Queer Children Research Articles

The Paradox of Play: A Conversation with Ken Corbett and Maggie Nelson

ABSTRACT In this conversation, Ken Corbett and Maggie Nelson address motherhood, the question of the family and the precarity of the present. Drawing from lived experience, clinical work, and writing endeavors, they engage with our cultural moment through a discussion of precocity and precarity, parenting discourses and impossible safety, psychoanalysis, queer families and queer children, and the looming presence of overwhelming societal challenges. By playing with the paradox around questions of impossibility, they each, in their own way, speak to what is possible.

Cripping sex education: reflections on a public pedagogy project

ABSTRACT In response to recent calls for ‘cripping sex education’, we describe and reflect on an 11-week public pedagogy project in Canada that paired five community sexuality educators with 78 undergraduate students to make digital sexuality education tools for disabled, Deaf, and queer children and youth. From a perspective that argues for a genealogy of crip desire in childhood, we reflect on the possibilities and limitations of an intellectual partnership project, called Cripping Sex Education: Creating Digital Tools for Disabled, Deaf, and Queer Kids. This public pedagogy project centred crip theory, coalition building, and critical digital pedagogy in its aim to discover how cripping sex education might be feasible within the parameters of our institutions, vocations and lives. The work required all partners to consider new pedagogical formations of sexuality education, including through ethical engagements, relational rights, and expansive approaches to access. Interviews with three student participants reveal that cripping sex education involves thinking broadly about accessibility, challenging normalcy and, as disability justice principles attest, centring those who are most impacted. We close with recommendations for future cripping sex education pedagogical work that honours already existent crip desires, childhoods, and futures.

Exploring Affective Experiences of Queer Individuals Navigating Relationships with Evangelical Parents

An abundance of scholarship explores and discusses the process of queer identity development, including the experience of disclosing one’s queer identity, often referred to as coming out. Coming out to one’s parent(s) can be a challenging and complex experience for queer individuals, particularly for children from religious families. In this study, I explored the nuanced relationships between queer individuals and their Evangelical parents. I conducted qualitative interviews with nine participants. Using thematic analysis and Ahmed’s theory of affect and happy objects, I constructed four themes: (a) learning the affect queer carries, (b) feeling the affects of being queer, (c) how parental appraisals affect parent-child relationships, and (d) being the killjoy. Results suggest the belief alone that “queer is bad’’ is harmful, regardless of outward acceptance or rejection behaviors from parents. This work compels the field to look beyond and before reactions from parents toward their queer children and to also consider how conceptualizations of queer as bad or good affect queer individuals. While much is known about the challenges faced by queer individuals, this work reveals the importance of examining the systems and structures causing these challenges rather than perpetuating the idea that being queer is inherently painful.

Queering children’s rights: a critical queer analysis of the UNCRC

ABSTRACT While there is increasing attention for LGBTQIA+ concerns within human rights, the legal instruments and academic discussions regarding children’s rights remain largely silent on issues involving sexuality and gender. Due to pervasive protectionist narratives and heteronormative assumptions governing modern childhood, children’s rights implicitly limit the expression of (queer) children and lack the tools and guidance to navigate complex queer disputes. In this context, this paper explores the world’s leading document on children’s rights – the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) – from a queer theoretical perspective, uncovering how children’s rights are interwoven with social constructs surrounding gender and sexuality. In doing so, this paper first explores the relevance of queering the UNCRC and sets out a queer theoretical framework within the human rights context. Through this lens, finally, the paper discusses three overarching areas of queer critique within the UNCRC: 1) the construction of childhood, 2) child sexuality and gender and 3) the normalising impacts of restrictions on child agency on queer children. It concludes that the UNCRC has great potential to catalyse the implementation of LGBTQIA-focused protections, but more work is needed to clarify and strengthen the legal position of the queer child within its ambit.

