The trope of the Child is contradictory and marked by considerable ambivalence. To reckon with the Child’s place in public culture is to bear witness to its myriad permutations. One such permutation presents itself in the story of “Alex,” a 23-year-old white U.S. American woman who nearly left her Washington State home to join the Islamic State (ISIS) after sustained online contact with several Caliphate members. Alex’s story is a representative anecdote regarding white civil society’s affective investments in and anxieties about the Child, and is strikingly homologous to popular narratives of online sexual predators who target children. Within the white Western heteronormative imaginary, the figures of the pedophile and the terrorist recruiter seek to defile the Child and, in so doing, undermine the normative foundations of white Western civil society. To mark the ISIS recruiter as a queer threat to the Child is to mobilize the latter in the service of Western hegemony and tether heteronormative notions of child and family to the politics of empire.

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