Mark McGlashan

The Representation of Same-Sex Parent Families in Children's Picturebooks

My PhD thesis examined the largest (to my knowledge) collection of picturebooks written for children and published in the English language featuring representations of families with same-sex – i.e. gay or lesbian – parents/caregivers. As well as being some of the most requested-to-be-banned books of modern times, many of these picturebooks are rare and hard-to-find, and so I believe my work provides the most comprehensive overview of the representation of same-sex parent families (SSPFs) in picturebooks available.

My thesis investigated how gay and lesbian sexualities are constructed and represented in SSPF picturebooks, and how those representations and constructions relate to the wider social situation of gay and lesbian sexualities. In doing so, this thesis gives, for the first time, a representative account of the ways in which lesbian and gay sexualities are represented in SSPF picturebooks.

As with the majority of my work, I drew on theory and methods from the areas of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Multimodality, Social Semiotics, and Corpus Linguistics (CL) and proposed a way forward for studies in Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) and Multimodal Corpus Linguistics by presenting a Corpus-assisted Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, including the presentation of collustration as an innovative theoretical and methodological approach to the notion of collocation between multiple semiotic elements in multimodal texts. 

Findings of the research suggest that SSPF picturebooks attempt to challenge and counter dominant negative stereotypes of gay and lesbian people and related homophobic discourses that lead to social exclusion and opposition to the books. They also include discourses intended to celebrate differences in (family) identity. However, the findings also suggest that SSPFs are represented in largely (homo)normative ways, upholding traditional notions of the nuclear family, as well as perpetuating some gender stereotypes. While the books thus aim to counter homophobia, in presenting gay and lesbian care-givers as ‘normal’ and barely different from heterosexual care-givers, the books could be viewed as backgrounding a potentially wider range of gay and lesbian identities.