The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

“The Queer Child both describes and models the critical possibilities of a queer and queered essentialism and makes a sophisticated contribution to the seemingly paradoxical but nonetheless crucial anti-identitarian identity politics.” — Shane Vogel, American Literature

“The Queer Child is dazzling and important. Its bold interrogations of delay and expansive argument for more sophisticated appreciation for sideways growth should become grounding concerns for those studying childhood, past, present, and future.” — Don Romesburg, H-Net Reviews

“In The Queer Child, Stockton teaches us more than just a few things about queer children. She teaches us a new way to read, one that reminds me of Eve Sedgwick’s call for ‘reparative reading’: that anti-paranoid, ambivalent stance in which one reads the small detail, the found part-object, for surprise, and through surprise, for hope. Before The Queer Child, I did not know why Lolita’s dogs felt like relief. Or the pleasures that can be taken by suspending a verb. Or that getting fat might be a way out rather than up. Stockton’s queer children, for the most part, do not have to watch videos promising that it will get better: their hope lies not in the future, but to the side.” — Elizabeth Freeman, Studies in the Novel,

“Kathryn Bond Stockton’s richly incisive intellectual history The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century reveals a parallel tract of the literary imagination. Her compelling, and vitally important, contribution to our understanding of how society juggles, sometimes successfully and often provocatively, the ideas of queerness and childhood proves that these ideas have literally formed one another.” — Michael Amico, Lambda Book Report,

“Queer theory is looking at children. And Stockton looks intensely, unflinchingly—grappling with the charged and often enigmatic inextricability of sexuality, politics, and the child.” — Gabrielle Owen, The Lion and the Unicorn,

“Stockton ranges widely across the terrain of 20th-century culture, touching on legal cases, novels, films, and other examples from popular culture. . . . [T]he examples she uses help buttress her insights, and she is breathtakingly deft in her readings of cultural texts. . . . The Queer Child offers a provocatively shaded look at the idealized versions of childhood we’re used to encountering, and invites us to rethink our sense of who children are—and what our own childhoods mean to us.” — Audrey Bilger, Bitch

“Stockton’s gripping book fascinatingly illuminates the works she addresses and the conceptual intractabilities of the queerness they allow us to perceive. She also maintains a difficult equipoise: retaining her focus on “the queer child” (resisting the urge to subordinate it to ‘adult’ needs and fantasies), she still allows it its ghostliness, resisting alike the temptation to make it a known entity and thereby leaving it, in the various fictions (legal and otherwise) we spin around it, to its suspended time, its delay, its unwonted forms of pleasure.” — Kevin Ohi, i GLQ

“This is an impressive, stimulating, and engaging study that queers the child in ways that show its enormous critical potential.” — Daniela Caselli, New Formations