The Project of Quaring Childhood

Our goal in this special issue is to bring into dialogue several fields that have developed substantially in the past two decades: childhood studies, critical race studies, queer theory, and new southern studies. What this has meant in practical terms has been a heady ride, with bracingly concrete repercussions. Each of these fields has sprung (some more consistently than others) away from a historical essentialism and toward a critique of how essentialisms affect history. Each is crucially engaged with issues of power, and each maintains (some more directly than others) an activist engagement with “the real world,” theorizing ideas that matter for bodies, bodies that matter for ideas. Each seeks (more or less explicitly) to bend the arc of the moral universe a little more quickly toward justice.

Yet only too recently have these fields begun to speak to each other. With a few exceptions, talks thus far have been bilateral. Perhaps not surprisingly, critical race studies and new southern studies found each other earliest, thanks to founding work by Hortense Spillers, Thadious Davis, Trudier Harris, Houston A. Baker Jr., and Dana Nelson. In the years since Philippe Ariès’s revolutionary assertion that childhood has a history, childhood studies has increasingly deployed theories of race to interrogate the role of “the child” in national and imperial formations, as exemplified in the scholarship of Caroline Levander, Anna Mae Duane, and Robin Bernstein. Along similar lines, scholars such as John Howard, Sharon Patricia Holland, Gary Richards, and Michael Bibler have used queer theory to explicate southern culture and literature’s engagement with queer sexualities and histories. Latest, pushing against lasting taboo, queer theory and childhood studies have met, most prominently in the publications of Kathryn Bond Stockton, Steven Bruhm, and Natasha Hurley. And the career of E. Patrick Johnson, to which so much of the present volume is indebted, in fostering and enriching the now firmly established field of black queer studies, has proven definitively that a queer theory that ignores race is no theory at all.

Our project here is to expand these invaluable conversations, to hold multilateral talks. This issue’s title, “Quaring Childhood,” is an encapsulated form of that project: quare is a term derived from southern culture, introduced by a black queer theorist (Johnson) to center the experiences of queer people of color—“children” (of any age) who have too often been marginalized, if not brutalized, in theory and real life alike. “Quaring,” like “childhood,” is a concept that works, a theoretical tool that insists on its historical specificity even as it demonstrates its expansive utility. As Johnson and coeditor Mae Henderson did in their foundational collection Black Queer Studies, we intend the essays in this volume similarly to work, to interanimate and enliven the multiple fields in which they intervene. The essays do not disappoint. Though initially I thought my editorial role might be something like a matchmaker’s, convincing potential bedfellows that they are not really so strange to each other, happily, encountering the innovative scholarship included here has felt more like being a matchmaker after the fact, having those bedfellows sit straight up and ask, Would you like to meet our “children”?

As in all projects so heavily invested in theorizing experience, there have been the dark nights of the academic soul: the nightly news. In the short year since south published a call for papers for “Quaring Childhood,” many migrant children (apparently innumerable) have been separated from their families by US immigration officials, some (also questionably counted) dying in government custody. Children, with or without their families, have starved daily in the Sudans, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Nigeria, and in locked compounds and closets in the United States; children have been injured or killed by bombs and guns and assorted cruelty in these same countries and all others around the globe. The lives of actual children as they most frequently appear in the news—as victims of enslavement, violence, sexual abuse, and other tragedies at the hands of family and/or traffickers and/or societal neglect—can make a largely theoretical project like this one feel obscure and inconsequential. This [End Page 6...