ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which feminine representations of non-traditional princesses are encoded in two contemporary picture books and how female characters position themselves as subjects either within or against established social orders. Episodes from each text are coded according to their representation of female agency, as articulated through Deleuze and Guatari’s (1987, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) and Butler’s (1990 [1999], Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge) feminist post-structural theories. Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005, The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan) and Painter, Martin and Unsworth’s (2013, Reading Visual Narratives: Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books. London: Equinox) social semiotic approach are also used to carry out an examination of coupling and commitment across the verbal and visual modes of the picture books The Pirate Princess and The Princess Knight. The analysis reveals that the process of becoming a non-normative female in patriarchal contexts is a process associated with physical and psychological difficulty.
