‘That’s my dumb husband’: Wild things,battle bears and heteronormative responses in an afterschool reading club

Reader response

Transactional theories, such as reader response, reveal how responding to texts is a social practice between readers, writers and texts. Through these transactions, readers connect with new ideas, perspectives, feelings and beliefs. This expanding knowledge of self and others can provide new perspectives and raise awareness of how literature helps to build a more complex understanding of the world (Kanai, 2017; Rosenblatt, 2004; Sipe, 2008). This is especially true for aesthetic responses, which tap into personal responses as the reader ‘lives through’ the ‘interchange with the text’ (Rosenblatt, 1995: 271).

Individuals, therefore, construct meaning during literacy events by reacting to both the text and others’ responses. Studying how responses evolve in group contexts reveals how collective literacy events are ‘an active part of public making’ (Kanai, 2017). In a group context, readers articulate their responses for others to understand, undergoing a process of sharing private responses and integrating them into a larger public consensus. Readers move from unspoken responses towards negotiated ones that more closely align with their peers and adult responses. As such, individual response evolves in a to-and-fro pattern, often merging with the group consensus. Through this process, individuals understand how their private responses align with (or not) the public aspects and thus gain knowledge into the sociocultural context of both text and responses to text. Yet, this may be problematic especially when the shared cultural milieu is narrowly constructed or reinforces a hegemony that is exclusionary. As Rosenblatt observed, those with ‘similar social and cultural backgrounds’ will arrive quickly at similar interpretations (as discussed in Sipe, 2008:59). However, the opportunity for outliers to participate in the negotiation is limited due to reduced representation in the group.

A critical perspective can shed insight on patterns of power distribution allowing us to ‘think within, through, and beyond the text’ (Short, 2017: 4) and illuminate moments and patterns of inequity. When critical theories are integrated with reader response, they act as lenses to consider power dynamics in children’s ‘textual practices’ (Pahl and Rowsell, 2010: 57). For example, Hartman’s (2018) analysis of read alouds with second graders revealed complex responses that contain ‘conflicting discourses and demonstrat[e] how the children either built upon one another’s remarks or refuted them’ (p. 88). Analysing children’s talk about texts offers insight into how children make meaning of their literary and social worlds. Likewise, analysing multimodal elements of response, such as images, gestures and artefacts, reveals social practices and power relationships embedded in a literacy event whether the event is a read aloud or one where the children are ‘text’ producers (Dyson, 2010; Pahl and Rowsell, 2010; Rogers and Wetzel, 2014). While much of reader response scholarship focuses on the role of the teacher in guiding children’s responses with the expectation of contributing ‘to a continuing process of growth in ability to handle responses –linguistic, emotional, intellectual– to literary texts’ (Rosenblatt, 1995: 269), there is less research on how children navigate responses to each other during literacy events.

Play and/as response

A neglected aspect of reader response is how children’s literacy events can be performative and playful. We draw from childhood studies to understand the role of play. Drawing from childhood studies, we note that play decentres adult-centred literacy practices – such as reading and writing of which young children often lack fluency – and reflects a wider range of children’s responses, especially to peers (Bengochea et al., 2018; Gabriel, 2017). Through play we can observe young children experimenting with peer and family relationships, physical activities, social status and identities (Blaise, 2005; Sipe, 2008; Wohlwend, 2017). Social relationships are negotiated and contested when children construct meaning playfully alongside their peers (Stagg Peterson et al., 2020) and are in ‘creative relationship to their own social dynamics’ (Ghiso, 2013: 40). Play, therefore, is child-centred. When children are free to direct their (individual and collective) responses to texts and tasks, they learn about social interactions (Corsaro, 2012). They explore and test conventions and stereotypes, express power and interact with socially constructed roles and the surrounding culture with their peers. Thus, play is integral to children’s meaning-making in a wide-range of interactions, including literacy events.

Power also is an important aspect of play. It influences ‘an aggregate of meanings and materials situated in cultural contexts’ and analysing it reveals the entanglement of ‘power relations and prevailing discourses’ (Wohlwend, 2017: 164). Play is not a free-for-all; peer hierarchies and social norms impact individual status and the roles each child can adopt in play. Yet, play serves as an ‘agentive platform for cultivating participation’ (Campano et al., 2016: 204), one that allows children to affirm, test and reject various ideas, identities and relationships. Through play, children test boundaries to understand their worlds and to explore their scope of influence, which may conform to or disrupt social conventions.

