Stories for Sexual Difference

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Abstract
Recent sociological accounts of children's literature which claim to offer the insights of poststructuralism have in fact much in common with earlier sociological approaches. Both neglect the central role of the relationship between children's phantasies and the literatures they seem to enjoy. This paper, which uses arguments from the Freudian story of sexual difference, offers a preliminary study of two kinds of British comics aimed at girls and at boys. It draws attention to changes that have occurred since a key Lacanian analysis of some girls’ comics was published over 10 years ago. It suggests the need for preparatory descriptive accounts and for the importance of developing theories to explain the hold of representations on the imaginations and desires of children so that we might better understand the tenacious hold of a ‘sexist’ semiology on their psyches.

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