The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

Series Q

by Kathryn Bond Stockton

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.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Theory, Queer Studies, Academic, History

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English and inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She is the author of Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer,” The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (both finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies), and Making Out (finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir), among other books.

Reviews

[C.E. G · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction to this book is totally fascinating. Stockton looks at "growing sideways" as it relates to children queered by sexuality, race, money, innocence, and criminality. It made me rethink how I conceptualize childhood, as well as how I remember my own childhood. That's how powerful the introduction is.

However, the book doesn't flesh out or answer these questions in a satisfying way. Stockton has a English Lit background, and I guess I was more interested in a sociological exploration than a literary analysis. I ended up skimming the last few chapters, because I hadn't seen the movies or read the books she was referencing.

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book in order to prepare for a literature review/final paper for Dr. Samuel Huneke's Global History of Sexuality and Gender graduate seminar in the fall of 2023. I really enjoyed this book and it introduced me to a lot of fascinating literary landmarks I was previously unfamiliar with, in addition to incorporating some great readings of films into the work. The book does an excellent job of unpacking so much discourse around youth and sexuality in a really interesting way. I found reading the book side by side with Jules Gill-Peterson's "Histories of the Transgender Child" particularly productive in reference to Kathryn Bond-Stockton's concept of "growing sideways" that so many LGBTQ+ youth experience in our society.

[Madelyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

“There are ways of growing that are not growing up. The “gay” child’s fascinating
asynchronicities, its required self-ghosting measures, its appearance only after its death, and its frequent fallback onto metaphor (as a way to grasp itself ) indicate we need new words for growth. Against the backdrop of crucial arguments made by Lee Edelman, James Kincaid, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I stake a different kind of claim for growth and for its intimate relations with queerness. Overall, I want to prick (deflate, or just delay) the vertical, forward-motion metaphor of growing up, and do so by exploring the many kinds of sideways growth depicted by twentieth-century texts.”

[amyleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction to this one left me tingling. The sidewaysness, the ways of inhabiting time, futureness, of the queer child. I loved the parts about thinking children alongside animals, how and what worlds they move and make possible but some of the chapters I found just too heavy with Oedipal stuff. I really do appreciate how vast and surprising of an archive Stockton pulls from and this book definitely, in its ideas, shifted my thinking.

[Iraultza · Rating 1 out of 5]

me esperaba otra cosa, la verdad. Sí que cuestiona ciertas ideas sobre la supuesta ignorancia, inocencia y falta de agencia de les niñes, pero el resto de capítulos me parecieron sin mas. La idea de crecer horizontalmente es original, pero no la veo reflejada en los análisis. La reflexión que hace sobre la pedofilia también bastante innecesaria.

[Maxine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some very interesting insights—and is a very good primer to the field—but is bogged down by Freudian gobbledygook while analyzing certain films and books. Less enjoyable than useful.

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly comprehensive and fascinating!

[Logan Tunick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Had to read for my capstone. Interesting but wouldn’t necessarily read if my own volition. Some of the theory is far reaching some is not

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Queer Child is made up of a series of close readings of literary and filmic texts dealing with "perverse" or "queer" children (loosely defined), drawing theoretically on work on queer temporality and animal studies. Unfortunately, Stockton's readings didn't strike me as especially illuminating, a noticeable problem not only when she tackles canonical literature like The Well of Loneliness, Mrs. Dalloway, Lolita, or In Cold Blood, but also in her analyses of recent Hollywood films (the section on Blood Diamond, for example, was little more than a summary). I actually really liked where the main ideas seemed to be going, but on the whole, The Queer Child didn't feel fully realized to me--especially disappointing considering how much I loved Stockton's previous book, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame. Frankly, I would recommend reading the introduction of this one and passing on the rest.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's hard to know what to say about this one. On the one hand, Stockton's prose was a joy to read (for me); wacky, playful and florid even as it is addressing an issue that many feel is too taboo to talk about even in hyperclinical terms. If there are some not-so-small problems with her claims, that doesn't mean this isn't a work that will get you thinking, in very different ways, about the queerness of children.

[Erdem Tasdelen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a while to figure out what she meant by growing sideways, could have done a better job of explaining it at the beginning (it's not a concept that is hard to grasp after all!)

A bit too all over the place - too much film analysis, too little theory. I mean her writing is very lucid and the films she writes about are definitely relevant but it gets a bit tiresome if you haven't seen the movies yourself.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 - I loved this book, Stockton's prose is mesmerizing (such a treat in this academic context), and she has some fascinating arguments about the (broadly defined) queer child. The intro is particularly great as she tidily identifies the genres of queer children that "braid" together (her metaphor) in the following chapters.

[Aubrey Hales-Lewis]

I want to read this book because it was written by a University of Utah professor I am hoping to study with in Phd land!

[Jessica]

interesting bit about animal friends of the queer child that really got me thinking.