How to Bring Your Boys up Queer

Attempting to restrain myself from paranoid practices of reading, I never counted the number of mentions the madeleine receives in Carol Mavor’s Reading Boyishly. The mini shell-shaped cake is the presumptive chronotope for this visually stunning assemblage of musings, illustrations, and tropes juxtaposed into a provocative reconsideration of the works and lives of Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, D. W. Winnicott, and Mavor. This ubiquitous “woman-cake” (13) punctum, which for Proust famously became a metonym for a time-space experience that triggers nostalgia, likewise condenses the productively incestuous bond Mavor champions between mother, son, and memory into an extravagantly cited symbol throughout her effusive lexicon of things “boyish.” Counterintuitively, she defines boyishness as an unapologetically playful, swishy, mother-centered, novelesque, in-between subjectivity that insists on a sensitively tactile and bodily approach to time and space: hence the madeleine.

Mavor explains her previous books, Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess Hawarden (1999) and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (1995), as having already given her the space for “reading girlishly” (28). Reading Boyishly is lushly accompanied by 439 color and black-and-white illustrations culled from photographs by and of her subjects, film stills, paintings, notebooks, manuscripts, and vintage picture books. Each illustration is less likely to link iconically to the information on its page than to provoke speculations about its indexical, and quite often surreal, possibilities. For instance, although the American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is not billed as one of her boys, his boxes recurrently stand in as dreamlike referents for the categories of boyish possibility Mavor’s readings suggest. Captions for each illustration are repetitions from the text, á la Camera Lucida. Unfortunately, Reading Boyishly’s meditative glossings do not recall the “hedonistic” Barthes for whom Mavor declares she has an “appetite” (2–6). The captions are written with an air of bewitching importance that does not quite measure up to the impact of the images or to Barthes’s exacting example of self-reflexivity.

The written text unfolds in a similar fashion. Oral, birth, and maternal metaphors provoke and guide Mavor’s interpretive historiographies through a free-associative narrative. For example, chapter 5, “Nesting: the Boyish Labor of J. M. Barrie,” entwines topics including, but not by any means limited to, the history of Peter Pan onstage and in print, an extensive exposé of Barrie’s relationship to the Llewelyn Davies boys, dirigibles, Sigmund Freud, bubbles, Jacques Lacan, the Cottingley fairy photographs, the Brownie camera, Julia Kristeva, birds, The Little Prince (1943), eggs, Queen Victoria, mauve, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Charles Dodgson, the repeated metaphor of the nest, and the ubiquitous madeleine. The many tidbits and absorbing anecdotes are tied together with unhappy interruptions from Mavor such as, “Childhood is as fairyish as a nest. Finding a glen of fairies is even better than finding a nest or madeleine” (227). Nonetheless, the undeniably interdisciplinary breadth of each chapter presents each topic/boy as both captivating and worthy of pursuit.

The biographical, autobiographical, psychoanalytic, citational approach by which Mavor ensnares her subjects is framed as a performance of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has termed a “reparative” reading. Indeed, Mavor describes herself as a “devotee of Sedgwick” (462), and Reading Boyishly is also positioned as a loose extension of Sedgwick’s 1991 essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay.” Mavor explains, “This book seeks to ‘repair’ that critical stance, so that boys can love their mother, can repeat the maternal attitude, without fear of retribution, without fear of . . . our culture’s ‘effeminophobia,’ when it comes to the body of the boy” (56). Additionally, “[My] reparative work embraces the texts and textures of Sedgwick . . . to usurp ‘reparative’ to repair not the gay body so pathologized by psychoanalysis itself but the body of psychoanalysis, so responsible for this initial pathologization” (73). Her reparations, then, are potentially disciplinary. This subtle move shifts her burden of proof from...