BOOKS
The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton
/ Aaron Nielsen
01.11.10
The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century
Kathryn Bond Stockton
Duke University Press
$22.95
312 p.
In The Queer Child, Stockton sets out to illuminate representations of queer children, both those that are explicit and also those ghosted in the backgrounds and margins of Western texts and films spanning the last century. Given the breadth of her exploration Stockton relies on an antiquated definition of ‘queer’ as weird and strange. She derives the book’s subtitle and one of its central constructs from the word’s 16th century German origins: quer, meaning “across, at a right angle, diagonally or transverse.”
In her introduction Stockton examines how our concept of the modern child has been depicted in literature and informed by historical incidents, such as the inception of child labor laws and the Mary Ellen Affair, which created the first laws against child abuse after a social worker successfully prosecuted abusive parents by arguing that children were protected by the law that prevented cruelty to animals. Stockton also points to the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case In re Gault, which raised the question of whether or not children should be treated as equal to “people.” Stockton writes, “The child is…defined as a kind of legal strangeness. It is a body said to need protections more than freedoms. And it is a creature who cannot consent to its sexual pleasure, or divorce its parents, or design its education—at least not by law.”
Stockton lays out how the child has moved from a nonentity, not even worthy of protections against abuse, into a romanticized, enforced innocence. This innocence can only fall away when adult society permits it to, through various milestones referred to as “growing up.” Stockton contends that the phrase “growing up” implies an upward, teleological movement: the “average” or “normal” (read as future heterosexual) child will “grow up” through various events (puberty, first dates, proms, etc.) that eventually see the child arriving at adulthood, where the growing ends: the adult is married and produces children of its own. Given how heteronormative “growing up” is, how does the queer child fit into this ascension? Stockton asserts that it does not.
The queer child lives outside of our culture’s paradigm of childhood because queerness is so married to presumptions of subversive sexuality that it’s severely problematic to apply the term to children, who are not allowed to consent to sexual pleasure, let alone pleasure that is seen as subversive. “Growing sideways” is Stockton’s analogue for queer children, who given their abject nature, are unable to “grow up.” According to Stockton, a queer grows sideways due to a myriad of factors, such as their ethnicity, their relationships with dogs and pedophiles, or even their lust for candy. Stockton’s outline of the evolution of the present delineation of childhood is engaging and insightful, but the actual meat of her book, the ways in which Stockton chronicles “growing sideways” are sometimes tenuous.
Kathryn Bond Stockton
Duke University Press
$22.95
312 p.
In The Queer Child, Stockton sets out to illuminate representations of queer children, both those that are explicit and also those ghosted in the backgrounds and margins of Western texts and films spanning the last century. Given the breadth of her exploration Stockton relies on an antiquated definition of ‘queer’ as weird and strange. She derives the book’s subtitle and one of its central constructs from the word’s 16th century German origins: quer, meaning “across, at a right angle, diagonally or transverse.”
In her introduction Stockton examines how our concept of the modern child has been depicted in literature and informed by historical incidents, such as the inception of child labor laws and the Mary Ellen Affair, which created the first laws against child abuse after a social worker successfully prosecuted abusive parents by arguing that children were protected by the law that prevented cruelty to animals. Stockton also points to the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case In re Gault, which raised the question of whether or not children should be treated as equal to “people.” Stockton writes, “The child is…defined as a kind of legal strangeness. It is a body said to need protections more than freedoms. And it is a creature who cannot consent to its sexual pleasure, or divorce its parents, or design its education—at least not by law.”
Stockton lays out how the child has moved from a nonentity, not even worthy of protections against abuse, into a romanticized, enforced innocence. This innocence can only fall away when adult society permits it to, through various milestones referred to as “growing up.” Stockton contends that the phrase “growing up” implies an upward, teleological movement: the “average” or “normal” (read as future heterosexual) child will “grow up” through various events (puberty, first dates, proms, etc.) that eventually see the child arriving at adulthood, where the growing ends: the adult is married and produces children of its own. Given how heteronormative “growing up” is, how does the queer child fit into this ascension? Stockton asserts that it does not.
The queer child lives outside of our culture’s paradigm of childhood because queerness is so married to presumptions of subversive sexuality that it’s severely problematic to apply the term to children, who are not allowed to consent to sexual pleasure, let alone pleasure that is seen as subversive. “Growing sideways” is Stockton’s analogue for queer children, who given their abject nature, are unable to “grow up.” According to Stockton, a queer grows sideways due to a myriad of factors, such as their ethnicity, their relationships with dogs and pedophiles, or even their lust for candy. Stockton’s outline of the evolution of the present delineation of childhood is engaging and insightful, but the actual meat of her book, the ways in which Stockton chronicles “growing sideways” are sometimes tenuous.
