Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children

Description

Our culture has a dominant narrative about children: they are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, children are officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual. Curiouser is a book about this narrative and what happens when it takes an unexpected, or queer, turn-when the stories of childhood must confront a child whose play does not conform to the ideal of child (a)sexuality. The contributors to Curiouser examine the ostensibly simple representations of children that circulate through visual images, life narrative, children's literature, film, and novels. At issue in these essays are the stories we tell to children, the stories we tell about children, and the stories we tell ourselves as children-stories that ultimately frame what is normative and what is queer. From the fiction of Horatio Alger, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, and Guy Davenport to the spectacles of Michael Jackson, Calvin Klein, and The Exorcist; from the narrative structure of pedophilia to evangelical Christianity; from punk tomboyism to queer girl-scouting: these scholars of childhood and sexuality scrutinize queer childhood energies in an impressive range of cultural forms. Contributors: Lauren Berlant, U of Chicago; Andre Furlani, Concordia U; Judith Halberstam, U of California, San Diego; Ellis Hanson, Cornell U; Paul Kelleher; Kathryn Kent, Williams College; James Kincaid, U of Southern California; Richard Mohr, U of Illinois, Urbana; Michael Moon, Johns Hopkins U; Kevin Ohi, Boston College; Eric Savoy, U of Montreal; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, CUNY Graduate Center; Kathryn Bond Stockton, U of Utah; Michael Warner, Rutgers U. Steven Bruhm is associate professor of Englishat Mount St. Vincent University. He is the author of Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (Minnesota, 2000) and Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (1994). Natasha Hurley has taught children's literature and queer theory at Mount St. Vincent University and St. Mary's University in Halifax. Cover Half title Title page Contents Acknowledgements Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children - Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley Part I. Sexing the Child Producing Erotic Children - James R. Kincaid The Pedophilia of Everyday Life - Richard D. Mohr “The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes”: Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger - Michael Moon Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material) - Lauren Berlant Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Maisie Knew - Kevin Ohi Knowing Children: Desire and Interpretation in The Exorcist - Ellis Hanson Part II. The Queers We Might Have Been How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick How to Do Things with Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the “Child in Danger” - Paul Kelleher “No Trespassing”: Girl Scout Camp and the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere - Kathryn R. Kent Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy - Judith Halberstam Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood - Michael Warner Guy Davenport’s Pastorals of Childhood Sexuality - Andre Furlani Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw - Eric Savoy Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal - Kathryn Bond Stockton Contributors Publication History Index