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The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. By Kathryn Bond Stockton. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. x + 294 pp. $22.95 (paper).
The cover image of Kathryn Bond Stockton's The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century shows a child holding a convex glass object over his face, presenting a child who is recognizable, normatively beautiful, and simultaneously distorted and off-center. The table of contents, listing an introduction, five expansive chapters, and a conclusion, flows sideways rather than vertically. The pages of the book are closer to square than those found in the typical monograph, allowing plenty of room for margin comments, the reader's own branches of inquiry. Thus, the book's design embodies the concept of sideways growth on which Stockton's groundbreaking work depends.
Stockton's central premise is that all children are queer, even those who fit the most normative constructions of the child. Here, queerness is defined not just by a sexualized strangeness, but by a strangeness that is specific to the child. "Queer" comes to mean that which is threatening and strange as well as that which is frighteningly vulnerable, especially, but not only, because of sex and desire. Furthermore, children trouble the heteronormative linear temporality of "growing up" through "sideways growth," a concept that allows Stockton to trace the otherwise undetectable desires of children and the adult interventions that impede their development. Stockton thus detaches growth from age and verticality, complicating the very qualities that define the child.
This book presents four versions of the queer child: the "Ghostly...