Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature (review)

Over the Rainbow, a collection of seventeen critical essays edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd, arrives at a pivotal moment in American political culture. Spurred in part by recurring incidents of homophobic violence against youth who exhibit sexual and gender nonconformity and in part by the disproportionately high suicide rate among LGBTQ adolescents, many families, schools, and communities are now seeking ways to address the needs of young people whose experiences of embodiment, eroticism, and gender identity do not adhere to heterosexual norms. At the same time a large segment of American society, in particular, the powerful religious right, is bent on perpetuating what Abate and Kidd call “the homophobia and erotophobia surrounding (often structuring) the discourses of youth” (1), insisting on abstinence-only approaches to sex education and attacking public health initiatives aimed at making safe-sex information and condoms available to minors. In such a conflicted climate the essays gathered in Over the Rainbow offer a range of arguments for the capacity of literary texts, and by extension the teaching of literature, to affirm the passions and address the vulnerabilities that shape the lives of young people today.

With the exception of Andrea Wood’s “Choose Your Own Queer Erotic Adventure,” an informative essay on the American reception of Japanese “boy’s love” computer games, Over the Rainbow is made up of reprints of previously published articles, some of which first appeared in the early 1990s. Abate and Kidd mitigate the datedness of these earlier materials by framing the volume as a historical overview of critical work on children’s and young-adult texts that depart, wittingly or not, from dominant conceptions of sexuality and gender. The editors’ introduction elegantly situates the collection within the historical span between the emergence of gay and lesbian studies in the early 1970s and present-day scholarship informed by the multifarious concept of queer. Both Abate and Kidd are leading figures in the field of children’s literature, to which Abate’s Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism (2010) and Kidd’s Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature (2011) are significant recent contributions. Their concise yet deeply informed account of the disciplinary transition from gay or lesbian to queer adds considerable value to their project.

The editors have made judicious selections to achieve a broad historical coverage and a diversity of topics. In the collection’s first essay, Claudia Nelson offers a detailed investigation of “homoemotional” relationships in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boarding school stories in British boys’ magazines; the final two essays, Catherine Tosenberger’s “Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction” and Wood’s “Choose Your Own Queer Erotic Adventure,” deal with twenty-first-century textual production and consumption on the Internet. Among the literary texts treated throughout the collection, works with male protagonists are carefully balanced with those featuring young women. Two essays, Jody Norton’s “Transchildren and the Discipline of Children’s Literature” and Jes Battis’s “Trans Magic: The Radical Performance of the Young Wizard in YA Literature,” directly address transgender issues, an important domain that is likely to receive more attention in future scholarship and, ideally, future stories for young readers. In the midst of the collection’s diversity, a number of intriguing topical intersections emerge. Nelson’s discussion of boys’ boarding school stories resonates with Tosenberger’s examination of fans’ queer matchmaking among students at J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, and both Robin Bernstein’s “Queerness of Harriet the Spy” and Sherrie A. Inness’s “Is Nancy Drew Queer? Popular Reading Strategies for the Lesbian Reader” find evidence of sexual and gender subversion in well-known stories of girl detectives. The two authors who deal with books aimed at preteen children, Robert McRuer and Elizabeth A. Ford, also provide the collection’s most sustained analysis of the political conundrums surrounding the representation of HIV...