Conference Program

Adopting an intersectional (Collins 2019) and queer and decolonial (Borghi 2020) theoretical perspective, this contribution aims to analyze the representation of queer subjectivities in contemporary Italian-language children's literature, questioning its pedagogical potential within educational processes.
Children's literature is one of the cultural and mass media devices that, through the production of representations, contributes to guiding the processes of socialization and identity construction in younger people, serving both as a space for the reproduction of social norms and as a possible terrain for transformation (Barsotti 2023; Forni 2022). This contribution proposes an analysis of some case studies – picture books and graphic novels published in Italian over the last twenty years – that depict subjectivities that do not conform to gender norms, a type of production that has seen significant growth in recent years (Fierli et al. 2016; 2020; 2022). Children's literature is investigated here as a symbolic space in which dynamics of exclusion, violence, and normativity can emerge, but also as a place of political and pedagogical imagination capable of making marginalized subjectivities visible (Sciurba & Bell 2020).

Inspired by the theoretical reflections and practical proposals of Rachele Borghi (2020), studies on queer pedagogy (Mayo & Rodriguez 2019), and the pedagogical thinking of Paulo Freire (2002), which lead to the adoption of an intersectional methodological and epistemological approach (Collins 2019), this contribution – starting from the conviction that there is and should be a virtuous circle of exchange between theoretical reflections and educational practices between academic research and the school context – has a twofold objective.

The first is to read these books from a queer pedagogy perspective, not limiting the analysis to the dimension of representation alone – which would risk ‘normalizing’ queer identities and co-opting them into a system that remains de facto hetero-cisnormative (Trujillo 2015) – but by questioning these works with regard to the processes of constructing normality, in order to understand whether and how they are actually capable of queering children's literature and the processes of growing up (Britzman 1995).

The second objective is to propose tools that can be used in the debate on the processes of decolonization of school practices (hooks 2020; Muraca 2021), highlighting how some works of children's literature can contribute to integrating decolonial and gender perspectives in educational contexts, or how they can, on the contrary, reflect and reproduce a colonial and cisgender gaze.