was inspiring to identify some of these lines. She contradicts the kinship model with the difference model in which children are seen as fundamentally different from adults – most often exemplifying purity and simplicity – as well as with the deficit model, which regards children as having limited knowledge, maturity and life experience. In the later, children are depicted primarily as passive recipients of education and moral guidance provided by adults. The idea of a kinship model inspired me and others to pursue the children’s literature studies differently, seeking those moments in which such shared capabilities occurred.

The work of Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and her colleagues (Chawar et al. 2018; Deszcz- Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Jaques, eds. 2021; Tryhubczak, Kalla, eds. 2020, 2021) has also offered new possibilities to reconsider the value of children’s creative contributions to culture, both when it comes to the exploration of intergenerational solidarity and the possibilities of participatory research. Through my own collaboration with Deszcz-Tryhubczak (García-González, Deszcz-Tryhubczak 2020; Deszcz-Tryhubczak, García-González 2023a, 2023b) I have become aware that understanding and challenging adultism is not to be mistaken with taking child-centred approaches, if only because doing so puts us at risk of becoming tokenistic. To challenge adultism, we need to first challenge our ways of knowing and creating both categories and meanings.

Together with Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak, we have explored the potential of childism to challenge adultist biases and creatively reimagine children’s literature criticism. In “Thinking and Doing with Childism in Children’s Literature Studies,” (Deszcz-Tryhubczak, García-González 2023b) we advocate incorporating childism as a critical theoretical framework to reveal and challenge adultist biases within our field. By situating childism alongside feminist, postcolonial and new materialist epistemologies, we aim to show how children’s literature can benefit from methodologies which prioritize the understanding of exclusions. In this article, we revise Peter Hunt’s (1984) concept of childist criticism, first proposed in the 1980s. Hunt’s concept was largely dismissed in favour of Jacqueline Rose’s provocative statement that children’s literature is impossible. Childist criticism calls for engaging with actual children in our research practices, presenting an affirmative reimagining of children’s literature critical analysis. This invitation has remained marginalized, while monolithic understandings of power still dominate the discourse. We emphasize the need to study the works and read alongside children, thus rethinking our research practices.

In my article entitled “Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism,” (2022) I delve further into how relational ontologies shift the focus from ontological claims about the child to exploring children and childhoods as movements and forces. I argue that childism is more productive when it questions the desires which exist in the movement and revolve around age and generations, moving away from claims regarding the representation of young people or their voices. I use childism to include children into thinking about texts addressed to them, as well as to question assumptions about adulthood and our comfort zones as researchers. Childism should not replace adultism with child-centeredness, but rather bring a new “art of noticing” (Tsing 2017) children and childhoods, which is informed by recognizing and dismantling exclusions.

I have inquired into how we address and engage with challenging and critical matters in our research practices. The construct of childhood innocence has become an increasingly powerful social myth which operates as an exclusionary social practice (Garlen 2018). As Robin Bernstein’s work on the cultural history of childhood in the USA remarks, the innocent child is a white child (Bernstein 2011). In Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Bernstein analyses how children’s books, toys and theatre props are “scripture things” (Bernstein 2011: 8) which produce and reflect the ideal of a white innocent child while allowing some space for resistance. Bernstein shows how innocence was gradually becoming the exclusive province of white children until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in desegregating both public spaces and, culturally, the concept of childhood itself.

Today, we appear to be more critically aware of the fact that children are able to deal with difficult subjects, but the paradigm of children’s innocence still haunts us when we think of children’s literature, culture and arts. In the last years, many picturebooks which have been published and translated touched upon the subject of death. Death appears in books published in different places around the globe. It takes different forms, but the narratives are almost always focused on the life cycle, and explain how natural it is to die. We do not see deaths resulting from killings, gender violence, insufficient health services, or ongoing genocides around the world. Death is a symbol. It comes as a dressed up skeleton to accompany Duck’s passing away (in Death, Duck and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch (2011)) or takes the form of a blossoming tree that reminiscences about the long and beautiful life of a fox and celebrates these memories with his forest friends (in The Memory Tree by Britta Teckentrup (2013)). The emerging category of “challenging picturebooks” (see, for example, Evans, ed. 2015; García-González et al. 2020; Haaland et al., eds. 2022) challenges our notions of childhood as deficitary and, instead, tries to think of children as readers able to deal with darker topics.

The question I keep asking is: what counts as children’s literature and what constitutes the status of a children’s text? I am interested in how this idea of a text as being related to children is often related to narratives about hope. What do we say about ongoing wars? About children who look to the sky not knowing whether the planes will bring food or bombs? And about the loss of biodiversity, and how life on the planet is endangered? How do we speak of child sexual and physical abuse, and the multiple forms in which it is normalized? How do we tell the story of slavery when dealing with its legacies? Do we only cover historical accounts of slavery or are we prepared to talk about contemporary forms of exploitation? The emotional repertoire is an entanglement of political and ethical positions. How are we encouraged to feel about difficult topics? Who are we allowed to empathise with and to feel compassion for? These are questions inherently linked to the status of what is considered literary, canonical and recommendable. Is the literature we recommend young generations the literature of a status quo?

