Coloring into Existence: Queer of Color Worldmaking in Children’s Literature
By Isabel Millán, assistant professor, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
December 13, 2023
Coloring into Existence investigates the role of authors, illustrators, and independent publishers in producing alternative narratives that disrupt colonial, heteropatriarchal notions of childhood. These texts or characters unsettle the category of the child, and thus pave the way for broader understandings of childhood. Often unapologetically politically motivated, queer and trans of color picture books can serve as the basis for fantasizing about disruptions to structures of power, both within and outside literary worlds.