Boyhood Studies

This special issue of Boyhood Studies takes two terms—boys and storytelling—and positions them alongside one another. In some ways, we take seriously Charles Dickens's oft-quoted notion that “A boy's story is the best that is ever told.” What does it mean to take the stories of boys and boys’ stories seriously? Are they really among the “best that [are] ever told”? In the space of education, and with declining literacy rates among boys, what does it mean to study storytelling? Or, what might it mean, to borrow a phrase from Carol Mavor (2008), to “read boyishly”? In this special issue, we hoped to bring together scholars working on the relationship between boys and storytelling, to consider the kinds of stories that boys are told, and to also consider the stories that they are not told. Our goal was to consider the importance of storytelling in boys’ lives as well as the importance of the storytelling of boys’ lives. That is, we were interested in boys as both real and embodied, as well as in the fictional boys that populate the literary universe. The issue presented here brings together a host of perspectives that all work to explore and expand the literary and cultural study of boys and storytelling.

Although queer picture books are growing in popularity, research on these texts still tends toward an overgeneralization of the field. This article takes a narrow focus on secondary characters in texts that center boys wearing dresses to see what reactions to boyhood gender nonconformity are supported in this subcategory of texts. Through close readings of various scenes throughout eight picture books, the article highlights gendered and aged patterns in these responses: women are supportive but distant, girls are close allies, men are absent or hesitant to support the boys, and other boys are generally bullies. The article concludes that while these texts are ostensibly queer because of their protagonists’ gender performances, they nevertheless fail to disrupt gender norms beyond the lives of their central characters.

While the increasing visibility of LGBTQ+ identities in recent young adult fiction has received much critical attention, such novels that contain the added complex distinction of adolescent male mental illness and recovery represent an underexamined area. This article produces readings of two recent young adult texts that feature gay male protagonists who experience mental illness: Adam Silvera's More Happy Than Not (2015) and John Corey Whaley's Highly Illogical Behaviour (2016). It investigates how the texts’ embedded heteronormative scripts, relationships between the symptoms and the self, and frameworks of health-related shame are fraught with anxieties, producing a complex double movement that simultaneously establishes and undermines gay males’ control over their mental illnesses and recovery trajectories to move the characters between spaces of empowerment and marginalization.

During the 1970s, young boys rode their bicycles more frequently and in greater numbers than at any other time in the United States’ past. Bicycle riding and racing became so popular in the 1970s that boys fashioned a culture of BMX, also known as bicycle motocross. The style of bicycles and riding that BMXers fashioned quickly grew from a niche within the industry into the most common form of bicycling in the United States. The 1970s has been dubbed the decade of the “bike boom” by industry publications and by historians who have written on the subject. Many factors likely contributed to the increased number of bicycle riders and sales. Most explanations of the increase tend to emphasize the political, economic, and environmental concerns of adults and neglect the role that younger people played in the boom.

With Richa Jha and Gautam Benegal's picturebook The Unboy Boy (2013), India acquired the notion of alternative masculinity in children's literature for perhaps the first time, and initiated the depiction in picturebooks of male characters who love soft toys, cook, dance, and dress in a way considered feminine. This article turns the critical lens toward gender codes that form the basis for masculinity discourses. Primarily drawing on Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, it explores how contemporary Indian picturebooks in English are challenging the representation of traditional masculinity. Through the lens of content analysis, this qualitative research adopts a multimodal approach and scrutinizes three other picturebooks: Abba's Day (2017) by Sunaina Ali and Debasmita Dasgupta, Kali Wants to Dance (2018) by Aparna Karthikeyan and Somesh Kumar, and Guthli Has Wings (2019) by Kanak Shashi.

In a heteronormative society, boys and girls are trained to dress and act in ways regarded appropriate for their respective genders. Even during play, a boy is expected to indulge only in activities that are traditionally considered masculine. A. A. Milne was inspired by his son's pretend play to write the Pooh books. From the illustrations in the book, which were modeled upon the real Christopher Robin and his toys, and various biographical material on the Pooh books, it can be discerned that the young boy was dressed in a gender-nonconforming fashion. This article probes this paradox of gender performativity in Christopher Robin's character in Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), wherein the child performs acts considered masculine in his imaginative play, while going against gender norms in his real-life appearance.

This article examines the role of athleticism in young adult novels featuring fat, male young adult protagonists. I analyze the role of athleticism in eleven national award-winning young adult novels with fat, cisgender, male protagonists, arguing that athleticism rebrands fatness as acceptable, powerful, and even desirable as long as it is associated with sport or violence. It also signals character growth and redemption in the fat male protagonists, as it is often the catalyst for their maturation and the resolution of the plot's conflicts. The article ultimately shows that the trope of athleticism in young adult literature reflects and upholds social constructs of male fatness.

