Kathryn Bond Stockton

The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

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.

God between their lips : desire between women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot

Abbreviations Introduction Part I: 1. Bodies and God: post-structuralist feminists return to the fold of spiritual materialism 2. Divine loss: Irigarays erotics of a feminine fracture 3. Lacking/labor Part II: 4. Recollecting Charlotte Bronte 5. Working for God autoerotically: approaching the bridegroom without a(r)rival in Brontes Villette 6. Recognizing George Eliot 7. At home with desire: the domestication of St. Theresa in Eliots Middlemarch Postlude Notes Index.

Feeling Like Killing?: Queer Temporalities of Murderous Motives among Queer Children

Both of the girls hit their victim with a brick until her skull was badly broken. Using a purse to hide the brick, the girls had swung it by means of a stocking. The other killers, a pair of men with a different set of victims, had cut one throat with a hunting knife, then shot the other victims, one through a pillow, at point-blank range. Swinging a brick; holding a knife against human skin; pulling a trigger against a head knowing you can’t reverse that pull. Who, if anyone, feels like killing? What, if anything, is this feeling? And what kind of feeling is a motive for murder? A set of densities thickening motive — also thickening the queerness of children — surrounds these two different scenes of slaughter, both from the fifties, and their portrayals in two famous texts: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965) and Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). Motive is the mystery behind these murders, the clotted matter clinging to them — intriguingly so since the motive, in each case, was shared by two killers working in tandem. How, it was asked, could two individuals, in the same moment, reach the same rage? With Capote’s In Cold Blood, the people of Kansas had good reason to feel almost cheated on the question of motive, to turn their suspicions back on themselves, locking their doors against each other. Capote, quoting a detective about

The Queer Child Now and Its Paradoxical Global Effects

Forging new concepts—kid Orientalism, reverse pedophilia, and manifest latency—this essay speculates on something that’s been surfacing in Anglo-American public culture over the last ten years or so. A future the public fears is coming—child sexuality, evidenced by sexting, “gay” kids in middle school, and sexual bullying—is accompanying exportation of a fading child (the figure of the innocent child) to other lands, where it seems weirdly possible to recover it. Quite paradoxically, the aesthetics of world documentaries on the-child-in-peril-in-the-third-world may be “restoring” the “Western”-style innocent child through, of all things, the sexualized, racialized “HIV child.” Yet this child-in-peril becomes a threat in a different direction, because of the demands it makes for our response. Feeling thus threatened, we flee from children who, we imagine, are desiring us (in reverse pedophilia). Is there any antidote to these strange dynamics? How does experimental literary form in the novel Push, and something Stockton calls “lyrical fat” in the film Precious, work against this fray? Stockton finds answers among depictions of children’s passion for signification—children’s libidinal relationships to signifiers—and through new conceptions of sexual latency via the latency of signification.

Surfacing (in the Heat of Reading): Is It Like Kissing or Some Other Sex Act?

Note to Plea sure Readers: This brief piece is a fanciful engagement of the trend called “surface reading.” This phenomenon, to which I’m responding, calls for taking the surface of a text— almost at the level of one’s just describing it closely, carefully, fully attentively—as a destination in its own right. The aim for surfacereaders is not to be swamped by seeking “deeper” meanings, “latent” meanings, such as psychoanalysis has sought. Against this backdrop, take my screed as its own embrace of surface— viva surface reading!— that would fondle depth. Since Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, who started this polemic, show themselves open to maneuvers such as mine, I believe I’m kissing the surface of their claims.