Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development

Abstract

Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory’s attention to (and searing debates on) queer futurity offers something new and important to studies of childhood. Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer theory, I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child’s a-sexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing sexuality within a discussion of children’s education is constructive. In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children’s psychosexual development, I offer a critical reading of the It Gets Better social media campaign (particularly, its consequent critiques and revisions). I begin with engagement of Eve Sedgwick’s 1991 seminal essay on queer childhood “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and then, from there, trace contemporary queer theory’s use of the figure of the child and consideration of the impact of “innocence” on childhood. In an effort to consider the contemporary residues of historical violence on theories of “healthy” child development, I also consider how histories of colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery extend into the future and leave traces on contemporary theories of child development.

Introduction

In 1991, Eve Sedgwick (1991) published an essay that may be said to have initiated contemporary queer theory’s consideration of childhood as a site of heteronormative intervention. “It’s always open season on gay kids,” the late queer theorist famously quipped in an article that was audaciously titled “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay.” Sedgwick contended that “desire for non-gay outcome” was pervasive in how adults deal with the appearance of non-normative gender or sexual desire in childhood. “Advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates,” Sedgwick (2004) jested, “is less ubiquitous than you might think” (p. 145). ¹ She was concerned with the amount of interferences being made into young lives that aimed to straighten out their futures, was disturbed by large amounts of suicides, and brought “the helping professions” (p. 140) to task for their catastrophic support for beliefs that queer childhood was not viable or healthy.

In “How to Bring Your Kids up Gay,” Sedgwick foretold of queer studies’ coming surge of bitterness toward curative interventions into the emergence and sideways growths (Stockton, 2009) of the queer child. She explained to her reader that the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM-III; the first that did not classify homosexuality as pathological fault) was erroneously celebrated as liberatory for queer subjects. In the same edition, Sedgwick pointed out, a new category was indexed: “Gendered Identity Disorder of Childhood.” The establishment of “Gendered Identity Disorder of Childhood” as diagnostic classification assumed the ability to detect impulses not yet organized as queer identity and realign them with heterosexuality. In “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Sedgwick expressed worry for the children who were being “fixed” under this classification. Deborah Britzman (2003) fondly refers to Sedgwick’s “loving hold” on “sissy boys” and “he-she girls” when she remarks that the article is uniquely important for its submission that it

takes the loving reparation of the figure of the child’s queer body, who catches, without reason, the shadow of the mother’s femininity or the father’s masculinity, even if these were not the first shadings of gender offered, to remind one of the chances nature can take. (p. 143)

Twenty-five years later, ensuing Sedgwick’s foundational remarks, queer theory now includes a robust literature that rethinks and reinhabits the child with an attention to its queer character. After Sedgwick, queer theory has mapped numerous temporalities onto the future of the child: Assurances of a better future, appeals for a voiding of the future (Edelman, 2004, most famously), and the potential for metrics of human development that allow for sideways growth (Stockton, 2009) are some. The child has become both a limit and a hope for queer theory. As the literature in this field has revealed, the child is a dense site of meaning for both queer sociality and alienation. It is a locus of anxiety for homophobic culture because on it rests the reproduction of a heteronormative future. Queer theory is now bursting with debates about the status of the child in relation to futurity, politics, and sexual subjectivity, but the field of Early Childhood Education largely resists learning from and carefully attending to these conversations. There remains a palpable nervousness and discomfort in this field of thought and practice when childhood comes into contact with sexuality. Despite embattled resistance, conversations about how queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) studies might enhance childhood studies have slowly begun to emerge (Davies and Robinson, 2010; Janmohamed, 2010; Robinson, 2005, 2008; Ruffolo, 2009). Many of the arguments made in the field of childhood education concerning children’s sexualities, though, tend to stabilize queerness as identity, instead of preserving something contingent, a “site of collective contestation” (Butler, 1993: 228).

