The Queer Child: or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth

Century (review)

Gabrielle Owen

The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 35, Number 1, January 2011, pp. 101-106
(Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.2011.0007

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/426905

Access provided at 19 Mar 2020 11:35 GMT with no institutional affiliation

 Book Reviews 101

———. The Child as Poet: Myth or Reality? Boston: Horn Book, 1984.
Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 2008.
———. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 2nd ed. New York: Longman, 1996.
Sloan, Glenna. “But Is It Poetry?” Children’s Literature in Education 32.1 (2001):
45–56.
Sorby, Angela. Schoolroom Poets: Childhood and the Place of American Poetry,
1865–1917. Lebanon, NH: U of New Hampshire P, 2005.
Styles, Morag. From the Garden to the Street: Three Hundred Years of Children’s
Poetry. London: Cassell, 1998.
Tarr, Anita. “‘Still so much work to be done’: Taking up the Challenge of Children’s
Poetry.” Rev. of From the Garden to the Street: An Introduction to 300 Years of
Poetry for Children by Morag Styles. Children’s Literature 28 (2000): 195–201.
Tarr, Anita, and Richard Flynn. Introduction. “‘The trouble isn’t making poems, the
trouble’s finding somebody that will listen to them’: Negotiating a Place for Poetry
in Children’s Literature Studies.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 27.1
(2002): 2–3.
Thomas, Jr. Joseph, T. Poetry’s Playground: The Culture of Contemporary American
Children’s Poetry. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2007.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth
Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009.
Queer theory is looking at children. Perhaps its first glance was the collection
of essays Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004), edited by Steven
Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, which gathered work by Judith Halberstam, James
Kincaid, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner, and indeed Kathryn Bond
Stockton herself. These essays represent moments over the past twenty years
when queer theory, however briefly, has turned to children as a site for inquiry,
a powerful location for questions of identity, sexuality, language, and culture.
Stockton’s The Queer Child: or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century
is the first of its kind, the first extended meditation on both queerness and
childhood. Stockton looks to twentieth-century representations of children in
film and fiction to read for images that have recurred throughout the century:
the ghostly gay child, the grown homosexual who is made childish, the child
queered by Freud, and the child queered by innocence, color, or money. These
images of children are seldom acknowledged or accounted for in traditional
social histories. Stockton does not do the work of social history, does not
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linger long on the discourses of sociology, medicine, or law, but instead aims
to supplement these modes of history-making with the stories told by novels
and films, stories rich with the gaps, overlaps, and excesses of meaning from
which the queer child appears.
The organization of the book can feel thematically strange or arbitrary,
though this feature is likely purposeful. Stockton divides The Queer Child
into three sections of paired chapters, set up to “freely” explore “three realms
of growing sideways: sideways relations, motions, and futures” (52). These
notions of sideways growth often collapse into one another or fragment entirely
in different manifestations. The Queer Child is stylistically playful, playing
with the repetition of words and metaphors, a practice of scholarly writing
queer theory has taken from deconstruction to reveal the uncertainties and
movement of language. Thus, the initial sections of the introduction may feel
unwieldy. Stockton’s most vivid and articulate moments arrive in her readings
of twentieth-century novels and films. In five chapters, she lucidly unfolds
scenes from both the page and the screen to bring the queer child into view.
The introduction, “Growing Sideways, or Why Children Appear to Get
Queerer in the Twentieth Century,” is much less an outline of what is to
come than a substantive argument framing Stockton’s theoretically inventive
terms and concepts. For Stockton, all children are queer. In one sense, there
is the gay child, the child understood as having same-sex desires, a child
whose desires are still unthinkable, or only available retrospectively, in our
language or representations. Stockton wonders if we are getting closer to
the gay child in the present tense, the day that a person might say, “I am a
gay child” (19). However, she is led to ask: “What this specific labeling will
mean for children’s creative occulting of themselves in either metaphors or
narrative strings is, of course, anyone’s guess. What will get lost through this
way of being found?” (19). Children are assumed to be straight, Stockton
says, but really they are assumed to be “not-yet-straight,” since “they cannot,
according to our concepts, advance to adulthood until we say it’s time” (6).
In this sense, Stockton explains, “the child from the standpoint of ‘normal’
adults is always queer” (7).
These twentieth-century conceptions produce a number of curious and
interrelated versions of the queer child, including the homosexual who is
figured as childlike or immature in psychological discourses. Stockton dis-
covers revisions of this figure in works as far-ranging as Radclyffe Hall’s
Well of Loneliness (1928) and Tim Burton’s film Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory (2005), where Johnny Depp plays an androgynous and child-like
Willy Wonka. Closely related is the child queered by Freud. Freud “queered”
the child by locating what he called “sexual perversions” in infancy and
childhood, perversions that he considered to be a natural part of human de-
velopment. Thus, Stockton argues, Freud constructs a queer child who only
 Book Reviews 103

