ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes a sample of picturebooks from a municipal and a school library to assess the gender representations in the stories available to child readers in the second decade of the 21st century. The chapter further clarifies how picturebooks reflect the libraries that house them and serve as material manifestations of these institutions’ histories and policies. The samples in this chapter demonstrate that many books in children’s libraries still promulgate stereotypic representations of gender. My argument is that the limitations of the institutional structures examined in Chapter 1, as well as the cultural embrace of universalism, a narrow conception of aesthetics, and the desire to protect a nostalgic approach to childhood – concepts that will be developed in later chapters – all contribute to library content that offers a limited range of gender norms to child readers.
