38 - Childhood Studies: Children’s and Young Adult Literatures

Summary

Children, childhood, and children's culture are central to the construction and enactment of gender and sexuality. The child links parents and relatives, teachers and administrators, healthcare workers and child experts, and whole communities of citizens in a broad web of relations across which power operates. Activities or pleasures that are sometimes considered perversions in adulthood may be the more common expressions of desire and pleasure in childhood. The ways childhood sexualities defy expectations of adult sexualities point to what some critics have described as the queerness of children. Children's texts have long included representations of same-sex desires and pleasures, even as they appear distinct to childhood. Though fairy tales are popularly associated with heteronormative outcomes, some include or even center on same-sex relationships. Some LGBT fiction for young adults has understandably assumed didactic and consciousness-raising tones, with homosexuality in the context of heteronormative culture constructed as a problem.