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Abstract: In this article I use four middle-grade novels to query the relationship between gendered forms of childhood and gender nonconformity in tweens. For the young characters in these novels, objects and spaces of gender enfranchisement-including gendered forms of childhood-are often out of reach. Using conceptual tools such as the orientation of objects, queer futures, and the transgender gaze, this work examines the ways in which these novels narrate their main characters' yearning for things that will make their gender identities legible, and how they, as agentic subjects, attempt to take revenge on the rules and structures of gender normativity.
Keywords: boyhood, futurity, object, queer, representation, transgender gaze, tween
How do representations of trans and gender nonconforming young people trouble our understanding of tween identities, and, more particularly, girlhood and boyhood? To begin to answer this question, I examine four middle-grade novels aimed at eight- to twelve-year-old readers that problematize the gender-normativity of tweens and their childhoods through the centering of trans and/or gender nonconforming characters-George (Gino 2016) and Gracefully Grayson (Polonsky 2014) (hereafter Grayson) that center transgirls, George and Grayson, and The Other Boy (Hennessey 2016) (hereafter TOB) and The Pants Project (Clarke 2017) (hereafter Pants), that center transboys, Shane and Liv.1 All the characters are eleven years of age and in grade six, except for George, who is ten and in grade four. Unlike young adult (YA) fiction, middle-grade novels rarely include romance narratives. While the link between gender identity and sexual orientation is a background tension in these novels, they are treated separately.
I found, for the young protagonists in these books, that objects and spaces-including girl and boyhood-of gender enfranchisement are often out of reach, and their narrative labors center the search for objects and spaces in which they can comfortably assert their gendered identities as they know them. This knowing makes them, despite their young age, agentic subjects in their quests for particularly gendered futures. Each narrative invites us to look with these characters, as they mirror for us their potential futures in the present. These characters exist in queer temporalities in which their futures are imagined "according to logics that lie outside [of] those paradigmatic markers of life experience" (Halberstam 2005: 2) belonging to the dominant narratives of...