This article examines the tension between agency and commodification in adolescent authorship, centring on Chun Shu’s autobiographical novel Beijing Doll (2002) and its transnational reception. It explores how Chun Shu’s literary identity was framed as an authentic expression of adolescent rebellion while being simultaneously shaped and constrained by market forces. Through editorial mediation and commercial packaging, her voice was both amplified and disciplined to fit gendered and national expectations. The novel’s protagonist, Lin Jiafu, negotiates sexual agency through shifting relationships, complicating dominant discourses that position girlhood between innocence and fully realized autonomy. Rather than a fixed achievement, agency emerges as an ongoing process of assertion, adaptation, and defiance. Finally, the article examines Beijing Doll as a contested space where global and domestic forces converge: Western markets commodify Chun Shu’s defiant narrative, while domestic critiques seek to regulate her voice within national discourse. By foregrounding the ideological stakes of adolescent self-expression, this article highlights how Beijing Doll disrupts conventional narratives of female agency and reveals the uneven power dynamic shaping young female authors in a globalized literary landscape.
Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) delineates young Jackie’s aspirations to become a writer interspersed with her family history and the larger political fabric of the United States. The memoir recounts a brief period of her childhood and concludes with multiple histories converging to build a promising future. This article employs the theoretical framework of microhistory to analyze Woodson’s memoir. Microhistory engages with the intricacies of individual lives to complement the epistemic murk created by the grand narratives of history. The article treats the memoir as a microhistorical record to inspect the period’s social dynamics and how it painted a Black girl child’s world. It concludes by commenting on the significance of childhood memories in understanding history.
This article examines the social, political and gendered representations of male caregivers/nannies in postcolonial Bengal through the children’s novella Holde Pakhir Palok ( The Golden Feather) and the “family” film Galpo Holeo Satyi ( Stranger Than Fiction) while remaining informed about the popular depiction of nannies in contemporary US literature for young people. Through a critical lens that engages caste, class, and gender, the study interrogates how male caregivers occupy a complex, liminal space in Bengali households while engaging in emotional and/or educational labour. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, masculinity studies, and decolonization, the analysis demonstrates how caregiving becomes a site for challenging hegemonic binaries of education/manual labour, masculinity/domesticity, and authority/servitude. The article also considers how such caregivers are often rendered non-threatening through the erasure of their sexuality, echoing colonial anxieties around non-binary and intersex identities. Ultimately, these texts suggest that Bengali male caregivers, although marginalized, play central roles in constructing moral and emotional childhoods. The study underscores the importance of further archival and theoretical work on male domestic labour in Indian children’s literature.
This article examines how picture books about autism act as a form of autism advocacy reliant on key epistemological assumptions. Picture books emerge as a crucial location for analyzing complex debates about power dynamics and story-making within autism advocacy circles at large. Focusing especially on parent-authors, the author argues that this advocacy encodes a specific epistemological approach that constructs rather than describes a certain kind of (abnormal) autistic subject. In this way, picture books about autism offer important opportunities to examine how epistemological and hermeneutical injustices become embedded in textual and visual forms in children’s literature. However, the author contrasts deficit-based autism advocacy narratives with more recent picture books by autistic authors and neurodiversity supporters that enact autistic self-advocacy and provide new ways of knowing and thinking about autistic story-making.
