“The childhood I was meant to be in”: The Queer Time of Reading

Abstract

ABSTRACT How can attention to queer adults’ childhood reading illuminate the complex temporalities of queer experience—and of reading itself? Developing existing critical work on non-linear time, reading and book use, this article proposes queerness as a mode and oral history as a method for provoking new thinking about reading-in-time and how the manipulation of the material book might facilitate time unfolding differently. Analyzing the Textual Preferences archive, in which ten LGBTQ+ adults reflect on their formative reading, the article shows how recalling and rereading key books from childhood enables readers to produce belatedly legible aspects of their “protoqueer” child-selves. Through encounters with texts by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruby Ferguson, Louisa May Alcott, Enid Blyton, Kenneth Grahame, Susan Coolidge and Joanna Trollope, these readers use books to negotiate growing up, to disrupt and defend against the progress of chronological time, and to reshape their past experiences, both in life and in reading.