Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children

Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale, by Kenneth B. Kidd. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Pp. 288. $56.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.

No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, by Lee Edelman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. 208. $74.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.

Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Pp. 408. $68.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

Children are forced to do some incredible things. They are, as we all know, required to represent our future, by which we mean that they have futures we can't yet account for, but futures for which we nonetheless hold out hope. But children are also tokens of the past—they remind us, perhaps, of when in our own histories we were young, of how we all made a tour through childhood, and of how that tour was laced with nostalgic goodness or traumatic horror, or some combination of both. Children, that is, remind us of time. But timing isn't everything, and so children are also forced to solicit our anxieties, our delights, our ethics, our love, or really any form of our attention, especially when politics and moral values are made an issue. In fact, when it comes down to it, and it always seems to come down to it, children can be most anything, other than themselves. And because they are pressured to do the work of placeholders for so much political, cultural, affective activity, they are everywhere, and they're very important.

So there's nothing extremely new about the sudden number of texts devoted to thinking about children in recent queer and queer-friendly work, especially since psychoanalytic theory, with its descriptions of infantile development and family dramas, has been crucial in the formation of "queer theory." It would be a mistake, indeed, to call the current moment "queer theory's turn to the child." Nevertheless, some exciting books have been devoting much ink to the linking of children and queerness. As Kathryn Bond Stockton writes in one of the more impressive essays on such mingling, the queer and the child are a confusing coupling because dominant culture has a "tendency to treat all children as straight while we culturally consider them asexual."¹ To bring these categories—these genres—of being into relation is not only difficult, but it's also dangerous. In fact, a number of writers who are anthologized in the recent collection edited by Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, have faced more than a little controversy: James Kincaid's "now famous 1992 book Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture met with outrage in England, where Tory members of Parliament tried to have the book banned . . . Eve Sedgwick found herself in the headlines for her work on Jane Austen and the masturbating girl . . . Ellis Hanson's dean at Cornell received some one thousand letters of protest demanding that he be fired for teaching a seminar titled 'The Sexual Child.'"² Making children sexy, making children queer, is playing with matches. And given the character of the current ultraconservative, values-worried political climate, some fire is sure to ignite.

But there's more at stake than scandalizing those who would prefer children to be straight, yet not sexual. There's more at stake than producing alternative accounts about how children are often riddled with queer sexuality. What I suggest throughout this review essay is that something about children—less as actual beings and more as what they are made to signify—livens up queer theory. Under my review are three recent books, each with children as their main sources of attention and concern, in which I'll explore the variety of ways figures of children have produced a wealth of scholarly insights that are important for queer theory. There's something fresh happening on this playground, perhaps because...