1. Origin Stories
In this introductory session, we explore the `origin story` of Queer Theory, and especially Queer Theory`s persistent interest in the figure of `The Child` and childhood as the origin of queerness. As many queer theorists have noted, modern cultural discourse often locates the origins of sexual identity in childhood. And yet, childhood is nevertheless assumed to be a site of asexuality. Together, we will explore this paradox and consider the meanings of how we tell stories about our sexual selves.
Required Reading:
Probyn, Elspeth. `Suspended Beginnings: Of Childhood and Nostalgia.` GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 2.4 (1995): 439–465.
Jenkins, Henry. `Childhood Innocence and Other Myths`
2. Libido Unleashed
In this lecture, we take up one of the most significant theories for our understanding of the queerness of sexuality: Sigmund Freud`s Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality. Looking specifically at Freud's second essay on Infantile Sexuality, we will explore the implications of Freud`s (radical) idea that infants are `polymorphously perverse` and discuss the way this idea has contributed to more recent queer understandings of gender and sexuality.
Required Reading:
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on a Theory of Sexuality, `Infantile Sexuality`
Davidson, Arnold. `How to do the History of Psychoanalysis.`
Further Reading:
Dean, Tim and Christopher Lane. `Introduction,` Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis
Malinowsky, Bronislaw. `The Formation of a Complex`
Giffney, Noreen. Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice & Queer Theory (2017, Punctum)
Cavich, Max. `Do You Love Me?: Or, the Question of the Queer Child of Psychoanalysis`
3. The Repressive Hypothesis, and Other Myths
Responding to both Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism, Michel Foucault issued one of the most influential revisions to our understanding of modern sexuality in The History of Sexuality. Together, we will consider the new model of power Foucault proposes, his claims about the `invention` of homosexuality, and his localization of the `masturbating child` as one of the four main cynosures of sexuality. We will also discuss how Foucault has influenced queer and social theorists in the decades since this landmark text.
Required Reading:
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol 1, Parts II-III
Further Reading:
De Lauretis, Teresa. `The Stubborn Drive,` Critical Inquiry.
4. Suicide & Strife
Undeniably, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was one of the first--and is still, posthumously, one of the most influential--queer theorists to date. Her work on sexuality returned, early and often, to the scene of childhood as an indispensable site for understanding the political importance of what she called her `anti-homophobic inquiry.` In this seminar, we will look specifically at her writing about queer youth suicide, and watch a documentary that explores the disproportionate rates of homelessness, poverty, displacement, and abandonment that affect queer youth. Together, we will think about the social, economic, and psychological consequences of childhood homophobia and how that has shaped the current terrain of queer community and culture.
Required Reading:
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. `How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay`
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. `Queer & Now
A Road to Home (2016)
Further Reading:
Zaborskis, Mary. `Sexual Orphanings,` GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Vol 224. (2016)
Paris is Burning (1990)
5. Death Drives, or Fuck the Child
In 2004, Lee Edelman issued an imperative on behalf of queer theory that has incited passionate and often heated debate: `Fuck the Child.` Identifying the contemporary yoking of political futurity to childhood, and pointing out the extent to which this aspirational horizon is premised on what Edelman describes as a heteronormative `reproductive futurity`, Edelman radically called for the queer rejection of the figure of `the child` writ large. Together, we will consider what Edelman meant in issuing this injunctive, how he deploys psychoanalysis to argue his point, and what the ethico-political stakes are of disarticulating the terms `queer` and `child`.
Required Reading:
Edelman, Lee. `The Future is Kids Stuff`
6. Queering Childhood
After Edelman`s provocation, a number of queer theorists have come to the defence of `the child,` arguing that childhood can be read as the par excellence manifestation of queerness. Looking at anti-developmental readings of the `queer child`, we will consider what potential childhood has for combating normativity. Is there an inherent queerness to all childhood? How is queerness being used differently from sexual identity or orientation in this deployment?
Required Reading:
Bond Stockton, Kathryn. `The Child Queered by Color`
Further Reading:
Rosky, Clifford. `Same Sex Marriage Litigation and Children`s Right to Be Queer,` GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Halberstam, Jack. `Animating Revolt & Revolting Animation,` The Queer Art of Failure.
