With a focus on current events, race, and the complex role of identity, this text provides a much-needed update to the ways representations and performances of gender and sexualities through literacy practices are viewed in educational and sociocultural contexts.

Section I. Gender, Sexualities, and Early Childhood Literacies 1. Navigating Gender and Social Influences on Early Literacy Development 2. Preschool-Aged Children’s Gender Identity Development: Exploring Gender Through Multicultural Literature 3. Child’s Play: Reading and Remaking Gendered Action Texts with Toys Section II. Gender, Sexualities, and Childhood Literacies 4. A Literacy of Resistance: Girlhood and Domestic Violence 5. Gender in the Making: Literacies and Identities in Girls’ Self-Initiated Making Activities 6. Understanding How Indigenous Latinx Children Express Gender Identities Section III. Gender, Sexualities, and Adolescent Literacies Chapter 7. "Holy gendered resource, Batman!": Examining the Broader Application of Comics and Superhero Fiction Beyond Their Restrictive Relationship with Boys 8. "This Is Why We Talk About Race and Sexuality, Too": Challenging White Feminism in and Through Literacy 9. How Gender and Intersectionality Inform Adolescent Literacy 10. "Outside Voices": Justice-System Involved Adolescent Males Writing Their Identities 11. Embedding the Complexities of Gender Identity Through a Pedagogy of Refusal: Learning the Body as Literacy Alongside Youth 12. Breaking Gender Expectations: Adolescents’ Critical Rewriting of a Trans Young Adult Novel 13. Defining Gender and Sexuality in LGBTQ Memoirs Section IV. Gender, Sexualities, and Adult Literacies 14. Performing and Resisting Toxic Masculinities on Sports News Comment Boards 15. Transnational Women’s Online Literacies: Writing as Social Action 16. Diverse Men Making Media: Creating Cultural (Re)Constructions of Gender and Race 17. Reading Fatherhood: The Importance of Fathers in Children’s Literacy Development

"Comprehending the vulgarity of how dominant powers have existed and continued to exist at the expense of gender articulation, gender rights, and gender differences is an effort in which the authors of this book engage. To understand this is to begin to understand how gender is included within the complexities of intersectionality.….This volume offers ways in which to begin to enter a conversation [on these topics]."--From the Foreword by Shirley R. Steinberg, University of Calgary, Canada"This collection shines new light on some of the darkest corners of literacy formation. Not only does it walk readers through the nuanced evolution of the connection of literacy to sexuality and gender, but in doing so it reminds readers that everyone has a stake in how literacy is either encouraged or discouraged based on each unique situation. This text provides an excellent starting place for any number of discussions on how far we still have to go in pursuit of what it means not only to engage diverse literacies but also how to allow them to thrive."--Elaine O’Quinn, Appalachian State University, USA