ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development of a music video by middle school students in response to Kirstin Cronn-Mills’ (2012) young adult novel, Beautiful Music for Ugly Children. Students expressed, in their words, “strong objections to the way that female characters in the book were portrayed.” Their creative project explored gender representation and critically rewrote stereotypical portrayals of female characters to, as they put it, “contribute to breaking gender expectations as a whole.” This chapter draws on Janks’ (2010) four-part critical literacy framework, as well as concepts of gender inclusion (Airton, 2013) and queering space (hicks, 2017b). Our research suggests how approaching critical literacy from a queering-space perspective invites adults and youth to question their own gendered identities, as well as social concepts of gender and the texts they encounter.
