The Queerness of Children’s Literature

The queerness of children’s literature—or of childhood, for that matter—is a growing topic in scholarly discussions. While past works on children’s literature and queerness focused on LGBTQ literature for children and young adults, or close deconstructive queer readings of texts, the ways in which we discuss queerness is changing. I’m thinking, for example, of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive; Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley’s collection Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children; and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child; or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. All of these books expand the traditional approaches to queerness and ask scholars to see it more radically, especially as it pertains to children. Children’s literature studies, like queer theory, is also expanding, and Tison Pugh’s Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children’s Literature is a brilliant study on how we can enlarge our conventional notions of children’s literature and queerness.

Pugh begins his study explicitly and succinctly. “Children,” he argues, “cannot retain their innocence of sexuality while learning about normative heterosexuality, yet this inherent paradox runs throughout many classic narratives of children’s literature” (1). He focuses his book on two key concepts that he believes are central to many works of children’s fiction, whether explicit or not: innocence and sexuality. The tension between these two seemingly contradictory concepts, Pugh argues, is what renders children’s literature as queer. In the introduction, he pulls from many queer theorists—including Edelman and Stockton—to complicate his overall approach to queer theory. Despite dealing with some dense, theoretical material, Pugh expertly summarizes these works and reveals their potential for discussion of children in general and children’s literature in particular. As the title of his book suggests, Pugh focuses on heterosexuality rather than homosexuality; queerness, in his view, is far broader: “[Q]ueerness provides an apt metaphor for considering the psychosexual development of children, if one views queerness not as a synonym for homosexuality but as a descriptor of disruptions to prevailing cultural codes of sexual and gender normativity” (6).

The chapters that follow each present a kind of case study of different texts. The first chapter argues that L. Frank Baum’s Oz books are a queer utopia whose idealistic nature “is undercut by its antisocial and antireproductive edges” (28). The second chapter moves from the world of fantasy literature to the realistic fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Here, Pugh focuses on eternal childhood, tomboyism, and a fascinating argument about erotic triangles between child characters and horses. The middle chapters of the book concern three of the most popular fantasy series in contemporary children’s literature: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The impact of these three series on contemporary children’s literature cannot be overstated, and one might assume that these books (especially Rowling’s) have already been exhausted as topics in scholarly debates. Pugh, however, provides some meticulously close readings that are original and complex. The chapter on A Series of Unfortunate Events is the strongest, in part due to his discussion of the relationship between the mysterious Beatrice and Lemony Snicket as the narrator. Chapter six is about Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl books. Again, the analysis and close readings throughout the chapter are excellent, but Pugh hesitates to draw any firm conclusions about the books because the series is still incomplete, which somewhat weakens his arguments. The penultimate chapter on Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series explores the paranormal romance series in terms of abstinence and masochism. Much of this material will not be new to readers who have heard critical discussions of the series, but the highlight of this chapter is a brilliant argument about Bella Swan’s “bug-chasing hunger for infection and death” (157). The book concludes with a short discussion of David Levithan’s Boy Meets Boy. While this chapter could...