Understanding Law and Sustainability in Children’s Literature Through the Lens of Queer Studies in Animations and Cartoons from America

Objective: Queer Studies as a literary space explores the lives of non-heterosexual individuals. It developed as a literal theory in the 1990s with Terresa De Lauretis from her work Queer Theory Lesbian and Gay Sexuality. As the study develops, it covers the varied history of social acceptance faced by homosexuality in many cultures through a wide range of theories and concepts. Children’s literature profoundly shapes individuals from a young age and alludes to whose stories matter in a social setting. Result: Understanding queer studies in children’s literature would provide an extensive picture of representation, equality, and perceptibility, highlighting their difficulties and struggles, coping strategies, and even validation for the queer community. Method: On the same note, the researcher is aware that discussing queerness among children is sensitive; therefore, the paper will traverse through certain conjectures, such as the history of queer studies, Queer Law, the history of queer studies in children’s literature through cartoons, the political problems of studying queer people, and queer delineation among children in contemporary society. Conclusion: Through these trajectories, the research aims to understand queer law and sustainable representation as part of human rights amongst queer children in America.

“The boy in the cupboard”: children in Indian comics and their subversion of heteronormative interpellation

ABSTRACT This article delves into the complex ways in which children and adolescents subvert heteronormativity in/through comics. Situated at the intersection of Comics Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, this research engages with queer theoretical contemplations by locating it within the impetus of queer theory’s inquiry into the figure of the child, more specifically, the crisis of identity as experienced by queer children. It focuses on select contemporary Indian comics by platforms like Gaysi Family and Pratham Books, published both digitally and in print between 2018 and 2022, and employs a theoretical framework drawing from Butler’s conception of the heterosexual matrix and interpellation, as well as Munoz’s theory of disidentification. The article comprises three sections offering four different perspectives on the mechanism of subversion: the first section explores disidentification in characters and their subversion of heteronormative norms, the second delves into disidentification at the intersection of romantic/sexual desire and gender, and the final section examines the role of these comics in reshaping the heteronormative boundaries of ‘children’s literature’ and their role in introducing subversion to comic readers through narratives of disidentification. The article illuminates the transformative potential of comics in challenging norms, fostering resistance, and envisioning alternative futures.

Understanding Law and Sustainability in Children’s Literature through the Lens of Queer Studies in Animations and Cartoons from America

Objective: Queer Studies as a literary space explores the lives of non-heterosexual individuals. It developed as a literal theory in the 1990s with Terresa De Lauretis from her work Queer Theory Lesbian and Gay Sexuality. As the study develops, it covers the varied history of social acceptance faced by homosexuality in many cultures through a wide range of theories and concepts. Children’s literature profoundly shapes individuals from a young age and alludes to whose stories matter in a social setting.
 
 Result: Understanding queer studies in children’s literature would provide an extensive picture of representation, equality, and perceptibility, highlighting their difficulties and struggles, coping strategies, and even validation for the queer community.
 
 Method: On the same note, the researcher is aware that discussing queerness among children is sensitive; therefore, the paper will traverse through certain conjectures, such as the history of queer studies, Queer Law, the history of queer studies in children’s literature through cartoons, the political problems of studying queer people, and queer delineation among children in contemporary society.
 
 Conclusion: Through these trajectories, the research aims to understand queer law and sustainable representation as part of human rights amongst queer children in America.

An ambivalent story: Queer children’s literature in Israel between 1986 and 2022

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, only 23 Queer literary works have been published for children and adolescents in Hebrew. This paper examines the characteristics of these works in light of the ambivalent and controversial status of the LGBTQ+ community in Israel. The findings show that the few works that have been published and that present same-sex families or LGBTQ+ characters, and the manner in which Queer themes are presented in those texts, are in line with how these issues are perceived and addressed by Israeli society. Moreover, this article divides the Queer Israeli literature for children and youth into three categories: implied Queer literature that hides the Queer existence through the allegoric genre; Queer-phobic literature that seemingly presents the Queer family but in actual fact promotes homophobic stereotypes; and Queer literature that places the LGBTQ+ character or family in the center of the story without passing judgment or criticism.

