First Impressions: Appearance and Identity

The patterns in terms of physical appearance reflected in the descriptions of the female and male characters in children’s fiction are the focus of this chapter. These repeated representations direct child readers towards gendered sets of features, attribute positive or negative associations to them and present these discourses uncritically for integration into child readers’ ideas about physical appearance and what is socially attended to. The most frequent appearance descriptors for each identity category, as reflected in high scoring collocates with the terms girl, woman, boy and man, reinforce stereotypical images of females and males respectively, with the majority of appearance modifiers relating to young females. For child readers these representations provide detailed descriptions of the aspects of human appearance which are significant in identification and assessment. As sketches of how girls and women should look or how boys and men should look, they are narrow and judgemental, always binary and bolster existing stereotypes of gender.