Children’s social interactions during creative and playful moments are carefully considered in this study because they could reveal a relationship between learning and mediated actions. Like reader response theory, analyses of play recognize meaning-making as transactional and mediated by both the content and context of interactions. Multimodal responses illuminate how children use performative play, such as gendered role play, to wrestle with normative practices and each other for power. In this creative context, children ‘feel safe and are ready to share’ (Pahl and Rowsell, 2010: 46), so analysing their talk and actions reveals their perspectives and motivations. Through play, children negotiate current identities as well as ‘imagined future trajectories’ filled with ‘potential revolutionary becomings’, yet which are ‘ever shrinking’ (Holford et al., 2013: 714) and at risk of becoming ritualized. This is particularly true in the early years, so children’s playful responses are a means to understand, test and challenge heteronormativity.

Responses and gender/sex/uality

We propose queer theory as a heuristic to study response. Methodologically, queer theory demands a more expansive notion of data, including the ‘material body and embodiment’ (Waite, 2017: 66), or a recognition that response is multimodal. A queered analysis reveals how gender/sex/uality shape interactions including those that appear neutral or ‘gender-meaningless’ (Boldt, 2011), often with the effect of rendering heterosexuality compulsory (Rich, 1980) and constraining possibilities for how gender/sex/uality is ‘done’ (Holford et al., 2013). Queer theory questions privileged position and establishing patterns of heteronormativity, the institutionalized belief that heterosexuality is normal and all other romantic relationships are abnormal and inferior (Blackburn and Smith, 2010). We consider how heteronormativity informed individuals’ responses and modifications as these responses are taken up or rejected by the group. Doing so accesses more diverse perspectives of events and illuminates persistent discourses, interactions and norms around gender/sex/uality. For example, pitch changes when speaking can mark shifts in character and connote gendered stances (Wohlwend, 2012).

This framework takes into consideration how our identities and interactions can be imagined differently (Balfour, 2016; Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, 2013). When considering children’s responses to literacy events, a queered analysis explores the meaning-making process around gender/sex/uality. This includes research on young children’s responses to picture books with themes and beliefs about LGBTQ people and communities (Hartman, 2018) as well as queered readings of heteronormative texts (Ryan and Hermann-Wilmarth, 2018). Our work adds to these perspectives by studying children’s responses and imaginings within their own texts and particularly how gender/sex/uality norms are negotiated during a literacy event.

The children’s multimodal responses serve as windows to child cultures and the construction of sociocultural categories of gender, sexuality and other varying aspects of their identities. Yet, we are concerned that their emerging consensus is influenced by the dominant social and cultural backgrounds, as reflected in peer status hierarchies (Gabriel, 2017; Holford et al., 2013). Unpacking heteronormativity in literacy events, including analysing the playful processes enacted, increases our understanding of how it persists. We purposefully examine the children’s complex responses after a read aloud of Where the Wild Things Are so as to consider how they were testing, teasing and tempering gender/sex/uality.

Context of the study and participants

The afterschool reading club was designed to engage children with literature and discussions about families and family diversity in an informal setting. It emanated from volunteer work that Rachel (the first author) did in an urban public elementary school in the United States. All students in the first-grade classroom where Rachel volunteered were invited to participate in the study. She then contacted interested families, and seven parents permitted their children to participate. The four girls – Dorothy (all names are pseudonyms), Renee, Jane and Erin – and three boys – Stephen, Brendan and Richard – came from straight and gay, blended and extended families. Two of the children had Latinx heritage, two Jewish and all others white/Caucasian. Two of the parents reported that their family identified as interracial due to adoptions. All of the children spoke English as their first language, but came from international and multilingual family backgrounds.

At the first club meeting, all the children gave their verbal and signed assent. To ensure transparency with parents, Rachel created a weekly newsletter and spoke to parents when they picked up their children. She undertook additional efforts to ensure the children were compliant with participating, including having them set up recording equipment so they knew they were being recorded, giving them a choice whether they share their work and letting them choose how they engaged in the program. For example, they could read or draw during the read aloud and group activities or simply decline to participate. Member checks ensured that Rachel was interpreting the children’s actions and ideas correctly. If a child could not remember or appeared uncomfortable, then she did not include this information.

Because the group was so small, the children’s personal information has been aggregated and no detailed biographies of each child have been shared, which was an ethical decision because of the level of details they shared about their families. When identity categories such as race, ethnicity, parents’ marriage status, language-use, class and religion were volunteered, we included this but only after follow up discussion with parents and children.

