Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature (review)

In 1991, when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick first published her essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” it represented a landmark as a queer-affirmative study of the discourse on childhood gender and sexual nonconformity. Not only did it acknowledge the existence of “proto-gay children,” it actually dared to imagine that scholarly and popular treatments of queer kids might do something other than try to erase or eradicate them (22). The twentieth anniversary of Sedgwick’s provocative and foundational essay, 2011 could be described as the year of the queer child—a somber rather than celebratory moment, in which the challenges of childhood are being acknowledged more fully. After a number of suicides by gay youth in fall 2010, the national media turned its attention to the trials of children bullied for being gay or being thought gay, and the It Gets Better campaign inspired gay and straight people to make videos addressed to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth telling them that life can indeed get better. Though children’s literature scholars have been attuned to issues of gender and sexuality for some time now, 2011 has seen two book-length projects published specifically on queer children’s literature: Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd’s Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Tison Pugh’s Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature.

The It Gets Better campaign, by implying that young people just need to survive a little while longer until reaching the safety of adulthood, acknowledges two taboo facts: childhood is a dangerous time; and children, rather than innocent little lambs, can be and often are ferocious and sometimes deadly tigers, especially to other children. Pugh’s book takes up this theme of childhood innocence and its relationship to sexuality and sexual knowledge. He notes that children are compelled to remain innocent, which typically involves remaining sexually ignorant and thus asexual, while at the same time learning or practicing to become heterosexual adults. According to Pugh, “This tension between innocence and sexuality renders much of children’s literature queer” (1). Children’s literature, Pugh, explains, is notably ambivalent about growing up and thus about attaining normative heterosexual adulthood. Heterosexuality, then, is what can seem “abnormal, deviant, and queer” in literature for children and young adults (1). In shifting the focus from the queerness of same-sex relations to that of an impending heterosexuality for most children, Pugh’s book makes a unique and provocative contribution to the conversation about the queer child. Pugh moves through a variety of critically and commercially successful works to examine how they negotiate in different ways the tension between innocence and heterosexuality which produces what he calls “the queerness of children’s literature.”

Pugh focuses on serial or series fiction because it is more likely to span longer periods of time, thus foregrounding child development and making the maintenance of innocence and the avoidance of heterosexuality harder to sustain. Examining the problematic nature of heterosexuality in children’s literature points Pugh to otherwise overlooked moments or texts that offer opportunities for wonderful analysis. In chapter one, on Baum’s Oz books, Pugh discusses the hysterical rivalry between the Tin Woodman and Captain Fyter, the tin soldier who follows the Woodman as Nimmie Amee’s lover. Neither tin man really wants to be with Nimmie, so she settles for the meat man Chopfyt, who has been made by magically gluing together the severed body parts of her two former lovers before they became tin. Chopfyt does whatever she wants, including all of the household chores, making a desirable partner after all. Plus, he does have one shiny metallic limb, which delights someone with a tin fetish like Nimmie’s. For Pugh, these antierotic, nonprocreative elements overshadow conventional heterosexuality and constitute the queerness of the Oz books.

Chapter two considers how Laura’s love for horses in Wilder’s Little House series both prepares her for adult heterosexuality and serves as a...