“Gender Queer” & Why Picture Books Are for Everyone
During family holidays, after I’ve been thoroughly bombarded with all of the college questions (i.e., “what are you studying?”, “well, what do you plan to do with that degree?”), my mother will often intervene with her own little anecdote:
“Gosh, I always figured Kate would be an English major. When she was about 4 years old, my father bought her a set of board books for Christmas. Well, they were just about her favorite thing in the world! Every evening, while I was cooking dinner, she would take out her little box of books and read all 12 of ‘em. Granted there were hardly any words, so she flew through them. But the girl practically came out of my womb with a book in hand!”
For most of us, our first impression of reading was a result of picture books. Children rely on images to spark recognition and comprehension that cannot yet be achieved through words. This concept, however, does not end with childhood. Research has shown that approximately 65% of the population are visual learners, that they benefit from seeing the information they are being taught.
According to the ALA, Gender Queer was banned for depicting “sexually explicit content.” Now in my opinion, this claim, unlike so many others banned book headlines, is not phony. The novel contains relatively graphic illustrations of nudity, masturbation and sex, and that is just what I remember off the top of my head. For a young child, this book might be inappropriate. Simple as that. But just because a book contains photographs or drawings, any sort of visual content, does not mean it is for kids. Let me repeat that: picture books are for people of all ages, not just children!“‘Gender Queer’ is a comic, and in full color, but that doesn’t mean it’s for children,” author Maia Kobabe explained in an interview with The Washington Post. We have discussed at length whether or not authors should be responsible for warning readers about the content of their books. In Kobabe’s case, e chose not only to comment on this subject in several interviews, but audiences need not look further than book covering. “Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of… adolescent crushes… erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears,” the back synopsis reads. That definitely does not sound like a book for young children, if you ask me!
Some comic books and graphic novels, like any other form of literature, are designed to be entertaining (which there is absolutely nothing wrong with, might I add!). Others, however, are created with primarily educational intent. As expressed in eir afterword, this novel was a catharsis, a transformation of adolescent trauma into self-love and expression. But it also serves as an opportunity for all people, however they identify, to better understand what it means to be non-binary and asexual. As someone who identifies as cisgender, and has never explicitly struggled with my gender identity, I found the visual expression in Gender Queer to be extraordinarily helpful. Many of the ideas in the text were foreign to me, and I cannot imagine they would have been so clearly captured by written word. As I have come to learn recently, sometimes picture books are even more useful to adults than they are to kids.
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