Each club meeting had a theme, which centred on a book, and during our weeks together, we established a routine that started with settling in and eating a snack. Rachel designed multimodal activities, such as drawing prompts and craft projects, which included multiple options, allowing them to engage in ways that may not mirror what they did in their classroom. This is particularly important when working with younger children whose textual literacies (writing and reading) range widely and for whom visual and pictorial modes are important forms of communication (Sipe, 2012).

Our analytic collaboration represents only one part of a broader study on the afterschool reading club (Skrlac Lo, 2016a). Rachel worked in the community to establish the reading club, which she led once a week for 5 months. Each week, Rachel volunteered in the children’s classroom, and after school, she and the children would walk to a neighbourhood café for the reading club. Angela joined the study after data collection as a co-analyst. The partnership between the two authors emerged from shared interests in expanding scholarship on reader response and how gender/sex/ualities are enacted and enforced among children. We wanted the opportunity for ‘more complex interrogation of how sex, gender, and sexuality intertwine in the heteronormative process’ (Atkinson and DePalma, 2009: p. 2). Particularly, we observed how gender/sex/uality was layered into their interactions, and while their responses did not always denote gender, they often signified allegiance to gender/sex/uality norms. For example, when Jane added red buttons to her artefact because the other girls had red buttons, the buttons did not signify femaleness; rather, her choice to add red buttons signified her alignment with the girls. Informed by the notion that gender/sex/uality is a dialogic performance between our internal identities and social norms, we realized that collaborating together would provide opportunities to explore queer theory, apply it to our analysis of the children’s responses and consider the implications for educational contexts.

Data collection

Data from each of the club’s 90-min meetings included audio and video recordings, Rachel’s field notes, research memos, photographs and the children’s artefacts. The children were given field notebooks in which they were free to draw or write as they wished. All artefacts were collected and photographed each week. The audio files were transcribed and the video files were logged for key events and timestamps.

Data analysis

Drawing from our theoretical framework, we began our collaborative data review with an overview of the research project. Rachel provided background and reported overall findings, which included talk about families, friendships and romantic crushes, books, popular culture and other talk about social organization and human experiences. We studied anonymized transcripts and video data, taking notes of gestures and interactional events, noting contrastive details or other details that enhanced the transcripts. Individually, we highlighted where children were engaging with gender/sex/uality for collaborative analysis.

Taking this subset of data, we used critical multimodal discourse analysis (CMDA) to focus on children’s talk, artefacts and actions (Bengochea, et al., 2018). CMDA connects narrative research, critical discourse analysis and multimodal social semiotic approaches by exploring a variety of modalities such as verbal conversations, gestures, movements, gaze and compositions (Rogers and Wetzel, 2014). Like other types of discourse analysis (e.g. Critical Discourse Analysis), CMDA is a lens that illuminates gender/sex/uality as multimodal interactions that ‘demonstrate affiliation with a particular social group’ (Wohlwend, 2012: 5). Discourse analysis pushes against reductive binaries, such as masculine-feminine, exploring power relations, questioning subject positions and offering the possibility of counter-subject positions and raising our awareness of how ‘everyday practices’ are constructed (Wohlwend, 2012: 7). Because of this, CMDA highlights relationships between language, power and identities (Norris, 2020), revealing how positions are not fixed, but dynamic or always in a state of becoming. CMDA is often used to explore a particular aspect of a study, so it is usually applied to illustrative sections of a larger data set (see, for instance, Stagg Peterson et al., 2020). We view the children’s actions during literacy events as an illustrative section, ones that were rich sites of multimodal interactions that focused on the children’s storytelling and meaning-making practices. Using this analytic framework, we analysed language use, semiotic artefacts and the social worlds in which they were situated (Rogers, 2011).

Individually and collaboratively, we considered the children’s interactions and artefacts from multiple perspectives. After multiple passes with the data, we identified two critical incidents, which are moments ‘in the field which require a pause for reflection’ (Scherer, 2020: 2). In week 8, Rachel read Where the Wild Things Are and then shared the prompt: Make a Wild Thing of someone in your own family. The children were given precut figures made of construction paper and an assortment of craft supplies to decorate the paper figures. In week 12, we returned to their Wild Things because the children continued to reference them in the subsequent weeks. To extend the activity, Rachel asked the children to write biographical sketches for their Wild Things. We isolated transcripts and video data of these moments. Within the transcripts, we considered multimodal features, including language, silences, gestures and artefacts, and how these features referenced gender/sex/uality and influenced the children’s interactions.