Parent Reactions to Sexual and Gender Identity Disclosure Events in the Deep South

Parental reactions to sexual and gender identity disclosures are known to be related to queer children and adolescents’ mental health and psychosocial adjustment. An improved understanding of how and why parents react how they do, in conjunction with their perceptions of how the coming out process unfolded can inform our understanding of how a young person’s coming out is experienced by parents in the broader context of the family. A clearer understanding is especially important for families located in historically sociopolitically conservative geographic areas because these parents might be at highest risk for a maladaptive reactions to coming out, subjected to homophobic legislation and cultural pressures, and because families from these areas are less represented in the literature. In the current qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents of queer children and adolescents living in the Deep South. Results illuminate a highly heterogenious experience and provide an initial roadmap, via the articulation of a conceptual model, to guide further research with families in this context.

Reparative Reading and the Drug Wars’ Queer Children

This article posits that recent reparative responses to the opioid crisis are consistent with a longer history of reparative hermeneutics conditioned by the drug wars in the Americas, ones that attempt to repair but often reinforce the biopolitical logics produced by the artificial divide between licit and illicit drugs, a distinction that facilitates both racial and imperialist policing and racial capitalist profiteering. The humanities’ postcritical reorientation, and particularly the turn toward the reparative, is underwritten by such relations between state, capital, and drug policy. To investigate the reverberations of such contemporary political and academic investments in drug-war-fueled repair, the article focuses on a recent wave of black fiction and film that reenvisions the 1980s War on Drugs in the era of the opioid epidemic, with particular attention to Barry Jenkins’s film Moonlight (2016) and James Hannaham’s novel Delicious Foods (2015).

Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices in the Orthopaedic Care of Sexual and Gender Minority Youth: A Survey of Two Pediatric Academic Hospitals.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) children and adolescents continue to experience unmet healthcare needs, partly because of clinician biases, discrimination, and inadequate education. Although clinician attitudes and knowledge related to sexual and gender minority health have been well studied in other medical specialties, these have been scarcely studied in orthopaedics. (1) What are pediatric orthopaedic healthcare professionals' attitudes (perceived importance, openness, comfort, and confidence) toward caring for sexual and gender minority youth? (2) What do pediatric orthopaedic healthcare professionals know about caring for this patient population? (3) What factors are associated with clinician attitude and/or knowledge? (4) What existing initiatives to improve orthopaedic care for this population are clinicians aware of at their home institutions? All 123 orthopaedic healthcare professionals at two pediatric academic hospitals in the Midwestern and Northeastern United States were sent a 34-question, internet-based, anonymous survey. The survey queried respondent demographics, attitudes, knowledge, and practice behaviors at their home institutions related to the care of sexual and gender minority youth. Respondent attitudes were queried using the Attitudes Summary Measure, which is a survey instrument that was previously validated to assess clinicians' attitudes regarding sexual and gender minority patients. Items used to assess knowledge and practice behaviors were developed by content experts in LGBTQ health and/or survey design, as well as orthopaedic surgeons to improve face validity and to mitigate push-polling. Attitude and knowledge items used a 5-point Likert scale. Sixty-six percent (81 of 123) of clinicians completed the survey. Of those, 47% (38 of 81) were physicians, 73% (59 of 81) were licensed for fewer than 20 years, 63% (51 of 81) were women, and 53% (43 of 81) described themselves as liberal-leaning. The response proportions were 73% (38 of 52) among eligible physicians specifically and 61% (43 of 71) among other clinicians (nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and registered nurses). To assess potential nonresponse bias, we compared early responders (within 2 weeks) with late responders (after 2 weeks) and found no differences in responder demographics or in questionnaire responses (all p > 0.05). The main outcome measures included responses to the attitude and knowledge questionnaire, as well as the existing practices questionnaire. To answer our research questions regarding clinician attitudes knowledge and awareness of institutional initiatives, we compared participant responses using chi-square tests, the Student t-test, and the McNemar tests, as appropriate. To answer our research question on factors associated with questionnaire responses, we reported data for each question, stratified by hospital, years since licensure, and political leaning. Comparisons were conducted across strata using chi-square tests for Likert response items and ANOVA for continuous response items. All p values less than 0.05 were considered significant. Of the respondents who reported feeling comfortable treating lesbian, gay, and bisexual (sexual minority) youth, a small proportion reported feeling confident in their knowledge about these patients' health needs (99% [80 of 81] versus 63% [51 of 80], 36% reduction [95% confidence interval 23% to 47%]; p < 0.001). Similarly, of those who reported feeling comfortable treating transgender (gender minority) youth, a smaller proportion reported feeling confident in their knowledge of their health needs (94% [76 of 81] versus 49% [37 of 76], 45% reduction [95% CI 31% to 59%]; p < 0.001). There was substantial interest in receiving more education regarding the health concerns of LGBTQ people (81% [66 of 81]) and being listed as an LGBTQ-friendly clinician (90% [73 of 81]). Factors that were associated with select attitude and knowledge items were duration of licensure and political leaning; gender identity, institutional affiliation, educational degree, or having LGBTQ friends and family were not associated. Many respondents were aware of the use of clinic intake forms and the electronic medical record to collect and provide patient gender identity and sexual orientation data at their practice, as well as signage and symbols (for example, rainbow posters) to cultivate LGBTQ-welcoming clinic spaces. There were varying degrees of confidence and knowledge regarding the health needs of sexual and gender minority youth among pediatric orthopaedic healthcare professionals. There was considerable interest in more focused training and better use of medical technologies to improve care for this population. The study findings support the further investment in clinician training opportunities by healthcare administrators and orthopaedic associations related to the care of sexual and gender minority patients, as well as in the expansion of medical documentation to record and report important patient information such as pronouns and gender identity. Simultaneously, based on these findings, clinicians should engage with the increasing number of educational opportunities, explore their personal biases, and implement changes into their own practices, with the ultimate goal of providing equitable and informed orthopaedic care.

