From Alice to Alana: Sexualities and Children's Cultures in the Twenty-First Century

Welcome to our ending. As editors, we are referring, on a composition level, to the timing of our writing of this introduction. While it has been the subject of regular conversation between us, for logistical reasons it has been the final piece written for this special issue. This is partly because the content of this introductory essay was dependent upon securing our cover art and selecting the final articles for this issue. More philosophically, by deciding to open this essay with a "welcome to our ending," we hope to refer to the twenty-first-century demise of the sexually-innocent child. Of course, the preceding is a loaded, even clichéd, sentiment that operates under the culturally held assumption that there ever was a beginning to an innocence of the child—a notion challenged by such scholars as Anne Higonnet, James Kincaid, Richard Mohr, Tison Pugh, Jacqueline Rose, and many others. Nevertheless, the following essays invite further conversation about the controversial relationship between children and sexual cultures.

It may be difficult to believe that it has been nearly fifteen years since the publication of Kenneth Kidd's special issue of the Quarterly on "lesbian/ gay literature for children and young adults" in 1998. In what has become a seminal introductory essay, Kidd explores the advent of children's and young adult literature with gay/lesbian themes, challenging notions of the genre as a post-1969 phenomenon. By pointing to representations of same-sex friendships and relationships among characters in children's literature, Kidd provides queer readings of canonical children's texts in an effort to "explore the range, intensity, and social resonances of same-sex friendships and relationships that are already central to writing for and about young people" (117).

Granted, in the years that have passed since the publication of Kidd's special issue, representations of queer characters are still limited. Nevertheless, the existence and range of ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters are depicted in children's and young adult texts has been the subject of several critical texts and anthologies. Perhaps most prominent among these are Michael Cart and Christine A. Jenkins's categorization (based upon the work of Rudine Sims Bishop) and analysis in The Heart Has Its Reasons: Young Adult Literature with Gay/Lesbian/Queer Content, 1969-2004 (2006); and Michelle Ann Abate and Kenneth Kidd's Over the Rainbow: Queer Children's and Young Adult Literature (2011), a collection of new and reprinted essays that queer historical (or "classic") children's texts, explore cultural politics surrounding lesbian/gay issues and families, or advocate for or model queer theories of children's textuality. Such explorations parallel the increasingly complex ways in which gender and sexuality are both played with and exploited in popular culture: take, for instance, Andrej Pejić, a self-identified male who makes his living as a female fashion model. The broadening interest in exploring and problematizing queer and gendered themes in scholarly books, articles, and conference papers testifies to the fact that this genre stands on its own as a body of literature worthy of critical discourse. As books for children and young adults have begun further exploring and complicating the topic of sexual identities, there have also been an increasing number of texts that push the cultural boundaries surrounding children and sexuality more generally.

Popular constructions of the child continue to reflect society's simultaneous preoccupation with and repulsion by the notion of a sexualized child. As Stephen Bruhm and Natasha Hurley write, "There is currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, however, children are also officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual" (ix). In Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children's Literature (2011), Tison Pugh further explores the paradoxical relationship between proclamations of childhood innocence and the ways in which (primarily heterosexual) sexuality pervades texts written for children and young adults. He argues,

The fundamental tension between innocence (the ostensibly normative foundation of children's sexual identity) and heterosexuality...