Toward a Multicultural Feminist Perspective on Fiction for Young Adults

Feminist social science investigations of children's books over the past 20 years have employed the liberal feminist assumptions that marked the paradigmatic study by Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, and Ross. The authors illustrate the value of a multicultural feminist approach to children's literature by “listening” to themes of oppression and resistance in 16 recent young-adult novels about non-White, non-American, or nonheterosexual characters. Their findings point to a greater variety of such themes than they might have heard if they had used only a liberal feminist lens in their reading of children's books. The findings also lead to elaborations of current multicultural and global feminist theories themselves.