In this article, I move beyond commonly employed sociological techniques for securing the child’s “right” to LGBTQ identity and assert that queer theory’s growing attention to discourses of childhood offers methodological, pedagogical, and epistemological advances to the provision of care for all children. ² My argument begins with the premise that developmental theory and its attendant model of Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) can be destructive to some children’s imaginative and social capacities when not attuned to their possible queer presents and futures. As many have noted, the rhetoric of innocence that envelops normative theories of childhood development has the damaging effect of reducing the child to a figure without complexity (Allen, 2011; Kincaid, 1998; Matthews, 2009; Robinson, 2013). Here, I help to illustrate how some of the affective, libidinal, epistemological, and political insistences on childhood innocence can injure the child’s development and offer a new mode of analytical inquiry that insists upon embracing the child’s queer curiosity and patterns of growth.

Forging more prolonged conversations between queer theory and childhood studies may deepen understandings of children’s diverse educational needs and complicate assumptions that sexuality, in its tendency to bleed outside the boundaries of knowable indexes of identity, can be easily mapped onto a predictable future. Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer studies, here I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child’s a-sexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing queer growth within a discussion of how children negotiate development is constructive. Ultimately, I suggest that queer theory’s growing interest in childhood as a site of analysis (e.g. Edelman, 2004; Halberstam, 2011; Munoz, 2009; Owen, 2010; Stockton, 2009) could be strengthened by partnership with the sociological study of children’s education, while childhood studies could be bettered by thoughtful engagement with queer theory. I am, though, apprehensive about queer theories of the child that do not account for its relationality and lived experiences and spend time engaging with critiques of queer theory that do not account for racialization or continued legacies of colonialism.

The small but powerful and expanding body of work in which child studies scholars critique their discipline for a voiding of queerness provides the groundwork for my inquiry into how and why studies of children’s education have, generally, been more keen on securing knowledge concerning developmental stages and building professional capacities for realigning children’s growths that occur along calculated, horizontal, and heteronormative lines (Janmohamed, 2010; Robinson, 2008, 2012, 2013; Ruffolo, 2009; Silin, 1995; Tobin, 1997). My analysis of queer childhood is profoundly indebted to this literature. David V. Ruffolo’s (2009) work, for example, is pointed in its address of the ways in which heteronormativity appears in early childhood education:

The heteronormative underpinnings of ECE policy initiatives speak to the ways in which children are ab/normalized when they are faced with the challenge to purchase/rent collective identities that are unable to account for multiplicities of difference. The result of this is the establishment of minoritized subjectivities that are often disguised and/or disqualified … (pp. 14, 15)

Like Ruffalo, I am not only concerned with the erasure of queer sexualities in settings of childhood education but also extend this line of inquiry to assert that queer theory can, more expansively, help to analyze how normativity is reproduced in relation to theories of childhood. Despite advances in conjoining LGBTQ studies and studies of children’s education, much of the research done in this area employs “queer” as something of an identity which is knowable and measurable. There are large amounts of literature that takes LGBTQ teachers and parents as its subjects of inquiry (e.g. Burt et al., 2010; King, 1997; Wolfe 2006). I am interested in these subjectivities, of course, but also suggest that a queer methodological approach to child development and education can more generally disrupt teleologically constructed narratives of growth that require a developmental sequence which culminates in normalcy. Queer, as an identity that names and makes some people’s sexual desires socially legible, has helped in the making of important sociological studies of sexuality and homophobia as they relate to the child’s education. Queer theory, though, has also offered a theoretical method of analyzing constitutive discourses of normalcy (Britzman, 1998; Warner, 1999).

