Growing Sideways in Twenty-first Century British Culture

Abstract

This volume examines changing boundaries between childhood and adulthood in British society and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century − where these age boundaries are widely debated, policed, and contested − to investigate alternatives to conventional ideas of growing up. Building on observations, especially in children’s literature criticism, that human growth is shaped by a grand narrative that privileges adulthood, and on terminologies of non-normative growth, particularly in queer theory, this monograph develops growing sideways as a concept that queers this grand narrative by destabilising childhood and adulthood, and the boundaries between them. The concept is refined through close readings of twenty-first century British children’s literature, television series, film, and participatory events, troubling age boundaries via specific strategies in three conceptual areas: appearance, play, and space. Exploring power structures around age and gender, this monograph traces growing sideways as a distinct and important alternative discourse of human growth.

Survival Kits for Babies: Baby Box Books and Infant Temporality in Finnish Maternity Packages

“…Other ways to disrupt normative timelines include shifting focus onto depictions of, e.g., anachronisms, non-maturation, and no future (Edelman, 2004;Halberstam, 2005;Freeman, 2010). Queer temporal literary studies make us aware that bodies age in various ways and that norms concerning maturation and development vary across time and space (Stockton, 2009;Pugh, 2011;Joosen, 2018;Malewski, 2021). Within children's literature studies, Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) has coined the concept growing sideways in order to capture such non-normative timelines when growing up queer.…”