Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Gender roles are learned by children while they are still very young, but there remains an insufficient body of research into the messages communicated about gender through non-anglophone countries’ children’s and young adult literature. Working to address this disparity, this study uses the books from the last two decades of Madrid’s annual “Muestra del Libro Infantil y Juvenil” that have been marked as being thematically about “mujer(es)” to investigate popular discourses of femininity in literary art intended for Spanish children. The work explores answers to three guiding questions: What do women do, what don’t they do, and what happens when women do something they “shouldn’t”? It gives specific attention to the differences that surface following variables of age and time. In other words, this study considers how discourses of “appropriate” womanhood have changed in Spanish children’s literature since the turn of the 21st century and if those changes are different for young children than they are for older children.