References

Arnal Txabi, Amekan Hassan (2010). Caja De Cartón. Pontevedra: O’QO Editora.

Beauvais, Clémentine (2015). The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Bernstein, Robin (2011). Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press.

Braidotti, Rosi (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge – Malden: Polity Press.

Chawar, Ewa; Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna; Kowalska, Katarzyna (2018). “Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 111–131.

Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna; García-González, Macarena (2023a). “Ethics, Epistemologies and Relational Ontologies in Researching Children’s Cultures.” In: Children’s Cultures After Childhood, Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Deszcz‐Tryhubczak, Justyna; García‐González, Macarena (2023b). “Thinking and Doing with Childism in Children’s Literature Studies.” Children & Society, vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 1037–1051.

Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna; Jaques, Zoe, eds. (2021). Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna; Kalla, Irena Barbara, eds. (2020). Rulers of Literary Playgrounds: Politics of Intergenerational Play in Children’s Literature. New York – London: Routledge.

Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna; Kalla, Irena Barbara, eds. (2021). Children’s Literature and Intergenerational Relationships: Encounters of the Playful Kind. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Erlbruch, Wolf (2011). Death, Duck and Tulip (Catherine Chidgey, Trans.). Wellington: Gecko Press.

Evans, Janet, ed. (2015). Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks: Creative and Critical Responses to Visual Texts. New York – London: Routledge.

García-González, Macarena (2017). Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and International Adoption. London: Routledge.

García-González, Macarena (2022). “Towards an affective childist literary criticism.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 360–375.

García-González, Macarena; Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna (2020). “New Materialist Openings for Children’s Literature Studies.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 45–60.

García-González, Macarena; Véliz, Soledad; Matus, Claudia (2020). “Think Difference Differently? Knowing/Becoming/Doing with Picturebooks.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society, vol. 28, no. 4, s. 543–562.

Garlen, Julie C. (2018). “Interrogating Innocence: ‘Childhood’ as Exclusionary Social Practice.” Childhood, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 54–67.

Gubar, Marah (2009). Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gubar, Marah (2016). “The Hermeneutics of Recuperation: What a Kinship-Model Approach to Children’s Agency Could Do for Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 291–310.

Haaland, Gunnar; Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina; Ommundsen, Åse Marie, eds. (2022). “Introduction: Challenging Picturebooks in Education.” In: Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education. International Perspectives on Language and Literature Learning. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–20.

Hunt, Peter (1984), “Childist Criticism: The Subculture of the Child, the Book and the Critic.” Signal, vol. 43f, pp. 42–60.

Hunt, Peter (2021). Childist Criticism Revisited (Private Correspondance between Peter Hunt, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González).

Lakoff, George (2002). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George; Johnson, Mark (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LeFrançois, Brenda A. (2014). “Adultism.” In: Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (Thomas, Teo, ed.), New York: Springer, pp. 47–49.

Nikolajeva, Maria (2009). “Theory, Post-Theory, and Aetonormative Theory.” Neohelicon, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 13–24.

Nikolajeva, Maria (2010). Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. London – New York: Routledge, 2010.

Nodelman, Perry (1992). “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 29–35.

Rose, Jacqueline (1984). The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, Victoria Ford (2017). Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Teckentrup, Britta (2013). The Memory Tree. London: Orchard Books.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2017). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Abstract

The author proposes a departure from the traditional academic discourse in children’s literature, which has long emphasised power imbalances in adult–child relationships and sought traces of such asymmetry within literary texts. Tracing the evolution of this critical perspective from its origins – particularly Jacqueline Rose’s notion of the “impossibility” of children’s literature – to Maria Nikolajeva’s concept of “aetonormativity,” the author contrasts these approaches with strands of thought that emerged as early as the 1980s. These alternative currents, rooted in ideas of cooperation and kinship, were later developed further in the work of Marah Gubar and Victoria Ford Smith. Positioning her own research within this latter framework, the author advocates for childism and childist thinking in the study of children’s literature – approaches that manifest not only through textual and visual analysis, but also through collaborative engagement with young readers themselves.

Macarena García-González – researcher at Pompeu Fabra University. She is the author of The Borders of Empathy in Children’s Fiction (2025, Routledge) and Enseñando a sentir. Repertorios Éticos en la Ficción Infantil [Teaching how to feel: ethical repertoires in fiction for children] (2021, Metales Pesados). She leads JOVIS, a research group focused on interdisciplinary studies of youth and childhood.

The Polish translation of the paper (“Kwestionując status badań nad literaturą dla dzieci”) was published in the book “Status sztuki dla dzieci. Pola, rozgrywki, refleksje [The Status of Art for Children: Fields, Games, Reflections], edited by Anna Czernow and Michalina Wesołowska (Poznań 2024). More information about the book (in Polish) can be found here.

Polskie tłumaczenie artykułu („Kwestionując status badań nad literaturą dla dzieci”) ukazało się w książce „Status sztuki dla dzieci. Pola, rozgrywki, refleksje” pod redakcją Anny Czernow i Michaliny Wesołowskiej (Poznań 2024). Więcej informacji znajduje się tutaj.