Youth Fiction and Trans Representation

Youth Fiction and Trans Representation is the first book that wholly addresses the growth of trans and gender variant representation in literature, television, and films for children and young adults in the twenty-first century. Ranging across an array of media--including picture books, novels, graphic novels, animated cartoons, and live-action television and feature films--Youth Fiction and Trans Representation examines how youth texts are addressing and contributing to ongoing shifts in understandings of gender in the new millennium. While perhaps once considered inappropriate for youth, and continuing to face backlash, trans and gender variant representation in texts for young people has become more common, which signals changes in understandings of childhood and adolescence, as well as gender expression and identity. Youth Fiction and Trans Representation provides a broad outline of developments in trans and gender variant depictions for young people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and closely analyzes a series of millennial literary and screen texts to consider how they communicate a range of, often competing, ideas about gender, identity, expression, and embodiment to implied child and adolescent audiences.

Tom Sandercock is a casual academic at Deakin University where he teaches courses in literary studies, children’s literature, and gender and sexuality studies. He was awarded Deakin University’s Vice-Chancellor’s Prize (2013), a recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship (2013-2016), and his PhD thesis was shortlisted for the Alfred Deakin medal (2018). He has presented his research at national and international conferences and has published peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on youth media and transgender representation.