Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T22:27:47.090Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Queer Theory's Child and Children's Literature Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kenneth Kidd
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In 2002 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson published an essay entitled “what is queer theory doing with the child?,” addressing work in the 1990s by Michael Moon and the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the “protogay” child. Something inappropriate, even scandalous, was their answer, as one might surmise from the accusatory shape of the question. In their reading, Moon and Sedgwick essentialize rather than interrogate the protogay child, such that said child becomes “an anti-theoretical moment, resistant to analysis, itself the figure deployed as resistance” (36). For Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson, queer theory is insufficiently alert to the lessons of poststructuralist theory and especially to the ongoing interrogation of “child” and “childhood.” Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson specialize in childhood studies, and Lesnik-Oberstein is a well-known scholar of children's literature. Her 1994 Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child extends and takes inspiration from Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), which ushered into children's literature studies a powerful and lasting skepticism about “childhood” and “children's literature.”

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 182 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abate, Michelle Ann. “From Cold War Lesbian Pulp to Contemporary Young Adult Novels: Vin Packer's Spring Fire, M. E. Kerr's Deliver Us from Evie, and Marijane Meaker's Fight against Fifties Homophobia.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 32.3 (2007): 231–51. Print.Google Scholar
Abate, Michelle Ann, and Kidd, Kenneth, eds. Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature. U of Michigan P, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Beckwith, Osmond. “The Oddness of Oz.” 1961. Children's Literature 5 (1976): 74–91. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Robin. “‘Too Realistic’ and ‘Too Distorted’: The Attack on Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy and the Gaze of the Queer Child.” Critical Matrix 12.1–2 (2001): 26–47. Print.Google Scholar
Bruhm, Steven, and Hurley, Natasha, eds. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Bruhm, Steven, and Hurley, Natasha, eds. “Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.” Introduction. Bruhm and Hurley, Curiouser ix–xxxviii.Google Scholar
Cart, Michael, and Jenkins, Christine, eds. The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969–2004. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Clark, Beverly Lyon. Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children's Literature in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Cobb, Michael. “Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children.” Criticism 47.1 (2005): 119–30. Print.Google Scholar
Crisp, Thomas. “The Trouble with Rainbow Boys.” Children's Literature in Education 39.4 (2008): 237–61. Print.Google Scholar
Cummins, June. “Understood Betsy, Understood Nation: Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Willa Cather Queer America.” Children's Literature 32 (2004): 15–40. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cuseo, Alan A. Homosexual Characters in YA Novels: A Literary Analysis, 1969–1982. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Ford, Elizabeth A. “H/Z: Why Lesléa Newman Makes Heather into Zoe.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 23.3 (1998): 128–33. Print.Google Scholar
Hollindale, Peter. Signs of Childness in Children's Books. Stroud: Thimble, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Hughes, Felicity A. “Children's Literature: Theory and Practice.” ELH 45.3 (1978): 542–61. Print.Google Scholar
Inness, Sherrie A. “Is Nancy Drew Queer? Popular Reading Strategies for the Lesbian Reader.” Women's Studies 26.3–4 (1997): 343–72. Print.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Christine A. “Young Adult Novels with Gay/Lesbian Characters and Themes, 1969–1992: A Historical Reading of Content, Gender, and Narrative Distance.” Journal of Youth Services in Libraries 7.1 (1993): 43–55. Print.Google Scholar
Kenneth, Kidd. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Kincaid, James. Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Kincaid, James. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Karín, Lesnik-Oberstein. Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Karín, Lesnik-Oberstein, and Thomson, Stephen. “What Is Queer Theory Doing with the Child?” Parallax 8.1 (2002): 35–46. Print.Google Scholar
McGillis, Roderick. “‘A Fairy Tale Is Just a Fairytale’: George MacDonald and the Queering of Fairy.” Marvels and Tales 17.1 (2003): 86–99. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Michael, Moon. A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Nelson, Claudia. “David and Jonathan—and Saul—Revisited: Homodomestic Patterns in British Boys' Magazine Fiction, 1880–1915.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 23.3 (1998): 120–27. Print.Google Scholar
Nodelman, Perry. “The Case of Children's Fiction; or, The Impossibility of Jacqueline Rose.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 10.3 (1985): 98–100. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children's Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Ohi, Kevin. Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pugh, Tison. Innocence, Sexuality, and the Queerness of Children's Literature. Routledge, forthcoming.Google Scholar
Pugh, Tison. “‘There Lived in the Land of Oz Two Queerly Made Men’: Queer Utopianism and Antisocial Eroticism in L. Frank Baum's Oz Series.” Marvels and Tales 22.2 (2008): 217–39. Print.Google Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction. 1984. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham: Duke UP, 2009. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thacker, Deborah. “Disdain or Ignorance? Literary Theory and the Absence of Children's Literature.” Lion and the Unicorn 24.1 (2000): 1–17. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tosenberger, Catherine. “Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction.” Children's Literature 36 (2008): 185–207. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tribunella, Eric L. Melancholia and Maturation: The Use of Trauma in American Children's Literature. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Trites, Roberta Seelinger. “Queer Performances: Lesbian Politics in Little Women.” Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays. Ed. Alberghene, Janice M. and Clark, Beverly Lyon. New York: Garland, 1999. 139–60. Print.Google Scholar