ABSTRACT
Peter Mayle’s Where Did I Come From? (1973) represented something of a watershed moment: the beginning of a sub-genre of popular children’s picture books that focus on sex education and, as an extension, represent for children certain aspects of human sexuality. This chapter is an investigation of nonfiction or ‘informational’ children’s picture books about sex and sexuality. Connecting sex education and children’s literature, the aim of this study is to identify and discuss how nonfiction texts communicate to young people about puberty, reproduction and human sexuality. Through a discussion of a range of examples from this field of children’s literature such as What’s Happening to Me? (Mayle 1975), Hair in Funny Places (Cole 1999), Let’s Talk About Sex (Harris 2014) and many others, attention is turned to the specific ways in which sex and sexuality are framed in these picture books, with a particular focus on how the implied child reader is positioned in relation to these concepts. As this study demonstrates, texts in this subgenre have developed in the scope and manner in which sex and sexuality is discussed, and a small number of examples show a willingness to address contemporary ideas about sex and sexuality. However, on the whole these books typically frame sex and sexuality in standardized, heteronormative ways, and emphasize biological processes over more nuanced ways of imagining sexual relationships and identities, often ignoring, sidelining or avoiding how sex and sexuality might be performed or embodied in different ways. While many texts acknowledge young people as emerging sexual subjects, rarely do they depict how this subjectivity might translate into sexuality, especially when it is beyond a set of common, biologically driven experiences.