To analyse the artefacts, we undertook multiple reviews of the children’s process for creating their artwork and the written biographies. This involved three recursive steps. First, we created a multimodal transcript with descriptive summaries (Rogers and Wetzel, 2014), which included documenting verbal and nonverbal interactions as well as visual images to understand how the multiple modes worked together (Norris, 2020). Then, we wrote descriptive summaries, analysing modal use for interactional patterns. For example, we studied the relationship between children’s interactions and resultant modifications. Second, we analysed the data within and across modes and the functions of different modes. For instance, the children would modify their Wild Thing artefacts to affirm gender identity and affiliation, such as Jane’s addition of buttons. Finally, we shared our analysis and discussed our converging meanings. Recursively analysing data from multiple perspectives and considering the meanings of multiple modes helped us integrate our findings and deepened our understanding of how external discourses (e.g. norms) and interactions were influencing the children’s talk, actions and gender/sex/uality becoming.

‘That’s My Dumb Husband’

After 15 minutes of creating their Wild Things, Dorothy shifted the group’s focus towards playful enactment. This performative response (Sipe, 2008) moved her and other children into a living world of Wild Things, where their creations interacted with and responded to one another (see Figure 2). She did this by speaking directly to Stephen’s Wild Thing, named Battle Bear. Dorothy got up from the table and stood in front of the video camera. She called to Stephen, ‘Can I see Battle Bear? Can I see him?’ Stephen walked over to her. She held her Wild Thing in front of his Battle Bear and said, ‘Hey honey, watcha doin’?’

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Figure 2.

a-c – Dorothy, Stephen and Brendan’s Wild Things meet.

Brendan then stood up from the table to join the pair. He introduced his Wild Thing, ‘I’m a ninja’ and he held it out to join Dorothy’s and Stephen’s (Figure 2(a)); Dorothy turned her Wild Thing to Battle Bear and said, ‘Kill him husband.’ Battle Bear swiped at Brendan’s ninja (Figure 2(b)), and Brendan returned to the table (Figure 2(c)). Stephen and Dorothy followed, resuming individual activities.

A minute later, Stephen called across the table:

549 Stephen: Dorothy, Dorothy. Look at this.

Stephen initiated this exchange by calling out to Dorothy, not her Wild Thing. When Dorothy responded in character, Stephen assumed the voice of Battle Bear by changing pitch and using first person (e.g. ‘Never’ and ‘I can fly’), following her lead in their play. Dorothy issued a command that she expected him to follow while her Wild Thing got ‘her hair done’. Dorothy broke from her Wild Thing character to explain, ‘really, she is getting her hair done’ while she coloured her Wild Thing. She reverted back into her Wild Thing role immediately and shortly thereafter declared, ‘That’s my dumb husband’ (line 558). This was her first utterance at the table to someone other than Stephen about ‘her’ relationship with Stephen. When Renee responded negatively (line 559), Dorothy quit responding to Stephen. He tried to reinitiate the conversation (line 564), but she did not respond. At this moment, Rachel attempted to engage Stephen by responding to him, but he remained focused on Dorothy.

In this critical incident, Dorothy’s heteronormative script guided the play. She effectively established a social bond that included Stephen but excluded Brendan whose Wild Thing was verbally and physically threatened by Dorothy and Stephen. Dorothy’s marriage to Stephen indicates that heteronormativity informed her interactions, including her changed pitch and word choices, such as calling him husband and using female pronouns for her Wild Thing, Additionally, earlier conversations in the club about families with same-gender parents – such as Richard’s and Brendan’s – had challenged Dorothy’s conception of families and led to her confusion (Skrlac Lo, 2016b). Dorothy’s decision to role-play a heterosexual marriage with the only boy with heterosexual parents may have been (unconsciously) deliberate because ‘even very small incremental moves to de-territorialise and re-lease the grip of constraining gender norms can ignite fear and summon assemblages that tighten the straight jacket of how girls and boys can be and become’ (Huuki and Renold, 2015: 13). Dorothy’s resistance to any challenges to heteronormativity is further echoed when she responded to Brendan who misinterpreted Dorothy’s call to see Battle Bear as an invite for all to engage with her. Dorothy’s responses enforced conformity to heterosexuality both in how she positioned her Wild Thing to Stephen’s and in her rejection of Brendan’s Wild Thing as a potential spouse. Similar to Corsaro’s (2012) observation of children’s marriage play, Dorothy rejected the idea of two males in her marriage play and then affirmed her authority over the play script by commanding Stephen’s Battle Bear to kill the interloper.

