Current Projects
Child Cosplayers: Embodying Potentialities
Critical work on cosplay exists is a variety of different fields, including fan studies, video game studies, and media studies. Yet, little critical attention has been paid to children who engage in cosplay. Those theorists who have mentioned childhood in their discussion of cosplay—such as Mizuko Itu and Tracy Fullerton—focus on how adults use costuming to appropriate childhood identity and childhood culture, rather than children who engage in the practice. Ito argues that “…adults are increasingly not only mobilizing tropes of childhood in political and personal arenas, but are also consuming childhood as an alternative identity formation.” (p.198). However, cosplay allows adults to co-opt child identity, the practice also offers child fans the opportunity to access adult spaces as equals. In this paper I offer a quick introduction to how children who cosplay are currently represented in fan-centric media as well as a breakdown of how children’s literature scholars might use cosplay as a case study for current critical discussions about children’s bodily autonomy and how young people interact with and interpret texts.
Be Who You Are!, I am Jazz, I'm Not A Boy, and Sam!: Picturing Trans Childhoods
Nonfiction picture books featuring transgender children are a relatively recent phenomenon. Previous children’s books featuring gender non-conforming characters include Lois Gould and Jacqueline Chwast’s X: A Fabulous Child’s Story (1978), and Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray’s 10,000 Dresses (2008). Since 2010, however, a new genre of biographical picture books about transgender children is emerging. This connection to real lived experience creates tension between the utopic impulses of children’s literature and the spectre of systemic anti-trans bias that lurks just outside the picture books’ focus. The first four of these books published in English: Jennifer Carr’s Be Who You Are! (2010), Jessica Herthel, Jazz Jennings, and Shelagh McNicholas’s I am Jazz (2014), Dani Gabriel and Robert Liu-Trujillo’s Sam! (2019), and Maddox Lyons, Jessica Verdi, and Dana Simpson’s I’m Not A Girl (2020), clearly define the boundaries and In this chapter, I will discuss each of these picture books in detail, describing the genre patterns they establish and how those patterns fit into or challenge existing discourses of transgender identity and allyship within education, parenting, and literary theory.