Premium
“Aren't These Boy Books?”: High School Students' Readings of Gender in Graphic Novels
Author(s) -
Moeller Robin A.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of adolescent and adult literacy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.73
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1936-2706
pISSN - 1081-3004
DOI - 10.1598/jaal.54.7.1
Subject(s) - reading (process) , psychology , picture books , focus (optics) , mathematics education , visual arts , pedagogy , art , linguistics , philosophy , physics , optics
The author, a former library media specialist, often heard female students describe graphic novels as being “boy books” and sought to examine how a group of high school girls and boys read gender in three graphic novels. Through focus group and individual interviews, the participants indicated that they enjoyed reading graphic novels to varying extents, and they did not feel that graphic novels were geared only toward boys. Despite this conclusion, the students' responses revealed points of contention in terms of how they identified themselves as graphic novel readers and how they considered graphic novels to be forms of school knowledge.