On my post the other day about gender representation in books, I mentioned as an afterthought the problem wordless picture books present in identifying gender. I thought the topic deserved a post of its own.

It’s not some kind of queer-theory intellectual problem, either, as books that don’t identify the gender of its characters play hell with a reviewer’s use of the English language as he or she (see?) tries to get through the review without having resort to a pronoun.

Sometimes we just assume. When I did a Talks with Roger interview with Marla Frazee about The Farmer and the Clown, it occurred to neither of us that the clown wasn’t a little boy–but really, you could go either way.

It isn’t just wordless books, either. In the comments on the gender post, Lynn Michaels points out that Mo Willems’ Pigeon is ungendered. Without a moment’s thought I would have said Pigeon was a male, and I see that our reviews of those books consistently thus identify Pigeon as such as well. But unless somebody has textual evidence otherwise, nope. The latest–The Pigeon Needs a Bath!–does i.d. the bird as a male on the back cover (“The Pigeon is filthy! Do YOU think he should take a bath?”) but as Martha and I just spent a month telling our reviewing students, flap copy Doesn’t Count and should never be used in a review. Neither, apparently, should sexist assumptions.

JonArno Lawson and Sydney Smith’s new Sidewalk Flowers, which we are reviewing in the May issue, was something of a Rorschach test in these offices. It’s a wordless book about, most basically, a grownup and a child walking through a city while the child gathers and redistributes flowers before arriving at a house and resident family. I assumed it was a father and his  daughter walking home to Mom but reactions beyond that here included a backstory of recent or impending divorce and a tense tale of a careless dad barely paying attention to his charge as they negotiate the gritty streets. And while the child has long hair, can we even assume it is a girl? There are no words to help us out. While the author says the child is a girl, again, Doesn’t Count.

A colleague who identifies as neither male nor female cites this as an excellent example of why we should ditch gendered pronouns in favor of the more inclusive “they.” They may be right!

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