ABSTRACT
The chapter draws on ideas from corpus linguistics, multimodality, and critical discourse studies to analyse and critically interpret representational trends in a corpus of 52 picture books featuring same-sex parents published in English. The analysis focusses on how parents are linguistically represented in these books through different naming strategies (and accounts for differences between mums and dads), but also examines quantitative co-occurrence between visual and linguistic elements of a multimodal text through what I refer to as collustration. Trends suggest that, rather than challenging heteronormativity, representations of lesbian and gay parents in picture books implicitly reaffirm some stereotypical constructions of gender and sexuality in order to represent gay and lesbian parents as being able to participate in ‘normal’ fields of action (e.g., marriage, childrearing) from which LGBTQ+ people have historically been excluded.
