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The organization of this bibliography reflects the evolving, often contradictory state of scholarly work on childhood and gender. As in adult scholarship in gender studies, scholars constellate around two different perspectives, even as they acknowledge the points of overlap and exchange between them. Many scholars, particularly in the social sciences and education, are dedicated to charting the powerful and often damaging effects of gender expectations on children. Scholars working in queer and cultural studies often take a different approach, drawing on a host of cultural, literary, and historical sources to illustrate how children are shaped by, but can also transcend, gender norms. This bibliography seeks to acknowledge the productive tensions that are emerging in studies of childhood and gender by including sources that examine gender as it emerges in a variety of fields (e.g., education, literature, and adoption studies) and by including sources under the useful but perhaps problematic division of work into girlhood studies; boyhood studies; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies. As many of the sources cited here indicate, there is a vibrant and valid set of arguments that the study of gender in childhood should remain under the larger rubric of childhood studies. To do otherwise, to separate children out by gender, to draw attention to the workings of gender, runs the risk of imposing the very gendered dualisms on children that scholars seek to undo. Overall, this bibliography includes examples of various permutations of study in childhood and gender, with specific texts focusing on “girl” and “boy” studies that chart the demands of gender indoctrination, as well as more theoretical texts that argue that such binaries simply reinforce damaging stereotypes.

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The child, it has been said, is the last acceptable "other." While minority scholarship has made us aware of the injustice and inaccuracy of infantilizing colonized and marginalized people, we have only begun to look with a critical eye at the narratives of sentimentality, emotionality, and inferiority attached to children. This article traces at the prevalence of the child-as-symbol in early American literature and culture in order to elucidate the stubborn stereotypes attached to children -and the study of children -and to introduce the groundbreaking work that has begun to analyze the complex cultural work performed by the American child. Finally, I argue that attending to the vulnerability and dependence of childhood offers the opportunity to rethink the fictive assumption that any one of us can fully occupy the position of the self-reliant, wholly independent subject.A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening .-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 1 2 Childhood Studies and Early America © Blackwell Publishing 2005 Literature Compass 2 (2005) AM 109, 1 -9

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