For my supplemental reading as a part of tracking my term, youth, I read the introduction to Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children. I also read The Future Is Kid Stuff, by Lee Edelman. Here, I would like to ask some questions about these texts I hope to address and discuss during my presentation.
The authors of the introduction, Bruhm and Hurley, say that the dominant narrative about children, that they are bereft of any real sexuality but that their childish ventures are mishaps on the way to mature heterosexuality. makes them into the bearers of heteronormativity. Here are three quotes from the text I find particularly interesting:
"If writing is an act of world making, writing about children is doubly so: not only do writers control the terms of the words they present, they also invent, over and over again, the very idea of inventing humanity, of training it and watching it evolve. This inscription makes the child into a metaphor, a kind of ground zero for the edifice that is adult life and around which narrative of sexuality get organized. . . Utopianism follows the child around like a family pet. The child exists as the site of almost limitless potential (its future not yet written and therefore unblemished). But because the utopian fantasy is the property of adults, not necessarily of children, it is accompanied by its doppelganger, nostalgia. . . Caught between these two worlds, one dead, the other helpless to be born, the child becomes the bearer of heteronormativity, appearing to render ideology invisible by cloaking it in simple stories, euphemisms, and platitudes," (pg. xiii).
"What is the effect of projecting the child into a heternormative future? One effect is that we accept the teleology of the child (and narrative itself) as heterosexually determined. . . The very effort to flatten the narrative of the child into a story of innocence has some queer effects. Childhood itself is afforded a modicum of queerness when the people worry more about how the child turns out than how the child exists as child," (pg. xiv).
"The modern-day queer is unthinkable without the modern child," (pg. xiv).
While Edelman says that the child is the anti-queer, and symbolizes, as it is invoked in the name of family values, that there is no future for queers, Bruhm and Hurley tell us that childhood queerness is oppressed by children's care takers as something that will only have been, but has no future in that child's adulthood. Again, I find Edelman's arguments dependent upon a magical boundary between straight and queer, since he neglects to make good account of queers with children and queer children. Here are some questions I would like to ask about these arguments:
1) What is the child? Does this term represent children themselves, or is it, as something we might take away from Edelman's writing, a symbol of adult heterosexuality, not really having anything to do with real children? If Edelman disavows the child, what shrines does he present for the queerness of boys and girls?
2) Since Bruhm and Hurley assert that childhood queerness is oppressed by their caretakers as something that will only have been and does not have a place in the child's adult future, can we also say that the child has no future? That the purpose of child care is to expunge that child of their childhood forthwith?
3) If the modern-day queer is unthinkable without the modern-day child, how might these terms be used to deconstruct each other, and what alliances may be formed between them?
I look forward to discussing these questions in greater detail in my presentation.
"childhood queerness is oppressed by children's care takers as something that will only have been, but has no future in that child's adulthood"
This idea is something that I can definitely see taking place in children. When I first read that I thought of my five year old brother and how everytime I go down a toy isle with him in a store and I point out different toys and ask him what he likes he always turns down the pink and frilly toys and says they are "girl toys". I always explain to him that there are not "girl" toys or "boy" toys, they are all just toys and he can play with any of them, but nonetheless, every time it we find ourselves in a toy isle it is the same old story. He wants cars because they are what my parents always buy him and cars are toys that he always sees boys play with in the media, therefore, they are boy toys and since he is a boy that is what he should play with. It is this kind of stereotype that keeps children from being who they might have been and liking what they may have liked because anything else is not "normal".
The Child is a symbol by which we describe perfection, innocence, and cleanness. The idea that children are innately good and must be protected comes from the strict moral standards of the Victorian era, when everything was balanced by an opposite. Adults were experienced and temptable leaders who battled forces of good and evil within themselves while children were naive followers who needed guidance from wise leaders. They are seen as the future and it must be protected to conduct themselves correctly and morally.
However, children are often queer, experimental, and curious beings who know a lot more than they are able to articulate. They are impressionable, but also have the ability to think for themselves. Their conduct is regulated by those who watch them and that forms the conduct they will carry into their adult lives.