For the past dozen years I kept a children’s novel in my drawer, hoping one day to finish writing it between teaching, research, and meetings. The book began as a strategic challenge for myself, to write a queer children’s novel. While I was aware of some queer picture books and YA novels, I hadn’t read any for the middle grades, ages 8-12. What characteristics could I show in terms of gender and sexuality for that age group? How much desire, romance, love, cross-dressing would be enough but not too much for young readers? With this question, I refer both to the standards of schools and libraries, but also to what would be engaging or alienating to the kids themselves. A novel gives you the room and responsibility to create a whole world, and queerness, of course, is only one piece of this world. A novel allows you the words to truly create and examine nuanced and rich intersectionality.
What began as the adventures and love of a tomboy/nonbinary/trans boy/girl and her/their/his best friend took me back into the colonization and exploitation of my Southern California childhood. I found myself sitting beside my grandmother and listening to her stories of the Mexican revolution. I learned patience through her dementia. I struggled with anti-Mexican discrimination in the city where I lived, as I tried to understand my own place as a mixed Mexican-White kid. I found myself protecting my mother from anti-fat harassment. I held my friend as he suffered from grief over the death of his mother, while fighting back against the kids taunting him for not acting more “normal”. The process also unearthed the earth and the ways in which the land and water had been buried in concrete all around us, distancing us from learning from the land. We jumped on the opportunity for the joy of more loving relationships with the earth. Finally, like a good critical pedagogue, I attempted to craft a book that opened up questions about eco and social justice, rather than providing the correct answers. The Street Belongs to Us is as much a child’s adventure story as it is the culmination of 25 plus years of teaching and researching anti-oppression education, and as I watch it appear in libraries and bookstores, I realize it continues to be my most successful medium for presenting my ideas to the world.
This presentation starts from 12 mins 45 secs
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In this short film, I return to the street of my childhood that is the setting for my book The Street Belongs to Us. The Street Belongs to Us is as much a child’s adventure story as it is the culmination of 25 plus years of teaching and researching anti-oppression education, including the reclamation of our bodies and identities: gender-diverse, Mexican, mixed-race, working class, fat, neurodiverse, forgetful and grieving. The process of writing and filming also unearthed the earth and the ways in which the land and water had been buried in concrete all around us, distancing us from the land. In the prologue that is being read, the protagonists push aside the pollution and jump on the opportunity for the joy of more loving relationships with the earth.
Presenter
Karleen Pendleton Jiménez is a writer and professor of education, gender and social justice at Trent University. Her research explores intersections of queerness, gender, race and ethnicity through creative writing. She is the author of Lambda Literary Awards finalists Are You a Boy or a Girl? and How to Get a Girl Pregnant. She wrote the award-winning animated film Tomboy, and has been recognized by the American Library Association and the Vice Versa Awards for Excellence in the Gay and Lesbian Press. Selected book chapters and journal articles include: “Start with the Land: Groundwork for Chicana Pedagogy,” “ ‘I will whip my hair” and “hold my bow”: Gender-creativity in rural Ontario, “The Making of a Queer Latina Cartoon: Pedagogies of Border, Body, and Home,” and “Fat pedagogy for queers: Chicana Body Becoming in 4 Acts”. Her book Tomboys and Other Gender Heroes: Confessions from the Classroom explores queerness and homophobia in schools. Her new book The Street Belongs to Us (for 8 years old and up) explores intersections of gender diversity, ethnicity, and relationships with the land. She also wrote the screenplay for the award winning animated short film Tomboy.