becomes heterosexual through “proper” development, or development aided

by psychotherapy.
Stockton adds to this list the child queered by innocence, refiguring the
Romantic child as queer in its estrangement from adult experience. Innocence,
Stockton argues, makes children strange. We can see the child queered by
innocence in versions of Lolita and in the vigilante girl in David Slade’s
psychological thriller Hard Candy (2005), where these girls are at different
moments made strange by an innocence that distinguishes them from the
adults intending them harm. These queerly innocent depictions become even
more apparent when we think about moments when these same characters are
depicted as knowing, sexualized, or violent children, depictions that disrupt
the assumed division between child and adult.
Finally, there is the child queered by color, who because of race is fig-
ured as too wise, too experienced, too strong, or too street-smart to occupy
the innocent positioning of childhood. Stockton discusses, for example, the
African child soldiers depicted in Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond (2006)
where children once thought in need of protection become intruders. The
child queered by color is closely related to the child queered by money,
or who has premature knowledge of money. Stockton shows the way class
markers and poverty work to make children strange, alien, or queer in films
like Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994) and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Crea-
tures (1994). Stockton explains, “[E]xperience is still hard to square with
innocence, making depictions of streetwise children, who are often neither
white nor middle-class, hard to square with ‘children’” (32). All of these
versions of the queer child move in and out of one another, and Stockton
offers “numerous braidings” of them in her readings (36). In Fred Shepisi’s
Six Degrees of Separation (1993), for example, Stockton finds interwoven
“strands of the child queered by color, the ghostly gay child, the grown ho-
mosexual, and quite dramatically the Freudian child” (56). These abundant
and fragmented conceptualizations speak to the breadth of her perspective,
the many locations she went looking and the varied ideas of the child found
in twentieth-century imaginings.
The first chapter, “The Smart Child Is the Masochistic Child,” reaches back
to the start of the twentieth century with a reading of Henry James’s novella
The Pupil (1891) exploring the “sideways relation” of man and boy through
the lens of masochism. Masochism overturns power relations in profound
ways by conceptualizing pain as something that can be desired, even willed
and orchestrated, by its recipient. Masochism has the conceptual power, then,
to refigure children as desiring and orchestrating their subordination and
suffering at the hands of adults. Stockton reads Venus in Furs, case studies
by Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Gilles Deleuze’s reframing of masochism
in “Coldness and Cruelty” to reveal a boy in a position of power over his
104 The Lion and the Unicorn

