Not surprisingly, foes of the yellow press were more eager to disparage than define. Thus were the yellow journals accused of such malevolent effects as "corrupting the young and debauching the old, championing vice and lewdness, and defying respectability and decency."39 The practice of yellow journalism was likened, moreover, to a "contest of madmen for the primacy of the sewer."40

The Journal gloated about its extravagant spending on newsgathering. Not atypical was this claim, in which the Journal disparaged its rivals, notably the New York Sun: "The reason the old journalism doesn't like the Journal is that the Journal gets the news, no matter what it costs. The Sun and its kind cannot afford to spend money since the Journal has taken their readers away from them, and the probability is they would not do so if they could afford it. They are still living in the Silurian age."16

This cluster of social ills is rooted in what Garfinkel (1967) referred to as the “normals” view of gender: The belief that there are two, and only two, gender categories; that all people, with very few exceptions, fit neatly into one of those two gender categories; and that all people, with very few exceptions, fit neatly into the gender category they were assigned at birth.

The project of this dissertation is to confront societal norms around gender, gender identity, and gender expression in order to open up spaces for children and adults to interrogate and explore their relationship to their own and others’ genders.

is a social justice concern not only for the estimated one in 500 American children who are “significantly gender variant or transgender” (Brill & Pepper, 2013, p. 2), and for the 4-6 percent of children who exhibit “gender variant behavior” (Hein & Berger, 2012; Van Beijsterveldt, Hudziak, & Boomsma, 2006), but for all learners, regardless of their gender identity or expression.

Recent research suggests that the most frequent victims of bullying in K-12 schools are gender variant children: Those whose clothing, hairstyles, mannerisms, or other forms of self expression diverge from accepted norms for their assigned gender

Yet a growing body of research makes it clear that children begin to internalize dominant beliefs about gender as early as preschool

Cultural expectations about gender are folded into, for example, the spoken and tacit rules for how women and men, girls and boys, should dress and carry their bodies and engage with others and make decisions about relationships, family, and careers.

he African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass recalled how reading two books set him on his life's course: the political essays and dialogues in The Columbian Orator, edited by David Blight (New York University Press, 1998), which Douglass read in early adolescence; and the piquant documents of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Because of this, reading education has to go beyond scientific considerations to include the social,political, and cultural dimensions, if our students are to become the kinds of readers we want in ademocratic society.

It is no longer enough to fill the classroom with high-quality books and read aloud one or twoeach day. Reading aloud and creating a literate environment are necessary but insufficient forimplementing a literature-based approach to reading instruction. A shift in theoretical understandingsneeds to accompany this shift in instructional resources

Reading a great book changes us.

but the message is too important to be filed away. This work must be must shared with educators.

When classroom collections are largely by and about white people, white children have many more opportunities to make connections and become proficient readers.