At the table, this matrimonial allegiance continued when Stephen called out to Dorothy (line 549) and when he did not reject her heterosexual pairing when she continued the role playing (line 551). Dorothy was comfortable establishing and maintaining this heteronormative storyline, which was seen as desirable by Stephen and Brendan. She narrated their separation drawing on gendered stereotypes, she was ‘getting her hair done’ and subsequently coloured her Wild Thing’s hair (line 550). Similarly, Brendan modified his ninja to resemble Dorothy’s and especially Stephen’s. He added ears and renamed it Battle Bear, an effort to make it like Stephen’s Battle Bear. His actions demonstrate that he was responding to their Wild Things, adjusting to better align with norms that Dorothy established and reinforced when she chose Stephen’s Battle Bear as her husband. For Brendan, Dorothy’s marriage play was a high-status event to which he aspired to join. The marriage play ended only after Renee, Dorothy’s friend, responded negatively, ‘Oh, you guys are married, eww’ (line 559). Stephen called out to Dorothy again (line 564), but she did not reply. That she does not continue role playing with Stephen indicated a shift in Dorothy’s attitude. Renee’s response affected the storyline Dorothy was ‘writing’ and, in fact, this romantic storyline never returned to the children’s play with their Wild Things.

These transactions reveal the children’s responses, which led the children to modify their material and performative texts. As Campano et al. (2016) note, ‘the stories that children tell through their play may entail critique, and serve as a destabilizing force to social convention’ (p. 203). Renee’s critique of Dorothy’s storyline – similar to Dorothy’s preference to Stephen – destabilized Dorothy’s play and shifted the children’s interactions much like how Dorothy’s rejection of Brendan’s ninja. Over time, the range of appropriate gender/sex/uality play and content narrowed, serving to calibrate each child’s personal responses to the public consensus. This led to increasing similarities among the Wild Things and created a new, tenser dynamic.

Gorgeous and fancy

Dorothy and Renee bonded during their time in the club. This was a new friendship, confirmed by their parents. They typically worked and played together, often pursuing tasks of their choosing rather than prepared activities. They often drew and exchanged pictures of themselves together framed by hearts.

While creating their Wild Things, they worked independently yet were alert to one another’s talk and actions. For example, as discussed above, Renee was the only child who acknowledged and responded to Stephen and Dorothy’s role play after they returned to the table. An analysis of Dorothy and Renee’s Wild Things artefacts reveal that theirs were the most similar (Figures 1 and 3). Both chose blue paper for the body and added specific features that other Wild Things do not have: bangs, eyebrows and necklaces. They were responding and conforming to one another. Our data analysis indicates that Renee more frequently modified her Wild Thing to align with Dorothy’s, including changing facial features, style of dress and content of her biographical sketch.

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Figure 3.

Close up of Dorothy's (right) and Renee’s (left) Wild Things.

As they worked, they used female pronouns for their Wild Things and they quit using ‘Wild’, adopting Ning-a-Thing, a name they created together. They continued to focus on appearances in week 12 when the group wrote the biographies. Their focus on feminine traits indicates that the girls valued beauty in this exchange, and while they continued to influence one another, the tone shifted from collaborative to competitive. In her biographical sketch, Dorothy wrote, ‘My ning-a-thing is Fancy. The other Ning-a-things are crazy’, to which Renee responded, ‘I am gorgeous. I know you don’t agree with me’. Erin, another girl, observed that Dorothy and Renee shifted from friendly to fiery. In her Wild Thing’s biography, Erin wrote, ‘I think cray cray bay bay [Renee’s Wild Thing] and Fancy [Dorothy’s Wild Thing] fight too much’. While the girls did not directly exhibit any hostility towards one another, these sketches suggest a shift from collaborating to competing.

This competition was performed through artefacts, which demonstrates how engaging in multimodal responses allowed them to test aspects of their friendship that they may not have been able to do in person (Pahl and Rowsell, 2010). Additionally, their aesthetic choices and modifications reveal that while they initially engaged in practices that explored varying potentials (Balfour, 2016; Holford et al., 2013), they eventually rejected divergent identities and conformed to Dorothy’s feminine model, to which Dorothy explained, ‘I want to make me’. Moreover, Dorothy’s elevated social status as an award-winning artist may have guided Renee’s aesthetic choices and worked to ‘tighten the straight jacket’ of gender norms (Huuki and Renold, 2015: 13). Renee originally started to create a wilder Wild Thing – the mouth is perhaps a remnant – but changed direction, including removing antennae (see Figure 3). This policing of Renee towards gender norms demonstrates how Dorothy influenced this process of consensus making, which was sedimented when Renee physically modified her Wild Thing and wrote a biography that paralleled Dorothy’s. Dorothy effectively guided Renee away from the initial prompt – to create Wild Thing like someone in her family – towards an aesthetic response based on Dorothy’s multimodal text.

