Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development

Abstract

Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory's attention to (and searing debates on) queer futurity offers something new and important to studies of childhood. Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer theory, I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child's a-sexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing sexuality within a discussion of children's education is constructive. In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children's psychosexual development, I offer a critical reading of the It Gets Better social media campaign (particularly, its consequent critiques and revisions). I begin with engagement of Eve Sedgwick's 1991 seminal essay on queer childhood "How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay" and then, from there, trace contemporary queer theory's use of the figure of the child and consideration of the impact of "innocence" on childhood. In an effort to consider the contemporary residues of historical violence on theories of "healthy" child development, I also consider how histories of colonialism and transAtlantic slavery extend into the future and leave traces on contemporary theories of child development.

Queering reproductive justice: Memories, mistakes, and motivations to transform kinship

“…Luna (2018) refers to nonnormative families as “disruptive families”—a term I like and will use throughout this article. We can consider an array of disruptive families beyond the heteronormative nuclear family and contest patriarchal, racist, classist, and biological confinement (Acosta 2018; Dyer 2017; Smietana, Thompson, and Twine 2018).…”

Marriage Equality Time: Entanglements of sexual progress and childhood innocence in Irish primary schools

“…For example, Bond Stockton (2009: 30) explains how, configured through the adult’s retrospective ‘gauzy lens of what they attribute to the child’, childhood innocence is constructed as at once a-sexual and proto-heterosexual. Following Dyer (2017: 300), we assert that ‘strengthening a conceptual relation between “queer” and “childhood” can help to cultivate a culture of critique concerning the interruptive force of heteronormativity on the child’s development and, more broadly, expose asymmetries in how children are treated and the rhetoric of innocence is distributed’. Such a queer analysis of the ‘rhetoric of innocence’ offers a refusal to ‘calculate the child’s future before it has the opportunity to explore desire’ (Dyer, 2017: 292).…”

“…Following Dyer (2017: 300), we assert that ‘strengthening a conceptual relation between “queer” and “childhood” can help to cultivate a culture of critique concerning the interruptive force of heteronormativity on the child’s development and, more broadly, expose asymmetries in how children are treated and the rhetoric of innocence is distributed’. Such a queer analysis of the ‘rhetoric of innocence’ offers a refusal to ‘calculate the child’s future before it has the opportunity to explore desire’ (Dyer, 2017: 292). Indeed, many working in early childhood and elementary education contexts have begun to explore how the trope of the innocent child regulates and constrains what children may learn about sexuality (Davies and Robinson, 2010; DePalma and Atkinson, 2009; Robinson, 2013) and sustains a heteronormative timeline that idealizes the good future heteronormative sexual citizen-subject (Renold, 2000; Robinson, 2012).…”

“…At one level, the introduction of ME appears here to be opening up new possibilities for LGBT+ identities to be present in sexuality education in primary schools. However, as Dyer (2017) asserts, a truly queer approach to childhood studies would not only be concerned with the erasure or presence of LGBT+ identities in the curriculum. It would also involve a queering of childhood innocence itself; an interrogation and disruption of ‘teleologically constructed narratives of growth that require a developmental sequence which culminates in normalcy’ (Dyer, 2017: 292).…”

“…However, as Dyer (2017) asserts, a truly queer approach to childhood studies would not only be concerned with the erasure or presence of LGBT+ identities in the curriculum. It would also involve a queering of childhood innocence itself; an interrogation and disruption of ‘teleologically constructed narratives of growth that require a developmental sequence which culminates in normalcy’ (Dyer, 2017: 292). Instead, the age-appropriate timelines articulated by some parents and teachers in this study point to the continuing underlying problematic assumption that children are somehow free of sexual knowledge until introduced to sexual knowledge by adults.…”