Producing the Young Citizen in Texts of Families, Neighborhoods, and Nations

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session critically analyses popular fiction and nonfiction books and television for children and young people focusing on sexuality, sexual safety, bullying and heroism. Each of the selected texts can be understood as a pedagogical apparatus that works to instantiate children and young people as particular subjects and objects of knowledge. They are made responsible through that knowledge whilst simultaneously being constructed by that knowledge as potential gendered subjects of/ at risk. Thus, in various ways, the texts we have chosen endeavour to strike a balance between binaries of purity and danger, innocence and vulnerability, victimhood and heroism. The texts work to construct children and young people as ideal citizens of schools, families, neighbourhoods and nations.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Literature

Chair

• Marnina Gonick, Mount Saint Vincent University

Papers

• From a Wonderful Story to No-Nonsense Facts: Trajectories of Sex and Ethics in Pedagogical Texts for Children and Their Parents - Susanne Marie Gannon, University of Western Sydney

• Good Secrets, Bad Secrets: The Discursive Complexity of Confession in Children’s Picture Books About Sexual Child Abuse - Jo Lampert, Queensland University of Technology

• Bullying in Girls’ World: The Pedagogical Meanings of Teacher Texts About Girls and Bullying - Jennifer Bethune, Mount Saint Vincent University; Marnina Gonick, Mount Saint Vincent University

• The Girl Next Door: Postapocalyptic and Everyday Heroines in Popular Young Adult Texts - Kelli McGraw, Queensland University of Technology