Yet, Renee did not follow Dorothy’s lead blindly. She exercised judgement, whether in comparison to their Wild Things or in Dorothy’s choice of Stephen’s Battle Bear as ‘husband’. Dorothy, subsequently, responded to Renee’s judgement indirectly by altering her role playing and directly in her biographical sketch. Their transactions throughout illustrate how the girls navigated private aspects of the task and negotiated them with each other and the group. Their Wild Things evolved and became more alike the longer they worked on them. That they were able to arrive at a consensus demonstrates that readers with similar social and cultural backgrounds will lead to similar interpretations, even if that consensus pitted them against each other. What started as a quiet and friendly collaboration led to a competition over standards that reinforced stereotypes of the feminine ideal, namely, that beauty is the central standard of assessment and that females compete with each other to be the most beautiful.

Write themselves into these events and classroom interactions more broadly

Brendan and Stephen’s Wild Things also competed. Yet, their Wild Things evolved differently. Unlike the girls, who had similar racial and cultural backgrounds as well as family models, these boys came from different backgrounds. Brendan was white and had two moms. He was often quiet but deeply engaged in the club, eagerly participating in all activities initiated by Rachel even when no one else did. Stephen, whose parents were divorced and living with new partners, had Latinx roots. He was rarely quiet and his participation was often independent and ignored by his peers. His extended engagement in these activities was unusual as was Dorothy’s choice to include him in her role playing as her Wild Thing’s husband.

Brendan and Stephen’s Wild Things engaged in their first battle when Dorothy instructed Stephen’s Battle Bear to kill Brendan’s ninja (Figure 2). After this encounter, the boys returned to their seats and Brendan modified his Wild Thing to be more like Stephen’s, including changing the name to Battle Bear. The competition escalated while writing biographical sketches. After hearing each other’s drafts, they edited their own. Brendan’s (Figure 4) sketch evolved from ‘My name is Battle Bear and I am 34 years old’ to ‘My name is Battle Bear and I am 34 years old I fit [fight] the other Batl Bare’. Later, he added, ‘And I have a sord [sword]’. Brendan also made additional edits to his Wild Thing artefact, adding a green sash and modifying the ears so they were larger and like Stephen’s.

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Figure 4.

Brendan’s Batl-Bear and biographical sketch.

Stephen was equally conscious of Brendan’s actions and enacted a plan to secure his hypermasculine authority. He hid from others while he edited his text and then asked each child, including Brendan, and Rachel to write their name at the bottom of his paper while he covered the rest of the writing with his hands. He wanted to make sure that no one could see why they were signing the piece of paper and was very clear in his instructions, ‘Okay, everybody, spell your Thing’s name’ and ‘No peeking’. Once all names were collected he announced that his biography was done. He held his paper up, pointing to everyone’s signatures, and said, ‘See this is my team, all them’ and added, ‘Because I’m Battle Bear, so I’m the leader’. At this point, Brendan returned to his bio and added, ‘I have a army to’ and drew two smaller Battle Bears on his page. The boys’ interactions revealed a dialogic process and specifically that Brendan, perhaps as a result of Dorothy’s initial rebuke of his ninja, worked to compete with Stephen’s Wild Thing by emulating it.

Stephen’s responses, such as the way he used his body to cover the biographical sketch when he asked people to sign it, demonstrates an awareness of how his actions were provocative. First, he did not want Brendan to see what he was doing. He was conscious of how Brendan was responding to his work and he did not want to engage. Second, he may have feared rejection from other children, so he did not want to reveal his plan until he had everyone’s signatures. Unlike Dorothy, Stephen’s status varied from week to week and across the group. This ‘marriage’ to Dorothy was the first time he was welcomed into the inner circle of Dorothy’s play. Dorothy’s decision to marry Stephen’s Battle Bear indicated that his choices did not lead to exclusion. In this case, they garnered a response that indicated that his texts and actions aligned with hers. Furthermore, Brendan’s response – copying the Battle Bear motif – affirmed that Stephen’s decision to make a Battle Bear had a positive effect on his status within the group. His secrecy may have been an effort to maintain this status and the power that came with it. As Corsaro (2012) notes, ‘children relish taking on and expressing power’ in socio-dramatic play (p. 495) and role playing helps children learn both the role and the social position that the role holds. Stephen’s actions to maintain his newly achieved status, demonstrated by first Dorothy’s and then Brendan’s responses to his actions, were transformative and changed how he interacted with the group.