7. Spanking
In this seminar, we will examine a central if contested experience of childhood--spanking--and look at how queer and psychoanalytic theorists have explored its latent eroticism. In this seminar, we will explore how and why specific tableaus of childhood are eroticized in our cultural imaginary and question (through the act of spanking) the link between violence and eroticism at issue in much feminist and queer debate about sexuality.
Required Reading:
Dotti Gets Spanked (1993, Haynes)
Freud, Anna. `Beating Fantasies and Daydreams` (1922)
Further Reading:
Freud, Sigmund. `A Child is Being Beaten`
Hart, Lynda. `Knights in Shining Armor and Other Relations,` Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism, pp. 11-35.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. `A Poem Is Being Written`
8. Erotic Innocence/ Innocent Eroticism
Building on our discussion of eroticism, we will tackle our continuing cultural obsession with the dyad of the paedophile/molested child. Pushing back against sensationalized moral panics that position the figure of the paedophile as a lurking, ubiquitous threat to children's innocence, we will entertain the idea that our obsession with surveilling (threats to) children`s sexuality is part of, rather than the antidote to, our latent eroticization of childhood innocence. To understand this, we will look at a case study example--Lewis Carroll`s collection of photographs of Alice Liddell--and consider if/how these images eroticize innocence and how Carroll`s interest in specularizing innocence might help us understand our own similar cultural inclinations.
Required Reading:
Kincaid, James. `Reading, Watching, Loving The Child.` Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Literature, pp. 303-394
Further Reading:
Fischel, Joseph. ` `Especially Heinous': Politics, Predation, and Sex Panics,` Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, pp. 25-54
Higonnenot, Anne. `Photographs against the Law`
Jenkins, Henry. `The Sensuous Child: Benjamin Spock and the Sexual Revolution`
9. Consent
A vital debate in any consideration of childhood sexuality is the status of consent. This has likewise been an important topic for much feminist theory, which has though provocatively both about the necessities--and limitations--of current liberal, legalistic formulations of consent which position it as the necessary and sufficient condition for the arbitration of ethical sexual acts. By taking up the child as a sexual subject, we will consider what problematics inhere in our current articulations of consent, as well as what protections a consent-based approach to sexuality hold.
Required Reading:
Fischel, Joseph. `Introduction: Sex and the Ends of Consent,` Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, pp.
Fischel, Joseph. `Numbers, Sex, Power: Age and Sexual Consent,` Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent, pp.
Further Reading:
Butler, Judith. `Sexual Consent: Some Notes on Psychoanalysis and Law,` Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 2011.
Rubin, Gayle. `Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality` (1984)
MacKinnon, Katherine. `Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State,`
10. Trans & Now
In this final seminar, we will approach the increased visibility of trans people in the news, media, and popular press, asking particularly about how and why so much debate around trans-ness focuses on childhood. Watching Sciamma`s acclaimed film, we will consider its representation of trans childhood, asking about the relationship between trans-ness and queerness.
Required Reading:
Tomboy (Sciamma, 2011)
Judith (Jack) Halberstam, `Oh Bondage Up Yours! Female Masculinity and the Tomboy,` Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 191-214.
Gill-Peterson, Julien. `What Is the Now, Even of Then?`, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies Vol 224. (2016)
The Life and Death of Latician King
Further Reading:
Brock, Maria. `Whose Freedom, and from what?: The Child as Cipher for a (transnational) politics of `traditional values` `, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2019/10/21/whose-freedom-and-from-what-the-child-as-cipher-for-a-transnational-politics-of-traditional-values/?fbclid=IwAR33I8RF8-SZLFUGrLlLsiTWUMizeDBbG1m90gF_LNTPXXpBp4i85HIzm3k
Castaneda, Claudia. `Childhood.` TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1–2 (2014): 59–61.
Gill-Peterson, Julian. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle, eds. The Transgender Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Ehrensaft, Diane. Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender-Nonconforming Children, 2011.
Travers, Ann. The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (and Their Parents) are Creating a Gender Revolution. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
Snorton, C Riley. Black on Both Sides: Racial History of Trans Identity