ABSTRACT
When I was a young girl reading Harriet the Spy, I instinctively knew that there was something about Harriet that made adults nervous. I knew that I too often made adults nervous. What I did not know then was that Harriet stood as a symbol of pre-sexual lesbian identity. Young Harriet is a representation with whom many young women, lesbian and heterosexual, identify because her character is not stereotypically feminine. Harriet is a gender-bending, smart, capable, and sensitive young pre-teen who challenges the adult world with her idiosyncratic behavior and comportment. In many ways, Harriet is (and has been) a queer icon, an icon of resistance to hetero-normative culture. But Harriet is not the only literary figure in children’s or Young Adult literature (YAL) who challenges cultural ideals of femininity and sexuality; in the early twenty-first century we are progressively finding more and more fictions in our libraries and classrooms with characters who complicate ideas of what it means to be female, young, and gendered in contemporary culture. No longer are the issues that arise for these characters secondary to the conflicts of their more traditional counterparts. Their nonconforming gender choices are relevant and even critical for understanding the complexities of the world in which we live.
