It’s Not the Book, It’s Not the Author, It’s the Award: The Lambda Literary Award and the Case for Strategic Essentialism

On September 16, 2009, the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) released a statement revising their eligibility guidelines for the Lambda Literary Award, the most prestigious citation offered for LGBT books and authors. This criteria, which demands that an author must self-identify as a member of the LGBT family of writers, has been met with considerable disapproval within the field of children’s and young adult literature, with critics decrying the decision as unfair and essentialist. By arguing for the deployment of strategic essentialism as a discourse of resistance and by working to complicate discussions of essentialism within the field of children’s and young adult literature, the author of this article confronts the condemnation levied at the Lambda Literary Foundation and makes the case for the necessity of establishing the ‘‘Lammys’’ as an ‘‘insider-only’’ citation