The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (review)

The cover image of Kathryn Bond Stockton's The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century shows a child holding a convex glass object over his face, presenting a child who is recognizable, normatively beautiful, and simultaneously distorted and off-center. The table of contents, listing an introduction, five expansive chapters, and a conclusion, flows sideways rather than vertically. The pages of the book are closer to square than those found in the typical monograph, allowing plenty of room for margin comments, the reader's own branches of inquiry. Thus, the book's design embodies the concept of sideways growth on which Stockton's groundbreaking work depends.

Stockton's central premise is that all children are queer, even those who fit the most normative constructions of the child. Here, queerness is defined not just by a sexualized strangeness, but by a strangeness that is specific to the child. "Queer" comes to mean that which is threatening and strange as well as that which is frighteningly vulnerable, especially, but not only, because of sex and desire. Furthermore, children trouble the heteronormative linear temporality of "growing up" through "sideways growth," a concept that allows Stockton to trace the otherwise undetectable desires of children and the adult interventions that impede their development. Stockton thus detaches growth from age and verticality, complicating the very qualities that define the child.

This book presents four versions of the queer child: the "Ghostly Gay Child" (the gay child who is "birthed backwards" from the death of an adult's straightness), the "Grown Homosexual" (the adult figured as childish, delayed, and non-reproductive), the "Child Queered by Freud" (the not-yet-straight child whose perversity threatens adult sexual conventions), and the "Child Queered by Innocence or Queered by Color" (the child whose innocence is inaccessible to adults or the child of color presumed to have experienced too much and therefore granted that lost innocence through representations of abuse). Stockton quickly asserts that none of these figures exist in isolation. Instead, new queer concoctions appear in each text she analyzes. Fittingly for subjects as slippery as the child and queerness, these categories provide frameworks for but not answers to textual analysis. In fact, Stockton's ability to provide persuasive readings while allowing for the child's constantly mutating identities and desires is one of the greatest strengths of the book and an important addition to the field of childhood studies.

The primary texts are fiction—literature and film—of the twentieth-century United States. Stockton contends that the queer child (with the occasional exception of the "homosexual" adolescent or transgender child) is largely invisible in historical and ethnographic research because children's expressions of desire do not fit with the terms available in those fields. She therefore articulates the child's queerness through literary representations and concepts. The metaphor's function is crucial to Stockton's readings of many texts. The metaphor relates two seemingly discrete concepts, thus expanding and extending the meaning of each. For example, this lateral expansion inspires her interpretation of children's relationships to dogs in fiction. Stockton coins the term the "Interval of the Animal," which "offer[s] opportunities, queer as they will seem, for children's motions inside their delay, making delay a sideways growth the child in part controls for herself, in ways confounding her parents and her future" (p. 90). In other words, the dog provides a connection unmediated by adults and expresses queerness while avoiding detection. See for example Stockton's brilliant reading of the end of Nightwood, in which a woman, a queer child of the "grown homosexual" variety, romps with her lover's dog in order to cross time and reach her lover-figured-as-mother without alerting the book's censors to the queerness of the act.

Stockton's compelling analyses of texts expand understandings both of the child and of the texts themselves. The book is unofficially organized around the central...