Curiouser by Steven Bruhm; Natasha Hurley

Curiouser

On The Queerness Of Children

Steven Bruhm; Natasha Hurley

Our culture has a dominant narrative about children: they are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, children are officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual. Curiouser is a book about this narrative and what happens when it takes an unexpected, or queer, turn-when the stories of childhood must confront a child whose play does not conform to the ideal of child (a)sexuality.The contributors to Curiouser examine the ostensibly simple representations of children that circulate through visual images, life narrative, children’s literature, film, and novels. At issue in these essays are the stories we tell to children, the stories we tell about children, and the stories we tell ourselves as children-stories that ultimately frame what is normative and what is queer.

From the fiction of Horatio Alger, Henry James, Djuna Barnes, and Guy Davenport to the spectacles of Michael Jackson, Calvin Klein, and The Exorcist; from the narrative structure of pedophilia to evangelical Christianity; from punk tomboyism to queer girl-scouting: these scholars of childhood and sexuality scrutinize queer childhood energies in an impressive range of cultural forms.

Contributors: Lauren Berlant, U of Chicago; Andre Furlani, Concordia U; Judith Halberstam, U of California, San Diego; Ellis Hanson, Cornell U; Paul Kelleher; Kathryn Kent, Williams College; James Kincaid, U of Southern California; Richard Mohr, U of Illinois, Urbana; Michael Moon, Johns Hopkins U; Kevin Ohi, Boston College; Eric Savoy, U of Montreal; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, CUNY Graduate Center; Kathryn Bond Stockton, U of Utah; Michael Warner, Rutgers U.Steven Bruhm is associate professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University. He is the author of Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (Minnesota, 2000) and Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (1994). Natasha Hurley has taught children’s literature and queer theory at Mount St. Vincent University and St. Mary’s University in Halifax.


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Details

ISBN 9780816642021
Genre Literary History
Copyright Date 2004
Publication Date 20-May-04
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Editor Steven Bruhm; Natasha Hurley
Format Trade Paperback
No. of Pages 376
Language English
Rating NotRated
Editor Steven Bruhm; Natasha Hurley
Subject Children And Sex; Children In Literature; Children In Popular Culture
BookID 2596

Author: LFWBooks