Such Books Should be Burned! Same-Sex Parenting and the Stretchable Definition of the Family in Larysa Denysenko’s and Mariia Foya’s Maya and Her Mums

Abstract

As there is a myriad of Anglophone picturebooks featuring same-sex parents, some Western readers familiar with them would probably see little that is ground-breaking in the visual and verbal narrative of Larysa Denysenko’s and Mariia Foya’s Maya and Her Mums (2017). The picturebook’s first-person narrator and protagonist is a ten-year-old girl who describes her 16 classmates and their families; it includes no violence, no nudity, and no sexual references. Despite the title suggesting the story to be about the eponymous heroine and her family, Maya briefly introduces readers to her two mothers in one of the last doublespreads. When Maya and Her Mums was included in the programme of Ukraine’s most important book fair, the Lviv Book Forum, it became a political tool in the confrontation between homophobic Ukrainian nationalists and progressive intellectuals. In this essay, I want to examine the depiction of same-sex parenting in Maya and Her Mums and argue that it implies gradual widening of tolerance, with households headed by lesbian parents being the most controversial. Thus, the picturebook suggests that the definition of the family is stretchable, even in a conservative socio-political climate. By familiarising readers with Denysenko’s and Foya’s picturebook, I want to show what makes it different from equivalent Anglophone picturebooks and argue that the Ukrainian book market is slowly becoming more inclusive and diverse. Hence, despite the conservative backlash, the need for for same-sex parents and their children to be represented in children’s literature can no longer be ignored.