ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the concept of schemas and scripts, which offers a way to understand how texts participate in conveying and challenging prevalent social ideologies, as well as a way to consider why changing the way children understand gender might be so difficult. It argues that children's picturebooks are one of the many cultural vehicles that instantiate schemas and scripts in their readers by setting expectations for the way literary texts represent objects, relationships, and patterns in the world. Gender schema disruption and accretion is nothing new for women, who have been actively seeking to dispel limiting stereotypes throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In fact, very young children are "gender detectives" actively seeking clues from their culture as to how gender is performed and valued. While John Stephens concludes that schemas and scripts in diverse picturebooks can "function as transformative instruments", it seems that with regard to gender, there are still binaries that matter.
