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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 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...