Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children

steven bruhm, department of english, mount st. vincent university, halifax, nova scotia, canada, B3M 2J6 steven.bruhm@msvu.ca

Curiouser:

On the Queerness of Children

Co-edited with Natasha Hurley (Rutgers)

Forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press

This exciting collection of essays investigates the discursive ethos of the child with respect to sexuality. The essays appearing in this volume will consider some of the following questions:

What does it mean to speak of "sexuality" within a culture produced for children?
How do theories of childhood sexuality engage with social constructionism and biological determinism?
How do we read same-sex bonds in the world of children’s books?
What significance can we attach to the sissy or tomboy in children’s communities?
What alignments can we detect between children’s culture and camp?
How has the "child" entered adult sexual role-play?
What cultural work is being performed by the recent spate of books for children of gay or lesbian parents?
How has psychoanalysis "disciplined" the possibilities for children’s desires in cultural theory and practice?
How might discourses of rights and law paralyse or sterilize the ways we read children in culture?

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children Natasha Hurley and Steven Bruhm

Part 1: Sexing the Child

2. Producing Erotic Children James R. Kincaid

3. The Pedophilia of Everyday Life Richard Mohr
4. “The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes”: Pederasty, Domesticity and Capitalism in Horatio Alger Michael Moon

5. Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material) Lauren Berlant

6. Narrating the Child's Queerness in What Maisie Knew Kevin Ohi

7. Knowing Children: Desire and Interpretation in The Exorcist Ellis Hanson

Part 2: The Queers We Might Have Been

8. How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

9. How to Do Things With Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the "Child in Danger" Paul Kelleher

10. “No Trespassing”: Girl Scout Camp and the Limits of the Counterpublic Sphere Kathryn Kent

11. Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy Judith Halberstam

12. Tongues Untied: Memoirs of a Pentecostal Boyhood Michael Warner

13. A Postmodern Utopia Of Childhood Sexuality: The Fiction Of Guy Davenport Andre Furlani

14. Theory a tergo: The Turn of the Screw Eric Savoy

15. Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal Kathryn Bond Stockton

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