Stephen’s acceptance of his Wild Thing’s betrothal to Dorothy’s Wild Thing is a departure from past interactions when he rejected or sabotaged play that involved male-female romance (Skrlac Lo, 2016a). For instance, around Valentine’s Day, the children played a game of posting ‘kiss me’ notes on each other’s backs. Stephen, though, wrote ‘kick me’. This led to the girls shunning him, and Dorothy asked Rachel why he was allowed in the club. This behaviour diminished his status in the group and he was often ignored. Yet, he got the girls’ attention early into this activity when he announced that his Wild Thing was going to be a Battle Bear (adopted from the book Battle Bunny (Scieszka et al., 2013), a book that Rachel previously shared). Perhaps recognizing his peers’ enthusiasm (as well as his own), Stephen used Battle Bunny as a model to ‘do’ his Wild Thing. He effectively enacted strategies that were valued by his peers, confirmed when Dorothy called him over and called him ‘honey.’

Unlike in the past encounters when he would antagonize the girls, he responded positively to Dorothy and even continued their storyline when they returned to the table. He may have realized that his status was dependent on Dorothy’s opinion, or he may have been able to more successfully access discursive responses that aligned with the norms, or maybe he was willing to go along with her marriage storyline because it was role play rather than direct action (e.g. suggestion to kiss one another) and thus was more acceptable to him. While his shifting willingness to engage in heteronormative romance may reflect the messiness of children’s gender/sex/uality play (Holford et al., 2013), Stephen’s transgression, at least initially, was consistent with his past behaviour to resist and interfere with the anticipated script (in this case, Rachel’s prompt to create a Wild Thing).

Stephen’s role play with Dorothy indicates the he accepted the assigned heteronormative role in exchange for her attention. Unlike in the past, his actions elevated him to Dorothy’s husband and allowed him some control over the script/storyline. This suggests that Stephen may have believed that his status was dependent on Dorothy’s opinion, or that he was more successfully accessing normative discursive responses. Yet, when Dorothy ignores Stephen’s Battle Bear’s continued transgressive behaviour (i.e. when he takes it flying after Dorothy says ‘Husband, be careful’), Stephen does not lose his status. His decision to engage as Dorothy’s ‘husband’ sediments his Wild Thing as Battle Bear, most evident when Brendan abandons his ninja to become a Battle Bear. As with Renee and Dorothy’s shift to hyperfeminine Ning-a-Things, Brendan and Stephen’s war-themed Battle Bears represent gender conformity, a decision that was initially supported when Dorothy chose Stephen’s Battle Bear soldier who represented western hypermasculinity more than Brendan’s ninja. Stephen’s Battle Bear is not just accepted, it is desired.

The evolution of play among these four children from across gender to same gender aligns with a gender differences approach, that boys and girls are inherently different and, thus, their play, talk, learning and actions also are inherently different (Cherland, 1994). By the end, Stephen and Brendan aimed to dominate by strength (even when only figurative) while Renee and Dorothy focused on appearance. Additionally, the nature of competition was different: the girls worked to control only one another; the boys were seeking a sense of total control. Yet, by tracking their process of responding to one another, we see that their play conformed to heteronormative ordering after a series of across-gender transactions with one another’s texts, artefacts and actions. The children enacted varying responses to explore different social situations and test conventions. By analysing their process, we see how group norms were not innate but were policed through responses to one another’s artefacts, texts and actions. More importantly, norms were set by high-status individuals and sub-groups who came to consensus first. In this instance, Dorothy guided the direction of consensus building. First, in her desire to marry Stephen’s Battle Bear, which increased his status and spurred Brendan’s Wild Thing metamorphosis, she reinforced heterosexuality as the norm and hypermasculinity as desirable. Then, in her responses to Renee’s aesthetic decisions, Dorothy reinforced gender norms.

