Two by Two: Heteronormativity and the Noah Story for Children

Abstract

Purpose

In this paper, I look at one of the most archetypal of children’s stories, that of Noah and the flood, to understand the classificatory schema it presents.

Methodology/approach

Drawing on an analysis of 47 children’s picture books based on the biblical story, including those held in the historical archive of the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton, I show that the single most consistent frame for the story is the trope of “two by two”, referencing both the animals and people in the story. The books in the sample, intended for children aged 4–10 years, were published between 1905 and 2006, and are between 14 and 60 pages long.

Findings

The repeated emphasis on mated pairs, one male and one female, serves to reproduce the twinned categories of gender and heterosexuality in an overtly “natural” fashion that ties the animal bodies to human social divisions. These constitutive categories of social division – gender and heterosexuality – then become central schemas for organizing people and experience. I draw on Martin (2000) arguing that children encounter picture books before they have had experience in actual social life. Therefore, the books help instill these primary categorization schemas in children, creating the social groupings and relations among them that order their worlds.

Originality/value

The argument makes a strongly causal role for culture and argues that the impact/importance of the content of children’s books may be subordinate to the role they play in helping establish classificatory schema that help construct children’s understandings of the social world.

Citation

Corse, S.M. (2017), "Two by Two: Heteronormativity and the Noah Story for Children", Gender, Sex, and Sexuality Among Contemporary Youth (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 23), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 221-237. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-466120170000023010