Mune: Guardian of the Moon is a children's animated film about a series of misadventures resulting in a lighthearted good-versus-evil plotline. This movie attempts to be imaginative and original, and succeeds in some ways, through positioning slight-figured, compassionate, shy Mune as the hero of the story and using dreams of transformation instead of fists to defeat evil. However, it falls short through its stereotypical depictions of masculinities and gendered dynamics. Rather than portraying diverse and alternate ways that masculinity can be performed, Mune utilizes normative gender roles and hegemonic masculinity to emphasize that even small, unassuming young men can adequately fulfill typical masculine leadership roles, so long as they are most powerful and ultimately win the girl.

This article examines boy characters in early twentieth-century girls’ scouting fiction. These series, marketed using the names of the recently established girls’ organizations, supported female empowerment. They also included important boy characters: brothers, companions, villains, and bullies. The first three types are exemplars of what boys’ workers envisioned as middle-class manhood: youthful wildness and spunk channeled into habits of hard work, self-reliance, and intelligence. These boys would also recognize girls as near-equal partners at a time when marriage norms were becoming more companionate. Rural bullies and ethnic villains, by contrast, provide warnings about boys who do not develop manly self-control. Girls’ series helped shape how modern girls thought about their male peers, including what girls would and would not accept in their relationships with boys.

This article gives an outline of stereotypical representation of the Balkans as a predominantly violent culture that legitimizes violence through the lenses of (hyper)masculinized characters represented in Croatian literature for young adults selected for translation into English. A representation of this stereotypical image can be found in one of the most recent translations of a contemporary novel for children from Croatia, Odohohol and Cally Rascal by Matko Sršen. Meanwhile, the second case study of this article focuses on the analysis of translated young adult literature that promotes or contests violent masculinities. The novel The Teacher of My Dreams by Miro Gavran portrays a more complex image of masculinity from the Western Balkans, promoting a depiction of an emotional, intellectual, and rational male.

The hit streaming series Cocomelon has become a household name for many families with infants, toddlers, and kids at heart. Cocomelon introduces our youngest population(s) to a Western world that privileges flawed and utopian post-racial perspectives. I contend that the show presents a perspective on race and identity that glorifies color-blindness and ignores racial differences that would educate children about the complexity and beauty of diversity. This commentary imagines a Black infant and toddler boyhood in children's media that prioritizes race, culture, and identity and recommends other children's programs that invest in culturally diverse representations of childhood.

Reading Characters, People, and Properties

In this piece, I reflect on superhero comic books I read in my childhood and adolescence, noting that as I collected and read stories featuring the character known as the Silver Surfer, I slowly began to realize that the character's traits, as established in the first comic in which he appeared, seemed to change in comics published later. In searching for explanations for these changes, I began to pay attention to a comic's credits, recognizing that different writers and artists understood the character in different ways and often felt no obligation to maintain a consistent approach. I eventually realized that a comic's credits sometimes misrepresented the labor invested by each of the story's creators. This long process led to an ongoing interest—in both my writing and teaching—in the ways that our interpretation of a story and its characters can be enriched by understanding the conditions under which it was produced.

Books of the Heart

What might reflecting on favorite books from our childhood tell us about our past and current selves? This short meditation on that question first considers reading memoirs and experiments in rereading, and then reviews some favorite books from the author's own childhood, speculating on their appeal and potential significance for identity consolidation.

The Fantasy of the Boy Scout Handbook

Born and raised in Miami Beach, Florida, I opened my new Boy Scouts of America Handbook for Boys in the summer of 1956, at age 11, in anticipation of moving from the Cub Scouts to the Boy Scouts that fall. I found in those pages a fantasy that moved me deeply, a romantic fantasy of hiking and camping in the wilderness with a band of boy buddies. That fantasy has deep roots in fiction for boys and in books like the Handbook, appealing to the boy's desire to escape the surveillance and control of adults and to fashion a community of “lost boys” in a wilderness setting ideal for strong male bonding in friendship.

“I Never Had Any Friends Later on Like the Ones I Had When I Was Twelve. Jesus, Does Anyone?”: Reflections on Learning about Boyhood through Stand by Me

This piece offers reflections on the 1986 movie Stand by Me, drawing on some of the main themes and contextualizing them in relation to my own childhood as a girl growing up in the 1990s. I reflect on how in my rewatch of the movie, I was struck by the ways that the class positions of the boys echoed my own experiences of transition and liberation through education. I also reflect on the significance of seeing boys cry and be scared—feelings that the boys at my school were policed out of performing in public.

Boy Genius: Reflections on Reading The Great Brain

Based on reflection and analysis of a formative childhood text, this essay disentangles the relationship between reading, intelligence, and masculinity. The author argues that although reading fiction appears to encourage empathy, books written specifically for boys may contain detrimental messages about masculinity. The analysis reveals that the popular Great Brain series reinforces notions of whiteness, ableism, and masculine superiority. These messages are reinforced by the books’ emphasis on pragmatic “genius” and the savior trope in boyhood.