The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.92 (643 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 082234386X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 312 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-12-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. 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, delinquen
“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
Three Stars This book is interesting, but too sophisticated for me. I would have preferred a simpler read.. J. Fischel said a spectacular, needed contribution to studies of children, gender, queerness, metaphor, and most other things. 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. Growing Sideways with Kathryn Stockton Troy D. Williams 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 childhoo