Books and magazines for young people are full of clichés which, within the story, favor boys to the detriment of girls. Beyond the French case, we must think about the social cost of such an imbalance.
In Gender by the BookJulie Fette is interested, with a detached look, in the gender representations conveyed by French books and magazines for young people in the first two decades of XXIe century. The analysis of the American researcher (based at Rice University, Houston) is based on a rigorous and effective interdisciplinary methodology which combines literature, history and social sciences, in particular based on a series of interviews with specialists in children’s literature and with numerous actors and actresses from the world of publishing and education in France.
Libraries, clubs and corpora
Julie Fette’s point is not to look at the publications mainstream sold in supermarkets or in independent feminist publishing, to which she devotes only a few pages at the end of her essay. The interest of the work lies, on the contrary, in the choice to analyze the segment “ canonized ” Or “ institutionalized » of literary production for young people, in other words the segment most read by children, under the more or less benevolent gaze of adult prescribers – parents, teachers, librarians, etc.
The author focuses on three institutions (in the broad sense), to which she devotes the three parts of her work: libraries, book clubs and magazines. Its goal: to identify the presence of “ tropes » (or gender stereotypes) in the works that they publish or transmit to readers aged 3 to 14.
In the first part, the author looks at public libraries, whose specificities she reconstructs based on a historical study, to then focus on the professionalization of the profession of librarian. Despite the vitality of the sector, she notes the absence of standardized and shared criteria for selecting collections, including gender equality. This partly explains the results of the analysis of a sample of albums for 3 to 9 year olds, taken from the collections of a Parisian municipal library, the Buffon library, and a school library, the Lower School Library of the Awty International School in Houston.
In the second part, she focuses on reading clubs, in particular on the most significant example in France of this type of subscription distribution, thanks to its widespread distribution in schools: the Max Club of the École des Loisirs. She first analyzes the editorial policy of the School of Leisure and the image it offers of itself as an independent publishing house. The pillars on which its literary production rests, focused both on quality and the pleasure of reading, are the artisanal approach, the valorization of canonized works of the past, the author’s policy, the refusal of any moralism or didacticism. The promotion of gender equality does not appear among the publisher’s guidelines, which also emerges in the analysis of a corpus of Club Max books from the year 2019-2020.
Finally, the third part looks at French magazines specialized for youth, an exceptional market in terms of number and variety of publications. After presenting the history of this editorial segment and its specificities at the present time, Fette focuses on the most influential publisher in this field, Bayard, with a Catholic tone, and analyzes the issues for the year 2013-2014 of I like to readone of its most famous magazines, aimed at 10-14 year olds.
Fiction and gender privilege
Unlike the École des Loisirs, whose editors reject in principle any editorial intervention (starting with the commission of a book on a specific theme), the editorial management of Bayard claims an active policy in the management of the magazine, in the name of didactic remarks which are intended to be progressive.
Despite the diversity of the texts in the corpus and the differences between the institutions taken into consideration, the results of the analysis are overall quite dismaying. From a quantitative point of view, the numerical relationships are not balanced: there are always many more male protagonists and characters than female, and the illustrations generally tend to favor (i.e. represent more) the former. Female characters are associated with more circumscribed genres (notably realistic stories) and more often confined to enclosed spaces, while male characters find themselves involved in detective, fantasy, science fiction and other intrigues.
Many stereotypes persist, most of them unfavorable to women and girls: emphasis is often placed on their physical appearance and supposed weaknesses, and they are frequently assigned to indoor space and domestic tasks. In contrast, boys and men are more valued and assigned a remarkable variety of occupations and professions. Fette also points out the equation “ masculine = neutral trope “, especially in illustrations of anthropomorphic animals, that is to say the tendency to show the masculine as a standard or neutral model, in relation to which the feminine models represent a kind of “ DETOUR » to the standard.
Publishing houses often believe in the merits of gender jump : a boy will not read a story whose protagonist is a girl, whereas a girl can easily identify with a character of the opposite sex. Fearing losing their male readership, considered more cautious, publishing houses tend to favor the latter, leaving girls to be content with production where they are less often protagonists and less valued.
French specificities
The author does not hear “ denounce » the case of France as a negative example not to be imitated. She maintains that the persistence of gender stereotypes in literary production for young people is not limited to the French context and that it represents, on the contrary, a tangible reality, everywhere in the world, in XXIe century.
One of the interests of his work lies in the attempt to explain these results in the light of French cultural specificities. Fette does not hide the positive aspects of the French publishing market which, thanks to the single price of books and the central role of the State in the management and promotion of culture, has developed with remarkable diversity and quality. Equally important, the author emphasizes, is the conviction that children deserve books that stimulate their imagination and curiosity – books of good quality.
We would expect, in this secular country, concerned with providing children with well-written books that help them grow as citizens, more progressive publications in terms of gender representations. However, this is not the case. Fette identifies several factors which explain this situation, including a certain tendency of publishing houses to reissue, within their catalogues, numerous works from the past, of which adults have positive and nostalgic memories, and which sell, but which convey conservative representations. The tendency to favor male readers, which we have already discussed, is another factor.
In Fette’s analysis, there is also question of the famous “ universalism » inherited from the Enlightenment, often invoked by publishing houses, which pushes them to reject any excessively identity-based claims, including feminist authorities. Many specialists in the world of publishing and culture are therefore suspicious of any ideological or political message conveyed by children’s books. The choice to adopt a feminist (or simply gender-sensitive) approach is considered incompatible with a search for literary quality.
Conservatisms
Curiously, gender parity does not seem to represent a republican value, like fraternity or equality. Even if this is not the subject of the work, the author notes that alongside the primacy of the masculine over the feminine, we can observe in French publishing for young people a generalized under-representation of minorities, particularly ethnic and in terms of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Julie Fette’s meticulous and convincing analysis therefore shows that, despite the undeniable progress and progress, if we look at gender stereotypes, the situation has not changed much since the criticisms formulated from the 1970s by Elena Gianini Belotti or Adela Turin, and then by researchers like Sylvie Cromer, Anne Dafflon-Novelle and Carole Brugeilles.
We certainly observe the rise of publishing houses that are openly feminist or sensitive to gender, but they are in great difficulty from the point of view of the distribution of their works. Likewise, we are witnessing the proliferation of interesting publications under the banner of parity, even within general publishing, but which remain isolated initiatives with no continuity.
To this rather distressing framework, it must be added that the attacks of the most conservative fringes of society against gender parity, inclusion and the promotion of diversity are constantly renewed and become more and more aggressive. Just think of the controversies linked to the so-called “ gender ideology ” and, more recently, to the nebulous, contested and questionable concept of “ wokism “.
In this context, the choice of a large part of publishing not to work more actively towards these principles risks costing dearly the efforts to build a society that is more just, equitable and open to all the subjectivities that compose it.