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  • Queering the Children’s Canon: Contemporary Critics Respond
  • Kristen Proehl (bio)
Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011.

In her contribution to this collection, literary scholar Jody Norton writes that “‘children’s literature’ is a deceptively simple term” (293). With topics ranging from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to online gaming media, the seventeen essays included in Over the Rainbow present abundant evidence of her claim. Inspired by the dual anniversaries of John Donovan’s I’ll Get There: It Better Be Worth the Trip (1969), the first young adult novel to openly address homosexuality, and the Stonewall Rebellion, Over the Rainbow gathers together some of the most significant essays on queer children’s and young adult literature published between 1997 and 2010. While queer-theoretical treatments of children’s literature have been relatively slow to emerge in recent literary studies (1), Over the Rainbow is nevertheless a testament to the exceptional, if comparatively limited, scholarship in this area of study over the past fourteen years. Abate, Kidd, and the contributing authors not only reveal how queer theory enhances our understanding of children’s literature, but they also persuasively articulate why children’s literature matters to queer theory, queer studies, and LGBTQ history.

The critical neglect of LGBT children’s and YA literature might be attributed to the pervasive cultural anxieties surrounding the intersections of childhood and sexuality, combined with the frequent erasure of LGBT characters, themes, and issues within children’s literature. One exception to this trend, however, as Abate and Kidd note, is Kathryn Kent’s Making Girls Into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity. Several other important literary studies, although not focused exclusively upon queer children’s literature, are also worth noting: Abate’s Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History; Rachel Adams’s queer-theoretical scholarship on Carson McCullers’s fiction in Sideshow U.S.A.; and Gary Richards’s analysis of queer child figures in Harper Lee’s and McCullers’s fiction in Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1836–1961. [End Page 287]

Abate and Kidd have organized the essays in Over the Rainbow into three different topical sections: part one focuses upon queer-theoretical readings of canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s texts; part two examines post-Stonewall LGBT children’s literature; and part three explores the interactions of queer theory and readers across a diverse array of children’s media. As the editors explain, the essays included in part one reveal how “queerness is central rather than marginal” to the tradition of children’s literature (1–2). The collection opens with Claudia Nelson’s “David and Jonathan—and Saul—Revisited,” an insightful essay that looks beyond the “school story,” a genre of fiction often noted for its homoeroticism, and to Victorian adventure stories for boys. Nelson persuasively argues that “the opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality” in Victorian Britain “was less important than that between domesticity and antidomesticity” (16); “homoemotionalism,” she explains, was not considered incompatible with domesticity and was, in fact, often celebrated rather than censured (16). Roberta Seelinger Trites’s “Queer Performances: Lesbian Politics in Little Women” and Robin Berstein’s “The Queerness of Harriet the Spy” offer nuanced, original readings of two canonical and widely popular children’s texts. Bernstein explores the radical gender queerness of Harriet, while Trites focuses upon the homoeroticism of the March family household and explores what it means to “read” Little Women as a lesbian text. June Cummins’s “Understood Betsy, Understood Nation” considers Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Understood Betsy and its protagonist’s transplantation from an urban to a rural environment; she argues that Fisher simultaneously complicates gender roles and American identity (60). Tison Pugh’s “There lived in the land of Oz two queerly made men” offers a fascinating reading of L. Frank Baum’s Oz as an “erotically antisocial queer utopia” predicated paradoxically upon both nonprocreation and the “eternal presence of children” (88, 99). Finally, Eric Tribunella’s “Refusing the Queer Potential” offers thoughtful insights into the “double-life” of A Separate Peace: a book widely...

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