young teacher in The Pupil, a boy who with his teacher takes pleasure in
suffering, and whose love is violent and intense. She offers The Pupil as a
radical depiction of a queer child’s agency—more radical even than that of
Edward Carpenter, whose essay “Affection in Education” (1899) argued for
the purposeful homoeroticism of relations between boys and their teachers.
The Pupil serves as a way of speaking back to present cultural preoccupa-
tions with pedophilia and raises important questions about what it means for
a child to consent to pleasure, to seduce or to harm an adult, or to consent
to harm to oneself.
The second chapter, “Why the (Lesbian) Child Requires an Interval of
Animal,” explores the sideways relation between girls and dogs in three early
twentieth-century novels: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Hall’s The
Well of Loneliness, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Stockton suggests
that dogs work as metaphor, not simply in the sense of substitution, but in a
new theorization of metaphor that allows the suspension of time for women
who love other women. The adult women in these novels are given queer
childhoods through memory and narrative, but they are also rendered childish
adults through the delay of heterosexual marriage or the stylistic suspension
of language and plot. Delay is important to Stockton as an alternative way to
talk about and conceptualize growth. Growth usually implies forward motion,
progress, or development, but delay allows for movement in unpredictable
directions. Stockton explores the queer ways of being made possible within
delay, or what she calls “growing sideways.”
In the third and fourth chapters, Stockton delves into “sideways motions,”
which she understands as closely linked to the issue of motives. Her examples
come via intricate and unexpected readings of novels and films that make
children’s agency a central concern. “What Drives the Sexual Child? The
Mysterious Motions of Children’s Motives” focuses primarily on Lolita, in-
cluding Nabokov’s 1955 novel and film versions by Stanley Kubrick (1965)
and Adrian Lyne (1996). Stockton argues that the metaphors of animal and
vehicle that describe Lolita’s physical movements (or motions) indicate her
sexual desire and willful action (or her motives). “Feeling Like Killing? Mur-
derous Motives of the Queer Child” turns to criminal intent in two stories of
murder: Truman Capote’s novel In Cold Blood (1965) and the film Heavenly
Creatures (1994). In different ways, these two stories feature childhood as the
location for motive, even for adult actions. Stockton theorizes the way motive
is itself retrospective, applied only after an action has occurred, conceptually
linking motive to constructions of childhood and what Stockton (per Eve
Sedgwick) calls the “protogay” child. Even these constructions find themselves
retrospectively loaded with motives and meanings that are intended to explain
the later actions of the adult self. Motives move sideways, Stockton argues,
by putting the self-as-child beside the adult in a queer temporal logic that
 Book Reviews 105

reveals the shiftiness of motives, of meanings, and of the child.

The fifth chapter, “Oedipus Raced, or the Child Queered by Color,” is paired
with the conclusion to explore the complex intersections of race, money, and
representations of the queer child. In two films, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
(1967) and Six Degrees of Separation, an African American visitor becomes
a son to white parents, but only through the “backwards birth” created by
marriage, by association, and by the realization of liberal values these white
parents thought they had all along (192). This queer child shifts roles in both
films, queered by color and money, at different moments considered a visitor,
a son, and an intruder. Readers may recognize sections of the fifth chapter
from Stockton’s essay in Curiouser, “Growing Sideways, or Versions of the
Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the
Interval of Animal,” where she began to sketch out some of the conceptual
categories we find in The Queer Child. The book’s conclusion, “Money is
the Child’s Queer Ride,” does not sum up, but instead extends these readings
of queerness, color, and money to the films Hoop Dreams and Charlie and
the Chocolate Factory where Stockton finds “sideways futures” in dreams
of the NBA and in an economy of candy.
The sheer number of topics touched upon in this book may be too sprawling
or loosely connected for some readers, though the sharp insights and unex-
pected intersections are well worth the journey. It may be surprising, too, that
Stockton focuses primarily on fictional sources in a book exploring questions
of identity and culture. Stockton’s occasional references to cultural texts like
reality television, The Oprah Winfrey Show, legal discourse, and personal
narratives suggest a broader sociological inquiry, but her research centers on
literature and film. In the introduction, Stockton offers a justification for this
move, explaining: “[T]he silences surrounding the queerness of children hap-
pen to be broken—loquaciously broken and broken almost only—by fictional
forms” (2). Another reason for this focus on fiction may be that she sees all
of the subject positions she explores, including queer and child, as fictional
themselves. She understands, decades after Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of
Peter Pan (1984) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), that there is
no real child, real gender, or real queer—there is only the language we use
to make meaning out of our experiences of self and world. In this sense, the
texts of medicine or sociology are, like fictional forms, also imagined through
language and culture. The Queer Child features novels and films, but gestures
toward other cultural sources as a backdrop or cultural dilemma, opening up
rich terrain for scholars of childhood studies, children’s literature, and queer
theory. Queer theory is looking at children. And Stockton looks intensely,
unflinchingly—grappling with the charged and often enigmatic inextricability
of sexuality, politics, and the child.
106 The Lion and the Unicorn

Gabrielle Owen is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh, where

she studies children’s literature, queer theory, and composition. Her article
“Queer Theory Wrestles the ‘Real’ Child: Impossibility, Identity, and Lan-
guage in Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan” appeared in Children’s
Literature Association Quarterly.