The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

Stockton, Kathryn Bond

doi:10.1215/9780822390268

Cited by 535 publications

(82 citation statements)

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“…In keeping with this recognition of extreme inequalities, and rebellion against them, Hushpuppy is defined as both a delinquent and a dependent. Hers is the kind of "sideways" motion that Katherine Bond-Stockton identifies as challenging the notion that "growing up" to become a responsible subject will be the outcome of childhood (Bond-Stockton, 2009). Bond-Stockton's take on the potentiality of queer relations isolates the oddness of our interest in the child and suggests a rerouting of desire outside of the normative family.…”

Section: Attentive Manoeuvres: Child/animal/racementioning

confidence: 99%

The postcolonial child in Benh Zeitlin’sBeasts of the Southern Wild

Barnsley

2016

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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This article offers a consideration of the figure of the child in Benh Zeitlin's film Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), a vibrant but urgent ecological drama motivated by the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It examines how a film that on its release was praised as an American survival story focused on a feisty young heroine can be more productively understood through a postcolonial lens as a radical vision of world ecology underpinned by a complex critique of childhood, development, and marginality. Exploring how vectors of racial, economic, and environmental relations intersect in the film's fantastical form, the focus is shifted from survival to the connectivity that the precarious postcolonial child enables amongst actual and mythological animals and between past, present, and future time-worlds. As such, the child de-centres the contemporary notion of the human and the tenets of development, progress, and mastery over nature that hold it in place. By delineating the material coordinates of the film in terms of the capitalist, neo-imperialist world-system and analyzing how its mixing of the real and the fantastic elaborates upon the causes and responses to environmental disaster, the article shows how the postcolonial child provokes new approaches to ecological relations.

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Section: Attentive Manoeuvres: Child/animal/racementioning

confidence: 99%

The postcolonial child in Benh Zeitlin’sBeasts of the Southern Wild

Barnsley

2016

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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“…453-462;1995, p. 4;Walkerdine, 1993;Burman, [1994) and sporadic 'queer theoretical' attention to the topic in the following decade (for example Halberstam, 2005;Stockton, 2009). …”

Section: Development As Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The domain of culture studies offers a range of further examples. Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) intervenes in growing up by affirming growing sideways as 'a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays'. Biography-oriented works (for example, Turley, 2003;Carr, 2006;Posnock, 2006;Mavor, 2007) conceptualize puerility or youthfulness as figurative interventions rather than as distinctive of life stages.…”

Section: Development Against Timementioning

confidence: 99%

The semiotic predicament of developmental psychology

Janssen¹

2010

Subjectivity

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This article critically assesses various proposals for a cultural semiotics of maturity and developmental stages. Semiotic theories consider developmental subjectivity as a function of a person's progressive immersion into sign systems, and are key to a denaturalization and contextualization of the life-staged subject. A semiotic understanding of maturity inspired by the post-Marxist work of Jean Baudrillard suggests that neo-Marxist indictments of consumer society as alienating individuals either by 'hurrying' or infantilizing them, is complicit with a more profound and ambient naturalization of life stages. However, a look at Japan's 'cute culture' (kawaî karucha) is taken to suggest that both developmental psychology and its critique, may be, importantly sidetracked by late capitalist mass production and circulation of maturational markers. Various implications of this case study for developmental psychology are discussed.

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“…The logic of this trope, which Kathryn Bond Stockton has summarized as "children must be harmed" by the eroticism of adults (playfully fusing a supposition with the imperative), operates under the surface of Glee's narrative to deny its principal gay character access to specifically queer solidarity and community. 16 But if Glee's exuberant musical form teaches us anything, it is that dance steps, show tunes, mash-ups, and queer vibes have the potential to shake up and scramble identities, stereotypes, genres, television clichés -and perhaps even ideological formations. To grasp the alternate currents running alongside the show's dominant narrative of coming out, I also consider how style, performance, and aesthetics provide Glee's queer characters with ways to measure, negotiate, and even contest the disciplinary contours of their "accepted" identities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Raising Gays

Jacobs¹

2014

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

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This essay risks saying critical things about something widely viewed as wholly good: a recent glut of popular, "positive" media narratives produced in a spirit of concern for queer youth. When Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick published her urgently indignant essay "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" in 1991, her comment that "it's always open season on gay kids" acknowledged the vulnerability of gay and lesbian young people in the face of homophobic institutions willing to erase their very existence in pursuit of normative models of gender and sexual identity. 1 For Sedgwick, these institutions included not only clinical and developmental psychology but also the family and parenting, which were all too often complicit with the distortions and abuses of the "helping professions." 2 Today, Sedgwick's grim statement is likely to strike other chords: "gay kids" are no longer quite the oxymoronic scandal they once were, and in the current popular imagination, an "open season" on queer youngsters must necessarily conjure the scourge of homophobic bullying. 3 In response to this highly publicized threat, a well-meaning segment of American society has rallied to the cause of bringing up gay kids, saving young queer lives from the linked threats of bullying and suicide through sufficient doses of "acceptance," a medicine understood to be most effective when administered by a loving family. 4 Never mind its long history on the front lines of queer persecution: today only the family can make things better for queer kids living in a world that is so very bad. 5 I am driven here by the contrary, perhaps contrarian, conviction that what young queers in fact need most is other queers. Heterosexual parents -even those determined to tolerate, love, and protect their gay children -are still unable to familiarize their children with the traditions, habits, social codes, aesthetics, or values of specifically queer communities, and this is perhaps especially true of parents who insist on seeing their heterosexual and nonheterosexual children GLQ 20:3

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The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

Cited by 535 publications

References 0 publications

The postcolonial child in Benh Zeitlin’sBeasts of the Southern Wild

The postcolonial child in Benh Zeitlin’sBeasts of the Southern Wild

The semiotic predicament of developmental psychology

Raising Gays

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