queer theory/childhood book guide

2020-11-05 – I.W.

i originally wrote this up in response to a specific question, then it became long enough that i decided i ought to save it somewhere referencable. for the majority of these, i can far more easily spew criticism than heap praise, so it's more a map of a niche than a set of recommendations. in putting it online for the second time (2020-10-16), i have made some edits and reorganizations.

Can you recommend good writers on children and queer theory?

the answer to this kinda depends on if you want any kind of books about children and any kind of queer theory or queer theory type books involving children. either way, you can find some good stuff by poking around in the "child question" and "queer theory" tags in my book library. the stuff in there is not limited to what i have actually liked, or even what i have actually read, though.

specific recs are as follows. all of these are in my library, and a lot of them are the "canonical" stuff that you'll hear from anyone you ask about queer theory. i'll try to focus on the other angle more. i may have forgotten some important things, though!

Shulamith Firestone — The Dialectic of Sex (1970). this book is very '70s U.S., which is part of the charm of course but makes some of the chapters a drag. the one on childhood is exemplary, though. i recommend her short stories as well.
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (1972) — one of the first to “theoretically” articulate the soon to be cliché ideas that (a) gay sexual habits are a model for communism, (b) queer life is a kind of sabotage in the vertical flow of familial reproduction. he gets a lot of points for making his mistakes innocently, compared to the culpable naïveté of later writers, often clinging to a set of psychoanalytic reference points irrelevant to their real cultural context.
- Paul Preciado, Anal Terror, a postscript to Homosexual Desire. you can find a translation in bædan 3.
Tony Duvert, Good Sex Illustrated (1974). having used up my “product of the time” forgiveness card on Hocquenghem, i have to say that this is not very correct. it's worth reading if you have an interest in the subjects of this page, and it's right in seeing the heteronormative function of sex education and not falling for the idea that openness about sex is proof of historical progress. however, it's very much under the sway of the quasi-Reichian idea, which once held a surprising amount of currency on the left, that early sex prevents fascism. it’s good as a tract; i’ll admit to having had some epiphanies the first time i read it.
Guy Hocquenghem and René Schérer, Co-ire. the book! the book we would have written ourselves if we hadn’t discovered it just in time. it says a hundred things we couldn't have captured better, and fails to answer things we don’t have answers for either. it is to Hocquenghem's credit that after his earlier writings he played down the intrinsic importance of sexuality, which (despite warnings by Foucault) continues to mesmerize many in this list.
Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (1977) is the type of book i really like to see. it’s a proper sociological look at sinister mutual parasitism of family and state (in France as of the year X), which isn’t content merely to identify a bad guy but actually charts its historical transformations.
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan (1984). psychoanalytic and historical take on what "children's literature" (which is written by adults, did you know?) is all about. i remember enjoying it a lot, but can no longer remember any details.
Guy Davenport has some lovely stuff about kids in Apples and Pears (1984) and A Balthus Notebook (1989), and though the former is fiction, it cites enough to deserve a bibliography. wonderful book.
John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers (1988). history of child abandonment as an accepted part of family life in a significant swathe of European history, arguing that "exposure" does not mean infanticide. Boswell has written about gay history as well, though queer theory writers mainly bring him up so as to complain that he thinks “gay people” is a real thing.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. out of her works, Between Men (1985) made the most an impact on me, for giving a different approach to the social role of male-male feelings than the Freudish one you'll find in e.g. Hocquenghem. her essay on reparative reading also helped save me from the endemic brain diseases of critical intellectualism.
Leo Bersani has mostly not grabbed me, but his essay Is the Rectum a Grave? (1987) is canonical. he has a major place in my imaginary essay about paranoia and redemption in queer theory vs feminist polemics.
Wally Seccombe wrote a pair of major pieces of marxist history on social reproduction and the economic role of the family, A Millennium of Family Change (1992) and Weathering the Storm (1993). not necessarily concerned with the subject of children per se, but i think it's vital as context. if good queer theory or good feminist writing existed, it would look very much like this.
Lee Edelman, No Future (2004). this book uses an unwieldy Lacanian apparatus in which the impossibility of reaching anything real beyond the functioning of cultural representations becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. it’s about “the Child” as a symbol of the future menaced by conniving gays, rather than actual children. what it has to say is in some sense true, but conveyed in the most frustrating and misleading way possible. it kicked off the anti-social fad in the discipline.
Janet Halley, Split Decisions (2006) criticizes self-defeating feminist sex paranoia and sees queer theory as a better alternative. i tend to thing the criticisms are definitive but the positive part is lacking.
Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child (2010). people have a habit of calling things "Victorian," especially where attitudes to children are concerned, and they probably are right to think the Victorians set off a shift in those attitudes that still holds today among english-talkers, but they could do with studying what exactly the discourse was all about back then.
bædan (2012) somewhat kicked off my interest in futurity/"queerness"/children considered as connected, but i have to look back on it and myself as juvenile (ha). it notices a recurring motif, “total instant destruction,” and thinks it’s made a useful discovery at exactly the point when it should be becoming suspicious.
Emma Heaney, The New Woman (2017) is about what transfemininity means in relation to women and in relation to queer theory. it wants to tell literature and theory that “it’s not that deep” regarding trans women; trans women are just people, existing on the same level as cis people and not embodying transcendence, not the world-spirit on horseback. that’s all well and good, but if you have to throw Nightwood in the burn pile to make your point, it isn’t worth it. the book does help make a point about how the recognized representatives of fags always buy acceptance by throwing some residuum of “the bad kind” under the bus.
Steven Angelides, The Fear of Child Sexuality (2019). i can say this for the man: he wants to fuck teens. the chapters of the book lack something in cohesion when combined, but i remember all or most of them being good on their own. the third in particular, adapted from his earlier essay “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality,” draws out the obvious foucauldian critique of radfem notions of power.