From a Wonderful Story to No-Nonsense Facts: Trajectories of Sex and Ethics in Pedagogical Texts for Children and Their Parents

• In Event: Producing the Young Citizen in Texts of Families, Neighborhoods, and Nations

Abstract

(Objectives and perspectives)
This paper performs a close and historically nuanced textual analysis of three popular pedagogical picture books that describe the 'facts of life' for young children.

(Methods and materials)
The texts used in this paper are Gruenberg & Shimin's 1959 The wonderful story of how you were born, Mayle & Robin's 1977 Where did I come from?: The facts of life without any nonsense and with illustrations and Harris & Emberley's' 2008 It's NOT the Stork: A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families and Friends. Across a 50 year trajectory, the paper traces discursive shifts around sex, ethics, children, risk and pleasure through these texts. It interrogates narrative form and function in the written and visual components of each text (including point of view, focalization, plot, theme) to ask: What sorts of subjects of knowledge are produced in these texts? How do representations of sexuality and gender shift between these texts and to what extent do these shifts reflect broader social and cultural concerns? What gaps, contradictions and ambivalences are evident in these texts? How do they operate as pedagogical apparatus for parents/ teachers? How do these texts anticipate and position the implied child readers as sexually responsible citizens of the future? The theoretical framework is informed by feminist work on sex and ethics (eg. Carmody, 2009), discourse analysis of children's literature (eg. Mallan & Bradford, 2011), historical perspectives on sex education (eg. Sauerteig & Davidson, 2009), and new work on affect in sex education (eg. Lesko, 2010).

(Conclusions and significance)
The paper argues that shifting perspectives on sex and ethics and responsible sexual citizenship are evident in sex education texts for young children and their parents. It concludes that children's texts on sexuality are always and inevitably infused with discourses from the wider cultural, political and social spheres within which they are produced, marketed and consumed.

Author

• Susanne Marie Gannon, University of Western Sydney