Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children

Children are forced to do some incredible things. They are, as we all know, required to represent our future, by which we mean that they have futures we can't yet account for, but futures for which we nonetheless hold out hope. But children are also tokens of the past—they remind us, perhaps, of when in our own histories we were young, of how we all made a tour through childhood, and of how that tour was laced with nostalgic goodness or traumatic horror, or some combination of both. Children, that is, remind us of time. But timing isn't every thing, and so children are also forced to solicit our anxieties, our delights, our ethics, our love, or really any form of our attention, especially when politics and moral values are made an issue. In fact, when it comes down to it, and it always seems to come down to it, children can be most anything, other than themselves. And because they are pressured to do the work of placeholders for so much polit ical, cultural, affective activity, they are everywhere, and they're very important. So there's nothing extremely new about the sudden number of texts devoted to thinking about children in recent queer and queer-friendly work, especially since psychoanalytic theory with its descriptions of infantile development and family dramas, has been crucial in the formation of "queer theory." It would be a mistake, indeed, to call the current moment "queer theory's turn to the child." Nevertheless, some exciting books have been devoting much ink to the linking of children and queerness. As Kathryn Bond Stockton writes in one of the more