The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

by Stockton, Kathryn Bond

• ISBN13: 9780822343868
• ISBN10: 082234386X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-09-15
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains inThe Queer Child, where she examines children's strangeness, even some children's subliminal "gayness," in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of children emerge as this book illuminates the child queered by innocence, the child queered by colour, the child queered by Freud, the child queered by money, and the grown homosexual metaphorically seen as a child (or as an animal), alongside the gay child. What might the notion of a "gay" child do to conceptions of the child? How might it outline the pain, closets, emotional labours, sexual motives, and sideways movements that attend all children, however we deny it? Engaging and challenging the work of sociologists, legal theorists, and historians, Stockton coins the term "growing sideways" to describe ways of growing that defy the usual sense of growing "up" in a linear trajectory toward full stature, marriage, reproduction, and the relinquishing of childish ways. Growing sideways is a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays. Contending that children's queerness is rendered and explored best in fictional forms, including literature, film, and television, Stockton offers dazzling readings of works ranging from novels by Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov to the moviesGuess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Hanging Garden, Heavenly Creatures, Hoop Dreams, and the 2005 remake ofWillie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The result is a fascinating look at children's masochism, their interactions with paedophiles and animals, their unfathomable, hazy motives (leading them at times into sex, seduction, delinquency, and murder), their interracial appetites, and their love of consumption and destruction through the alluring economy of sweets.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Growing Sideways, or Why Children Appear to Get Queerer in the Twentieth Century

Sideways Relations: "Pedophiles" and Animals

The Smart Child is the Masochistic Child: Pedagogy, Pedophilia, and the Pleasures of Harm

Why the (Lesbian) Child Requires an Interval of Animal: The Family Dog as a Time Machine

Sideways Motions: Sexual Motives, Criminal Motives

What Drives the Sexual Child? The Mysterious Motions of Children's Motives

Feeling Like Killing? Murderous Motives of the Queer Child

Sideways Futures: Color and Money

Oedipus Raced, or the Child Queered by Color: Birthing "Your" Parents via Intrusions

Conclusion: Money Is the Child's Queer Ride: Sexing and Racing around the Future

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.