‘He’s a Crazy Creature from my own World’

While the remaining children did not engage as directly, they noticed and responded to this group’s interactions. Their Wild Things evolved towards a group consensus even when they were not fully integrated into nor conforming to the play. For example, the competitive vying for top dog extended to Richard, the third boy, even though he did not engage directly in the competition. In fact, Richard bypassed the hypermasculine war play and simply established his Wild Thing as leader by naming it ‘the king’. Similarly, Jane described her Wild Thing as a jester who lived in a castle. Here, we turn to Jane and her Wild Thing to consider how her responses offered a queered imagining of the Wild Things and the children’s play.

Jane was an enthusiastic participant in the club. Her big smiles and frequent laughter reflected her cheerful disposition. She persistently engaged in various activities to get others’ attention, like reading books aloud, and she frequently adopted supporting roles to write herself into the children’s play. She drew on different social positions and identities, such as a recent trip abroad, to explore her scope of influence on the group and on social conventions (Campano et al., 2016). Jane never indicated any sense of rejection, yet many of her initiatives were not taken up by her peers. For example, when she used googly eyes to make a mouth, the children rejected it, and she removed them.

Jane exhibited flexibility especially when creating her Wild Thing (Figure 1), which she modified to align with the others’. Her gestures reflect an effort to build group consensus. For example, while Richard made his Wild Thing the ‘king’, a dominant character, Jane made hers a jester, whom she described, ‘the crazy ning-a-thing was like a Jester he would always joke in castles’. Jane’s texts reflect how she was responding both to the girls by calling her Wild Thing a Ning-a-Thing and to the boys by joining their soldier and king storyline as the court jester. Her bridging text broke from the intra-group norms that emerged when they wrote the biographical sketches.

Rather than conform, Jane played with gender. Her Wild Thing’s features and sketch transected the girls’ and the boys’ texts. Jane’s Wild Thing was the only one whose final gender did not match its creator’s. Throughout the creative process, she switched its gender at least three times. These modifications may reflect the impact of others’ responses and interactions. For example, the material aspects of her artefact reflect how the other girls influenced her. Jane used buttons and other materials in a similar way to create conventionally feminine clothing like a skirt. Like the other girls, she used three red buttons. This action, itself not gendered, indicates a desire to link herself to the girls. Gender is not marked by what she does, but why she does it. Jane’s name, ‘Crazy Ninga Thing’, emerges during a conversation with Renee, Dorothy and Erin, aligning with the other girls’ decision to call their Wild Things Ning-a-Things. Yet, her biographical sketch indicates that she was also drawing from the boys’ texts. Her decision to make a Jester indicated that she understood the boys’ play with soldiers and kings and that she understood that the Jester would fit into their emerging narrative and yet does not compete with their Wild Things’ identities. That Jane embedded her Wild Thing into these children’s play suggests she understood dominant scripts and was able to use them to write herself into the children’s playful responses without threatening anyone. Through her actions and interactions, she tested her agency in order to build creative relationships and cultivate participation.

Jane’s process for creating her Wild Thing and the gender fluidity she enacted demonstrate how this literacy event provided opportunities to negotiate different identities. She played with her aesthetic vision, using different resources to ‘imagine other ways of performing gender’ (Balfour, 2016: 441) including pronouns, names, materials and storylines. The material artefact provided distance from her physical self, which made her gender transgressions less risky to enact. Yet Jane’s creative process, like in her other interactions with this group, did not define the group narrative. In fact, she mostly existed on the margins, observing rather than interacting directly with the others. Yet, she built on the ideas of others, perhaps in an effort to belong, and this helped to create group consensus and build a cohesive community of Wild Things.

By using CMDA to study the interactive process of artefact creation, we witnessed how the children’s initial responses to Rachel’s prompt was influenced through talk, play and observing one another’s Wild Things. They learned when they should draw from heteronormative scripts, push the boundaries and/or navigate transgressions. Giving the children an opportunity to choose how they designed their blank Wild Things after a reading of Where the Wild Things Are was an opportunity to see children enact aesthetic responses to a text and demonstrated that without a teacher to guide them back to the book, they embraced their personal responses and veered fully towards their external lives (Rosenblatt, 1995). Despite hearing Rachel’s prompt and knowing that they were in a reading club, the children created texts that reflected a lived-through experience. Actively and collectively living through the process revealed how they queered their own performances through artefacts, even if this queering did not persist and was not performed by all. These choices sometimes were policed by their peers’ responses, such as the feminizing of Renee’s Wild Thing and the hypermasculinization of Brendan’s ninja. For others, like Jane, it was limited successful engagement with others that led to the adoption of normative identities.