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Curiouser On the Queerness of Children Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, editors |
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$72.00 Cloth |
Classic essays and new work on the issue of childhood sexuality and its “queer resonances.” Our culture has a dominant narrative about children: they are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, children are officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual. Curiouser is a book about this narrative and what happens when it takes an unexpected, or queer, turn—when the stories of childhood must confront a child whose play does not conform to the ideal of child (a)sexuality. The contributors to Curiouser examine the ostensibly simple representations of children that circulate through visual images, life narrative, children’s literature, film, and novels. At issue in these essays are the stories we tell to children, the stories we tell about children, and the stories we tell ourselves as children—stories that ultimately frame what is normative and what is queer. From the fiction of Horatio Alger, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, and Guy Davenport to the spectacles of Michael Jackson, Calvin Klein, and The Exorcist; from the narrative structure of pedophilia to evangelical Christianity; from punk tomboyism to queer girl-scouting: these scholars of childhood and sexuality scrutinize queer childhood energies in an impressive range of cultural forms. “An excellent range of pieces that set up inquiry into the tangled-up qualities of sexual, queer children. Rather than produce extreme novelty, then, what this collection accomplishes, by creating a home where these essays have been familiarly united, is the drawing of our attention to queer theory’s more important, and I’d say more dynamic, objects of inquiry.” —Criticism “Hope for a new appreciation of what it means to be a child is at the heart of editors Steven Bruhn and Natasha Hurley. The essays are self-contained and can be read on their own, each adding a distinct voice to the forum on childhood queerness.” —fab Magazine Contributors: Lauren Berlant, Andre Furlani, Judith Halberstam, Ellis Hanson, Paul Kelleher, Kathryn Kent, James Kincaid, Richard Mohr, Michael Moon, Kevin Ohi, Eric Savoy, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Michael Warner. Steven Bruhm is associate professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University. He is the author of Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (2000) and Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (1994). Natasha Hurley has taught children’s literature and queer theory at Mount St. Vincent University and St. Mary’s University in Halifax. 408 pages | 5 halftones | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I. Sexing the Child 2. The Pedophilia of Everyday Life 3 "The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes": Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger 4. Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material) 5. Narrating the Child's Queerness in What Maisie Knew 6. Knowing Children: Desire and Interpretation in The Exorcist Part II. The Queers We Might Have Been 8. How to Do Things with Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the "Child in Danger" 9. "No Trespassing": Girl Scout Camp and the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere 10. Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy 11. Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood 12. Guy Davenport's Pastorals of Childhood Sexuality 13. Theory a Tergo in The Turn of the Screw 14. Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal Contributors |
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$24.00 Paper