"After All, It Is Not the Child Who Believes in Something Called Development"

Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children; Edited by Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. xxxviii + 338 pp.

Curiouser provocatively focuses on that most controversial area in sexuality studies: challenging naturalized cultural expectations about kids, development, and sex. Engaging the imbricated fields of cultural studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis, this book usefully profiles key features of the critical terrain on which issues of childhood and sexuality have been debated over the last fifteen years. Indeed, Curiouser's republication of seminal articles alongside more recent critical work almost qualifies it as an unofficial reader in queer kid studies.

The editors introduce Curiouser by arguing that childhood sexual experiences can be both traumatic and pleasurable. It is from this contention that the central preoccupation of the book devolves: "How to make sense of the child's pleasure without pathologizing it or reducing it to 'trauma'" (xxix). To such ends, Curiouser tracks a wide range of "other stories" about kids and sex, always emphasizing the cultural machinery that motors them. James Kincaid fleshes out this focus by walking us through a cavalcade of pop-cultural tales: his recounting of the pleasure people commonly derive from swapping outrage over Michael Jackson as spectral boy-lover is, in light of Jackson's current trials, newly familiar. Kincaid's discussion, too, of Elijah Wood resonates more curiously in the contemporary scene. For example, in a scene from North (1994), Wood's pants are repeatedly pulled down—despite his many protests—exposing his "crack" (16n). Following Kincaid's invitation to think more critically about the quotidian circulation of eroticized youthfulness, we might well wonder if it is the box-office erotics of Wood's great odyssey from child-star jailbait to childlike heartthrob that we sense percolating somewhere underneath his quest—as a Tolkienate child-man—to protect what the film refers to as the "preciousness" of his "ring," a quest that can only end with him "giving it up."

The incredulity that such suggestions inspire—a disavowal of contemporary culture's large appetite for eroticizing childishness—is suggestive of the deep hostility directed toward any intellectual endeavor that challenges cultural safety zones around childhood sexuality. Indeed, as Eric Savoy argues, suspicion surrounds children's sexuality in general (247). Reflecting on the scandal that accompanied the 1992 British publication of his book Child-Loving, Kincaid argues that it is only by challenging the false security of the "gothic scapegoating" narrative with even more scandalous writing that it might become possible to "rewrite the script" (15). Almost reading like an inaugurating injunction for Curiouser in toto, Kincaid's call for scandal sets the stage for the contributions that follow and their struggles to keep some theoretical space around children and sexuality open.

Richard D. Mohr takes up the call for scandal as he unpacks the constitutive contradictions at the heart of the American kiddie porn panic by pointing out the complicated erotics of anti–kiddie porn lobbyists whom he cheekily describes as having "cock-seeking minds" (24). He describes lobbyists' outrage at seeing—after having looked very, very closely—the outline of boys' genitals in the pixilated shades of a Calvin Klein underwear advertisement. Perversely, it is the lobbyists' witch-hunting premise that seems to offer them the impunity to look longingly at that which should apparently not be seen. Michael Moon also stresses that the putatively marginalized desire for children is, in fact, central to contemporary culture, arguing that Horatio Alger's homoerotic fiction consolidates capitalist forms of relation. Transactions of financial "interest" between Alger's boy and his employer, suggests Moon, delicately allegorize the man's erotic interest (46).

Paul Kelleher argues that the tendency to view the child as constantly "in danger" licenses much ideological work around abstract concepts such as "the general population" and "national security" (151). In her...