Overview
- Explores the new presence of queer children in popular cultural works and psychoanalytic discourse
- Analyzes the increasing attention to childhood and the figural child in queer studies
- Investigates how increased visibility of the gay/transgender/queer child affects the adult, queer and otherwise
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About this book
This book represents a meeting of queer theorists and psychoanalysts around the figure of the child. Its intention is not only to interrogate the discursive work performed on, and by, the child in these fields, but also to provide a stage for examining how psychoanalysis and queer theory themselves interact, with the understanding that the meeting of these discourses is most generative around the queer time and sexualities of childhood. From the theoretical perspectives of queer theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and gender studies, the chapters explore cultural, aesthetic, and historical forms and phenomena that are aimed at, or are about, children, and that give expression to and make room for the queerness of childhood.
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Keywords
Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Queer Pasts: Origins, Development, Normativity
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Front Matter
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Born This Way? Science, Mythology, Psychoanalysis
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Front Matter
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Queer Futures: The Politics of Childhood
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Front Matter
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Queer Culture: The Case of Animation
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Anna Fishzon and Emma Lieber curate an exciting collection of essays that playfully interrogate queer childhood and the queerness of the ways in which childhood is portrayed in literature and visual media, including animation, science, and mythology. How is “the child”, a specter of the unpredictable and unknowable, theorized as the promising future in need of protection, the guiding nostalgic past and the horrific and uncanny present? This collection holds these temporal potentialities to expand the reach and depth of queer studies and psychoanalytic theories of development and subjectivity. It is an appealingly nuanced book for psychoanalysts, clinicians, and academics finding themselves compelled by the temporal queerness that is childhood.”(Katie Gentile, Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, USA)
“This book understands queer kids to be not only persons but instruments: agents of confusion, sand inthe gears of normalcy, trouble on multiple horizons. From fantasies of origins to claymation animals, this book returns the queer child to its central place of outsiderness in both time and space. It not only brings the queerly analytical child up to the moment, but it moves that moment forward. This is a book that we will want to take off the shelf again and again to remind us of where we are going and why we might not ever get there. A tour de force of necessary thinking!” (Steven Bruhm, Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English Emeritus, Western University, Canada)
“This book is a breath of fresh air in the often turgid relation between queer theory and childhood. The authors in this volume largely abandon a fantasmatic and overly idealized queer child, divesting from queerness as a reaction formation wholly outside and self-consciously against the social. They relinquish the framework of a directional queer childhood that grows only sideways, resisting adulthood, reckoning instead with the myriad ways in which regimes of the normal animate queerness in children. From the institutional spaces that produce surprising intimacies to the ones that can and should excavate the “hows” of queerness, this is a refreshing redirection of psychoanalytically informed queer thought. Sexuality is transmitted, these authors tell us, in its enigmatic gestures, affective excesses and absences, and intimate meetings and misses. It emerges not into fluidity but into particularity in the psyche and the body. Queerness is animated by actual relation, both bestowed and developed in opposition to very real others. By foregrounding the actual over the figurative, the related over the antisocial, the how over the why, one feels in reading this book an optimism, not merely for childhood, but for its relationship to queerness.” (Tey Meadow, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, USA)
“Looking at childhood viapsychoanalysis, queer, and trans studies, this exciting collection allows the child to appear in its radical otherness. The authors tackle the child’s paradoxical symbolic value for growth and eternally fleeting youth, showing the child in all it its heterogenous, polymorphous variety. This superb collection enables us to rethink the child, present, past, and future: here queer lifts the hood from childhood.” (Patricia Gherovici, Psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017))
“This book understands queer kids to be not only persons but instruments: agents of confusion, sand inthe gears of normalcy, trouble on multiple horizons. From fantasies of origins to claymation animals, this book returns the queer child to its central place of outsiderness in both time and space. It not only brings the queerly analytical child up to the moment, but it moves that moment forward. This is a book that we will want to take off the shelf again and again to remind us of where we are going and why we might not ever get there. A tour de force of necessary thinking!” (Steven Bruhm, Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of English Emeritus, Western University, Canada)
“This book is a breath of fresh air in the often turgid relation between queer theory and childhood. The authors in this volume largely abandon a fantasmatic and overly idealized queer child, divesting from queerness as a reaction formation wholly outside and self-consciously against the social. They relinquish the framework of a directional queer childhood that grows only sideways, resisting adulthood, reckoning instead with the myriad ways in which regimes of the normal animate queerness in children. From the institutional spaces that produce surprising intimacies to the ones that can and should excavate the “hows” of queerness, this is a refreshing redirection of psychoanalytically informed queer thought. Sexuality is transmitted, these authors tell us, in its enigmatic gestures, affective excesses and absences, and intimate meetings and misses. It emerges not into fluidity but into particularity in the psyche and the body. Queerness is animated by actual relation, both bestowed and developed in opposition to very real others. By foregrounding the actual over the figurative, the related over the antisocial, the how over the why, one feels in reading this book an optimism, not merely for childhood, but for its relationship to queerness.” (Tey Meadow, Associate Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, USA)
“Looking at childhood viapsychoanalysis, queer, and trans studies, this exciting collection allows the child to appear in its radical otherness. The authors tackle the child’s paradoxical symbolic value for growth and eternally fleeting youth, showing the child in all it its heterogenous, polymorphous variety. This superb collection enables us to rethink the child, present, past, and future: here queer lifts the hood from childhood.” (Patricia Gherovici, Psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis (2017))
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Anna Fishzon is a psychoanalyst in private practice and an interdisciplinary scholar in New York City. She has taught courses on Russian history, psychoanalysis, literature, and gender and sexuality at Williams College, Columbia University, and Duke University, USA. She is the author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Palgrave, 2013).
Emma Lieber is a psychoanalyst in private practice and part-time faculty in Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, USA, where she teaches courses on psychoanalysis and literature, autotheory, and feminist literature. She is the author of The Writing Cure (2020) and has written articles and essays for numerous academic, popular, and psychoanalytic publications.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Queerness of Childhood
Book Subtitle: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass
Editors: Anna Fishzon, Emma Lieber
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59195-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95246-5Published: 22 July 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-59195-1Published: 21 July 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 319
Number of Illustrations: 15 b/w illustrations
Topics: Popular Culture , Youth Culture, Culture and Gender, Queer Theory, Gender and Sexuality