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.
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