The Sedgwickian Queerness of an Anime Lesbian: Reading Revolutionary Girl Utena

A tentative response to Eve Sedgwick's timely question "How to bring your kids up gay?" lies at the heart of Kunihiko Ikuhara's anime TV series Shōjo Kakumei Utena (1997). This article explores the affective sustenance that Revolutionary Girl Utenaoffers to some queer children and teens in the face of a somber heteronormative reality. This essay performs a close reading of Episode seven "Unfulfilled Juri", and it focuses on one of the queer feminine formations that the show cultivates, the tragic (joyful) anime lesbian. Paradoxically, and fortunately, the anime lesbian far from being an abject figure, becomes a site for queer identificatory projections and desires.

Can We Approach the Subject of Child Sexual Abuse Ethically in Academia? Towards a Queer Ethics of CSA Analysis

This article is dedicated to the question of ethics. It addresses the ethical issues that arise when making the painful subject of CSA the central focus of an academic inquiry. The first section considers the failures of certain subsections of twentieth-century American and Western European critical theory in approaching the study of CSA with ethical integrity. The disciplines of queer theory, feminist theory and sex-radical literature are focused on in particular in order to question and contextualize why academic endorsement of CSA acts has occurred. The article both considers and questions the rigid concepts of sexual normativity that both demonizes queer sex and leaves queer children vulnerable to abuse. In the second section, the pressure for personal confession of trauma when writing and researching on this issue is considered, and the fixed character of the survivor is examined.

“Are You Trying to Make Them Gay?”: Culture Wars, Anxieties about Genderplay, and the Subsequent Impacts on Youth

Using a queer theoretical lens, this conceptual paper explores the complexities of working with queer youth in leisure spaces by using genderplay to explore gender identity. Given the current social and political climate in Canada, researchers in this area face considerable professional road blocks from gatekeepers, despite providing often life-saving access for youth to queer mentors, community, and health resources. This paper, therefore, provides insight into the pervasiveness of the image of the child that informs the anxiety present in current political, social, and cultural discourses about queer children and the danger that image is putting these actual children in by limiting access to the above stated resources. Moreover, we expose how the image of the child is always invested in ideals of middle and upper-class whiteness, able-bodiedness, and imagined straightness from the outset, which further limits access to leisure spaces for queer children who may be otherwise marginalized.

