Pinkwashing Picturebooks: Reading Homonational Heroes Through Contemporary US LGBTQ + Biographies

Abstract

This article reports on a critical content analysis of contemporary picturebook biographies featuring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+) protagonists. Recognizing the increased rights and legibility accorded queer life within the United States, we analyze a textual corpus of 26 texts to spotlight how nationalist norms shape representations of LGBTQ + history in picturebook biographies. In particular, the queer theory concept of homonationalism provides conceptual purchase for illuminating instances of pinkwashing (the exclusion of certain racialized and sexualized others from a nation’s citizenry) across these books. To spotlight these practices, we follow homonationalist focal subjects—the individual(s) and objects through which readers experience the storying of queer history—and analyze their effects upon representations of that history in children’s nonfiction. Findings from our critical content analysis suggest that the homonationalist focal subject manifests in two ways: (1) as humans “out” in their occupations and (2) as regulatory queer icons suppressing gender and sexual transgression. Both iterations, as this article suggests, advance a progress narrative that positions the United States as a “gay-friendly” nation. However and often unintentionally, this narrative pinkwashes queer history, obscuring the continued oppression of those LGBTQ + individuals who remain, simply put, too deviant to be recognized and protected by the nation.