The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Series Q)

Engaging and challenging the work of sociologists, legal theorists, and historians, Stockton coins the term “growing sideways” to describe ways of growing that defy the usual sense of growing “up” in a linear trajectory toward full stature, marriage, reproduction, and the relinquishing of childish ways. Growing sideways is a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings, wayward paths, and fertile delays. Contending that children’s queerness is rendered and explored best in fictional forms, including literature, film, and television, Stockton offers dazzling readings of works ranging from novels by Henry James, Radclyffe Hall, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Vladimir Nabokov to the movies Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Hanging Garden, Heavenly Creatures, Hoop Dreams, and the 2005 remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The result is a fascinating look at children’s masochism, their interactions with pedophiles and animals, their unfathomable, hazy motives (leading them at times into sex, seduction, delinquency, and murder), their interracial appetites, and their love of consumption and destruction through the alluring economy of candy.

• Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq
• Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (Interplay)
• Curiouser: On The Queerness Of Children
• The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities
• Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (America and the Long 19th Century)
• Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
• The Child to Come
• The Hundreds