6Queer Theory: Queer Children and Childhoods

Abstract This year’s review of queer theory focuses on recent scholarship about transgender youth. Most of the scholarship reviewed in this chapter defines transgender expansively to include any identifications and/or expressions of gender that trouble dyadic sex-gender ideologies. Additionally, the scholarship reviewed in this chapter evinces a collapse of scholarship and activism by investing in scholarship as activism. Although queer theory is not often heralded for its use in taking a pragmatic approach to social change, the majority of theorists discussed in the chapter do in fact make practical recommendations for justice-oriented social policy and practice changes that would radically improve the lives of transgender youth. Even more, most of the scholars discussed in this chapter are themselves transgender and are committed to creating a world were trans lives can flourish. They resist liberal accommodation models of trans inclusion and instead theorize what meaningful structural change would look like. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction: Queer Kids; 2. Queer Gender Now; 3. Queer Youth Now; 4. Transgender Youth In and Out of History; and 5. Conclusion.

Quando as crianças viadas interpelam a docência

O presente ensaio se propõe a pensar as relações de gênero e aspectos da diversidade sexual a partir das contribuições de um episódio televisivo, um texto de Eve Sedgwick e outro de Giancarlo Cornejo: enunciações em torno dos meninos efeminados. Postulamos que nos debruçarmos sobre as “crianças viadas” pode nos ajudar a compreender as hierarquias de gênero que provocam e sustentam as assimetrias entre distintas posições. Assim, a partir desse analisador, interroga-se a escola e a formação de professores e professoras para pensarmos como nos posicionarmos frente a essas crianças como expressões da diferença.

Queering the Lost Child and the Politics of Failure in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City

Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2010) is a central edifice in the ever-growing genre of South African crime fiction. A decidedly post-apartheid literary trend (though not exclusive to it), crime fiction contributes to commentary on South African futurity, which is often portrayed as violent and almost always disappointing. Understanding the ways in which South African literature has been beleaguered with anxieties about the future, this article employs the figure of the queer child as an analytic to explore the generative politics of failure. Taking up queer theory’s anti-social thesis, recently considered in Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), and the concept of the queer child, put forward in Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), I argue that while the queer child may disrupt a narrative of reproductive futurism, it offers an alternative to both a failed future and a rainbow one. I consider the role of two types of queer children in the novel: the child queered by innocence and the child queered by degeneracy. By examining the exchange of and relationships between these children, I argue that the child queered by degeneracy hitches South African futurity to a queer celebration of state failure.

A Wager for Life: &lt;i&gt;Queer children seeking asylum in Norway&lt;/i&gt;

This article explores the experiences of queer children who have sought asylum alone in Norway, focussing on hope, fear and despair. The children who are denied asylum relate an experience of standing at the brink of death, while those who are granted asylum describe how the queer life they have hoped for is postponed by the settlement and integration system, where they live in isolation and in risk of violence and bullying. We analyse these experiences in light of decolonial theory in which the conditions of war and proximity to death are extended into the childrens’ lives under the custodianship of the Norwegian state. Drawing on queer theory, the wager is life as these children have known it. The potential is living beyond the coloniality of Being, in relationships and communities that provide the possibility of a meaningful life.

The Rights of Queer Children

The ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (crc) has long been hailed as a major event in the realisation of children’s human rights, combining the need for protection with a desire to grant agency through recognition of the evolving capacities of the child. Yet the idea of children’s agency as articulated in the crc excluded sexual identity and expression, and ushered in an incomplete emancipation for lgbtiq children; children who are gender non-conforming; and children whose sexual expression otherwise conflicts with heterosexuality – hereafter queer children. I argue that while the crc granted children agency in terms of rights to expression, thought and conscience, it denied children sexual agency. Queer children’s political agency is intimately connected to sexual identity and agency, because unlike their heterosexual counterparts, queer children’s identity and expression is sexualised while, at the same time, they are excluded from adult, identity-based movements.

A queer futurity autofantasía: contouring discourses of Latinx through memory and queer youth literature

ABSTRACTThis communication-centered performance studies analysis forefronts Latinx positionality in three key childhood moments to offer examples of queer futurity. An autofantasía presented through performative writing, the research essay brings Latinx into embodied practice via the memories of queer childhood, the themes of queer youth literature, and the contemporary understandings of Latinx. From the vantage points of my four-year-old self, my nine-year-old self, and my fourteen-year-old queer self, I draw upon queer and latinidad themes found in three separate queer children's books. All analyses combine to contour, for the moment, the changing discursivity of Latinx as a queer futurity.