Julie Fette, "Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature" (Routledge, 2025)

Nov 7, 2025

Julie Fette, Associate Professor of French at Rice University and author of 'Gender by the Book,' dives deep into the complexities of gender representation in 21st-century French children's literature. She discusses how institutions like libraries and book clubs shape the narratives young readers encounter. Fette highlights the tension between artistic integrity and market pressures, revealing how stereotypes persist amidst France's rich publishing landscape. She also explores how children's magazines navigate gender issues and the potential for more equitable literature, setting the stage for her future research on migration and otherness.

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ANECDOTE

A Scholar's Personal Turn To Children

Julie Fette described shifting fields after tenure to study children's literature.
She said she 'became a transgender thanks to my first book' and sought cradle roots of discrimination.

INSIGHT

Shelf Sweeps Reveal Gender Gaps

Shelf-sweep sampling across a municipal and a school library revealed pervasive gender stereotyping.
In 80% of sampled books, characters followed prescribed gender roles and mothers never held paid occupations.

ANECDOTE

Shelf Sweeps In Two Libraries

Fette performed shelf-sweeps in a French school library in Houston and a municipal library in Paris.
She combined 49 books from both sites to analyze gender representations together.

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Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, and subscription magazines – that circulate reading material to children. It shows how French policies, cultural beliefs, and market forces influence the content of children's literature, including tensions between State support for unprofitable artistic endeavors and a belief in children’s right to high-quality products on the one hand, and suspicion of activism as anathema to creativity and fear of losing boy readers on the other. In addition, the notion of universalism, which asserts that equality is best achieved when society is blind to differences, thwarts a diverse and equitable array of literary representations. Nevertheless, conditions are favorable for 21st-century French children's publishers to offer a robust body of richly entertaining egalitarian literature for children.

Guest Julie Fette, author of Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature published in October 2024 by Routledge. Dr. Fette is Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University where she is also Rice Faculty Scholar at the Center for the Middle East, Baker Institute and a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the author of Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920-1945 from Cornell University Press in 2012 and the co-author of the textbook Les Français from Hackett in 2021, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on subjects from gender and professional life in France to teaching French studies in the classroom and online.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.

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