(Play)Grounds for Dismissal: Ninas Raras in Transborder Children's Cultural Studies.

Abstract

This study instates the child as a unique, and often evaded, category of analysis. I investigate children's literature, television, and short films produced across México, the United States, and Canada that challenge childnormativity, or the ways in which children's cultural productions replicate normalcy. I converge my analysis around three illustrated and animated contemporary characters. These include: (1) Meli, the protagonist in Patlatonalli's lesbian-themed children's book, Tengo una tía que no es monjita (México 2004), (2) Dora, the protagonist in Nickelodeon's bilingual animated television series, Dora the Explorer (United States 2000), and (3) Alex, the protagonist in Coyle Production's genderqueer children's animated short film, Tomboy (Canada 2008). Although each is rooted in a particular nation-state, each of these characters, or niñas raras, also defies bounded notions of citizenship, cultural belongings, and borders. I focus on the following as evidence of this defiance: subject formation (e.g. the intersections of age, gender, race, sexuality, class, and citizenship), material productions (e.g. of consumable goods such as books, DVDs, and toys), and ideologies (e.g. power relations between adults and children, or the construction of “normative” childhood). I read each of these characters as niñas raras who fall outside contemporary understandings of what is appropriate for children. Instead, these characters contest the category of child, and ideologies of childnormativity, broadening the possibilities for conceptualizing childhood beyond existing constraints. Overall, I utilize literary, media, and cultural theories in order to propose transborder children's cultural studies as a disciplinary bridge between studies of girlhood, children, queers of color, and Latinidad.