Abstract: Children’s book is a window through which the young one first see and understand the multifaceted world. When they read out a piece of work they try to connect themselves with the characters and form their own opinion. Since most of the books written reflect heteronormative mentality, children tend to imbibe society’s binary attitude that excludes, all identities that fall short of normative gender standard. Those identities that do not fall into the heteronormative matrix, are often called unnatural or a deviation. The paper explores the constructed notion of child and childhood through the children’s book The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams. The protagonist of the book is a twelve-year-old boy who likes to cross-dress. By analysing the non-conforming protagonist of the book, the paper looks at the inconsistency of gender and the non-existence of the gender binary. The paper challenges the stereotypical binary notion of gender and disrupts the universal meaning found within the category of male and female by analysing the children’s novel The Boy in the dress. The paper also tries to reimagine the cultural binaries between natural and unnatural.
Keywords: Children’s literature, heteronormative, gender, cross-dressing, binary, non-binary identities, non-conforming identities, natural, unnatural.
Title: Challenging Heteronormativity: Disrupting the binary world in the children’s novel The Boy in the Dress
Author: Anitta Varghese, Radhika R
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
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