ABSTRACT
While contextual materials reveal that recent children’s picture books about boys who wear dresses emerge from an interest in transgender children, the books rarely refer to being transgender. Instead, they identify their characters’ interest in dresses as signs of self-expression, in a way that leaves the conventional association of dresses with femininity unquestioned and thus undermines the kind of gender fluidity the books mean to celebrate. Drawing on semiotic theoreticians like Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York: Routledge) and on the cognitive approaches developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University Chicago Press) and Coats (2019, Visual Conceptual Metaphors in Picture Books: Implications for Social Justice. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 44 (4): 364–380), the chapter explores a range of ways in which aspects of their texts and images make that happen and considers the implications of it happening.
