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There's been tons of discussion of diversity in children's and young adult literature, but I'd like to take it to a more personal level:
When you were a child and teenager, or now, if you're currently a teenager, did you see characters like yourself in the books you read? Do you see characters like yourself now? Did they only appear in limited circumstances, like only as villains, as sidekicks but not heroes, in novels about being persecuted and oppressed but not in more lighthearted fare, only as certain character types, etc? Did it matter to you when you did, or if you didn't?
By "like yourself," I'm thinking of matters of both identity and experience: characters of your race, your nationality, your gender, your sexual orientation, your experiences, etc.
I think you're all quite familiar with my feelings on the matter. I have ranted at great length about how discouraging it was, when I was a teenager, to keep coming across the "trauma destroys you forever" and "people with mental illnesses are doomed" tropes, and how encouraging and helpful it was to later encounter books like Deerskin and Mirror Dance, which said just the opposite. And while it didn't have a serious negative impact on my life that most books I read with Jewish characters were about the Holocaust or other Very Serious Jewish Issues, to this day I erupt in squeals of joy when I encounter a non-stereotyped Jewish character in a non-issue book.
On the flip side, I can think of many, many male-female romances, whether part of genre romance or just part of the story, which I read with great enjoyment. I can only imagine how I would feel if, growing up, I never ever found a book which had a romance of the sort I was actually having or wanted to have. But if I hadn't been straight, that would be the case. The only lesbians I encountered in fiction, up until I was at least a senior in high school, were Agatha Christie's "spinsters," whom I didn't recognize as such until much later, and the woman who traumatizes the straight heroine with a drunken pass in Madeleine L'Engle's A House Like A Lotus.
So you know how I feel. But I'm wondering: how do you feel? What was and is your experience?
When you were a child and teenager, or now, if you're currently a teenager, did you see characters like yourself in the books you read? Do you see characters like yourself now? Did they only appear in limited circumstances, like only as villains, as sidekicks but not heroes, in novels about being persecuted and oppressed but not in more lighthearted fare, only as certain character types, etc? Did it matter to you when you did, or if you didn't?
By "like yourself," I'm thinking of matters of both identity and experience: characters of your race, your nationality, your gender, your sexual orientation, your experiences, etc.
I think you're all quite familiar with my feelings on the matter. I have ranted at great length about how discouraging it was, when I was a teenager, to keep coming across the "trauma destroys you forever" and "people with mental illnesses are doomed" tropes, and how encouraging and helpful it was to later encounter books like Deerskin and Mirror Dance, which said just the opposite. And while it didn't have a serious negative impact on my life that most books I read with Jewish characters were about the Holocaust or other Very Serious Jewish Issues, to this day I erupt in squeals of joy when I encounter a non-stereotyped Jewish character in a non-issue book.
On the flip side, I can think of many, many male-female romances, whether part of genre romance or just part of the story, which I read with great enjoyment. I can only imagine how I would feel if, growing up, I never ever found a book which had a romance of the sort I was actually having or wanted to have. But if I hadn't been straight, that would be the case. The only lesbians I encountered in fiction, up until I was at least a senior in high school, were Agatha Christie's "spinsters," whom I didn't recognize as such until much later, and the woman who traumatizes the straight heroine with a drunken pass in Madeleine L'Engle's A House Like A Lotus.
So you know how I feel. But I'm wondering: how do you feel? What was and is your experience?