The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q) [Paperback]

Kathryn Bond Stockton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 082234386X | ISBN-13: 978-0822343868 | Publication Date: October 20, 2009 | Edition: First Edition

Children are thoroughly, shockingly queer, as Kathryn Bond Stockton explains in The Queer Child, where she examines children’s strangeness, even some children’s subliminal “gayness,” in the twentieth century. Estranging, broadening, darkening forms of children emerge as this book illuminates the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by Freud, the child queered by money, and the grown homosexual metaphorically seen as a child (or as an animal), alongside the gay child. What might the notion of a “gay” child do to conceptions of the child? How might it outline the pain, closets, emotional labors, sexual motives, and sideways movements that attend all children, however we deny it?

Engaging and challenging the work of sociologists, legal theorists, and historians, Stockton coins the term “growing sideways” to describe ways of growing that defy the usual sense of growing “up” in a linear trajectory toward full stature, marriage, reproduction, and the relinquishing of childish ways. Growing sideways is a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays. Contending that children’s queerness is rendered and explored best in fictional forms, including literature, film, and television, Stockton offers dazzling readings of works ranging from novels by Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov to the movies Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Hanging Garden, Heavenly Creatures, Hoop Dreams, and the 2005 remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The result is a fascinating look at children’s masochism, their interactions with pedophiles and animals, their unfathomable, hazy motives (leading them at times into sex, seduction, delinquency, and murder), their interracial appetites, and their love of consumption and destruction through the alluring economy of candy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I consider Kathryn Bond Stockton to be one of the most impressive and important queer critics in the academy today, and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century only confirms that assessment. It is magnificent: the kind of book that defines the field and is returned to again and again, inspiring all sorts of thought and work for generations to come.”—Michael Cobb, author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

“I don’t know when I’ve been so captivated by a book and eager to get to the next page. That it is original and that addresses a topic, the queer child, pretty much completely ignored is one mark of its importance. Even more striking though is the ease with which stunning insights are delivered as if they were a matter of course. Many readers will be struck by the centrality of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s book and the graceful way it exposes and breaks the silence surrounding the queer child.”—James R. Kincaid, author of Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting

From the Publisher

"I don't know when I've been so captivated by a book and eager to get to the next page. That it is original and that it addresses a topic, the queer child, pretty much completely ignored is one mark of its importance. Even more striking though is the ease with which stunning insights are delivered as if they were a matter of course. Many readers will be struck by the centrality of Kathryn Bond Stockton's book and the graceful way it exposes and breaks the silence surrounding the queer child."--James R. Kincaid, author of Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting

"I consider Kathryn Bond Stockton to be one of the most impressive and important queer critics in the academy today, and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century only confirms that assessment. It is magnificent: the kind of book that defines the field and is returned to again and again, inspiring all sorts of thought and work for generations to come."--Michael Cobb, author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books; First Edition edition (October 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082234386X
• ISBN-13: 978-0822343868
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #273,856 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a spectacular, needed contribution to studies of children, gender, queerness, metaphor, and most other things, June 13, 2010

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J. Fischel (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q) (Paperback)

The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century is a prescient, poetic contribution to cultural studies, literary criticism, and queer and feminist scholarship. Stockton sails seamlessly from Nabokov to Hoop Dreams, inviting her readers to discover how and why the child and its relations are at once central for and yet opaque to twentieth century sociality and sexuality--in life, in books, in law, and at the movies.

The Queer Child is about finding and creating impossible relations, and it is this impossibility that turns Stockton away from history and to literatures and media. In charting the extraordinary (and sometimes oddly ordinary) relations between girls and dogs, girls and money, boys and tutors, motions and motive, desire and danger, Stockton delivers the queerness that lies at the heart of every child, the sideways growth that children endure, initiate, or simply stumble upon. For those of us for whom queerness and queer thinking still holds political promise, The Queer Child imagines for its audience a world neither bound by the dictates of heteronormativity (marriage or gay marriage), but nor does it stall on a premature presumption that queerness ought to only offer negativity and resistance to the order of things. Instead, we get something fresh and capacious, a book that redefines how we read and look at children, queerness, and their inextricability.

Stockton manages to be both a surgeon and sorcerer with her words, and her ability to play and weave through her text makes reading The Queer Child delightful -an adjective I reservedly attach to any academic work, however important.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Growing Sideways with Kathryn Stockton, June 17, 2010

By 

Troy D. Williams (Salt Lake City, UT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q) (Paperback)

In the best tradition of queer theory, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores not merely the possible sexual orientation of children, but more thoughtfully, the forces that produce childhood's absolute strangeness. Through the pages of The Queer Child: Growing Sideways Through the Twentieth Century, Stockton takes us on a literary and cinematic journey into the fictional worlds of queer children - the very children that our official histories and childhood studies deny even exist. "As we explore the history of childhood books written in the twentieth century, there is no mention of nonnormative sexuality" Stockton argues, "History has no way to really talking about the sexual motives or desires of children." Fiction on the other hand does. Stockton guides us through the novels and films of the twentieth century where we are first introduced to the very queer child that the public culture had no language for understanding.

Early characters like the young student in Henry James' novella, The Pupil and Stephen in The Well of Loneliness were among the first to introduce readers to the possibility of a strange, mysterious queer child. Stockton argues that children can be "queered" or made strange by a variety of factors. Candy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), innocence (David in A.I.) and money (the children of Blood Diamond).

Laying these fictions next to (and to the side of) our official histories provide us a fascinating view of the ghostly gay specter haunting all of our childhoods. Ultimately, as Stockton contends, the gay child helps us to perceive the queer temporalities haunting all children.

As promised in the subtitle, Stockton encourages the reader to consider the ways children "grow sideways" and reveal patterns of growth that defy the familiar trajectory of "growing up". Legal and social realities have historically denied children the possibility a gay future. She writes, "one can remember desperately feeling there was simply nowhere to grow." The directions, delays and suspensions of childhood growth reveal a rich world of metaphors, lateral relations and queer fantasy.

As we explore the "sideways" growth of the protogay children of literature and cinema, Stockton helps us recognize our own lateral movements and extensions through life. The Queer Child is a delightful, challenging and rewarding read for both the seasoned academic and the lover of queer and literary thought.

4 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Ridiculously elusive, September 1, 2010

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Kris Bruun (Fort Collins, CO) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q) (Paperback)

I can't remember being so baffled by such intentionally obtuse language. Do you have a point Kathryn that isn't buried under layers of unnecessarily pedantic prose? Writing like this is entirely tedious and isolates potential readers. It's a shame that so many sectors of academia, the social sciences in particular, have adopted this same writing style.