‘That’s my dumb husband’: Wild things, battle bears and heteronormative responses in an afterschool reading club

In this paper, we analyse a group of 6 and 7 year olds’ interactions during a literacy event. We explore the complexities of their meaning-making following a read aloud of Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak 1963). Our focus is on discourses of gender/sex/uality, a term that acknowledges the complex relationship between gender, sex and sexuality, and how these discourses are enacted. Our guiding question was: How did discourses of gender/sex/uality circulate in this group of young children’s multimodal and playful responses to a literacy event? By considering the relationship between reader response, play and gender/sex/uality, we gained insight into how children’s responses to texts are connected to their own identities and lived experiences. We used critical multimodal discourse analysis to understand the children’s meaning-making processes. This revealed how the children were drawing from varying scripts to inform their play and creative processes. The children referenced gender/sex/uality to collaborate, to compete and to seek inclusion or status in the group. We discuss four children who drove this collective dialogue and who guided the group’s interactions. Another child’s responses pushed against and evolved in tandem with the emerging consensus. This study deepened and expanded our consciousness of children’s enactments of gender/sex/uality and how such enactments reinforced heteronormativity. The children’s artefacts, actions and talk are testimony of dominant discourses that guided and ultimately led them to adopt storylines that aligned with heteronormative scripts. Our analysis of how the children’s responses unfolded revealed how power asymmetries were reinforced and hegemonic ideologies persisted. Understanding the influences of social norms during interactive literacy events may help educators create opportunities for all learners to write themselves into these events and classroom interactions more broadly.