Transgendered lit

I've just been asked by someone on LJ to explain what I mean by a transgendered genre. Below is what I wrote. It's awfully muddled, and I hope to sort it out by March 6th when I'm giving a paper on this. Question: do people want me to post the paper? I do intend to write this one.

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"Transgendered fiction" ok, this is tentative, but all the comments I;m reading in the child development literature define maturity in terms of empathy. Animal behaviourists define maturity in terms of the closing down of curiousity. What I am interested in is the reading choices of the 10-15 yr old age group. This is the age at wich the child development literature emphaises children looking to problem books, to developing emotional outreach etc, etc, and wanting books that are relevant to them.

All the questionnaires that I have skimmed so far (too many to tackle until I'm home) are saying that they were interested in other things and people, ideas not emotions, objects not relationhips. If you go back to the child development literature this is identified as immature, and more common among science related children.

And it becomes a gender issue because it is associated with boys. So what we are looking at is a bunch of children who have *are*reading, which is mostly identified as a female activity, but have developed a "male" reading protocol.

And I'm still trying to figure out what all this means and how it manifests and how I can demonstrate it.

Farah