Applying queer methods of analysis to studies of childhood can help to queer the rhetoric of innocence that constrains all children and help to refuse attempts to calculate the child’s future before it has the opportunity to explore desire. Later, I engage with Andrea Smith’s (2010) response to Edelman in order to demonstrate the uneven distribution of “innocence” to children. There is a paradox that arises when the child’s rights to agency and participation in the world are secured while it is suggested that they are innocent and lacking complexity. I invoke this dilemma to highlight what is at stake when queer theory speaks about childhood as social construction but forecloses a consideration of actual children. In not thinking about children’s material rights, there are issues that get forgotten. As I write in Canada, I am considering, for example, the history of residential schools and their devastating effects on children’s lives as just one issue that may be elided or repressed when queer theory evades recognition of how the preservation of innocence (in the name of rights) has not protected all children equally.

In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children’s psychosexual development, this article later engages in a reading of the 2010 It Gets Better social media campaign, emphasizing what studies of children’s education can learn from the debates it caused. The campaign (and its consequent critiques and revisions) and its provocation to theories of queer temporality offer much to the field of childhood studies. To grow up queerly, it demonstrates, is a painful experience in a culture that does not validate your difference. Both the campaign and its critics point out that there is not enough done to clear a path for children and youth to develop queer identifications and affective attachments. Furthermore, It Gets Better and the expanse of analysis it has spawned exhibit that queer temporality is extremely important to a consideration of how to survive education when it does not nurture your desires.

Queering the child’s innocence

Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory’s attention to (and searing debates on) queer futurity and its reconceptualization of the stability of sexual and gendered subjectivity offer something new and important to studies of childhood education. Informed by queer theory, my use of “queer” is not only meant to register a child’s potential desire for same-sex relations or LGBTQ identity but also gestures toward more expansive ways to account for children’s deviances from normativity. My critique is not only concerned with the violent impacts of homophobia on queer children but also suggests more broadly that queer theory offers childhood studies a critical methodology that can help to loosen the parameters of normative development so that a deeper and more capacious theory of children’s sexual education can be built. My staging of a conversation between childhood studies and queer theory is not cynical acquiescence to queer negativity surrounding the figure of the Child (Edelman, 2004), nor is it a reinvestment in the child as a blank space on which to write uncomplicated resistance to homophobia. Hope and other positive affectivities associated with childhood are not always naive or unthoughtful romanticizations of the child (Munoz, 2009). I call into being a conversation between two fields of thought often deemed at odds in order to invite questions about the embodied vulnerabilities, educational impacts, neurological developments, and narrative conventions of childhood innocence. I hope to inspire sociological and educational theorists of childhood to insist upon a future of radical hope and possibility for the child who feels the weight of queer wanting.

I employ “queer” to both (a) classify sexuality and (b) reference deviance from cultural norms. Thus, children who self-identify or are identified with LGBTQ culture may be considered “queer,” but queer childhood should not be constrained to identificatory regimes or an assumption of the stability of sex or gender. I suggest that the queer contours of childhood are the child’s desires that refuse to grow up toward normative ways of being an adult and therefore, also, the residual adult desire to play and to be creative. In this sense, I borrow from queer theory’s insistence that queerness is that which undoes identity, not what holds it together. I am not interested in only promoting queer as a category of identity that promises social cohesion. Rather, I am thinking with Dina Georgis’ (2013) notion of queer affects as the return of memory and desire discarded for its ability to undo social identity. Queer affect, for Georgis, is what agitates our ability to fully know ourselves, and its presence is a result of memory, fantasy, and loss discarded because it is difficult to bear. In this formulation, queer is not what makes us recognizable to the other, it is what undoes us and what, here, can work to undo the innocent Child. Adults, for example, sometimes find it difficult to bare the child’s aggression and negative emotional responses because these reactions are often in excess of narratives of childhood innocence. Children’s rights are vehemently asserted in the field of child studies, but the child’s negative affects such as hate and aggression, often a result of insecurity and vulnerability, are generally undertheorized. I call these affects “queer” in order to show how complicated the interior and social world of the child can be. I am thinking with queer childhood as an analytic with which to theorize how children narrate themselves beyond trajectories of normative development that ignore the complex effects of sexuality on their understanding of self. So, beyond referencing LGBTQ identity in children, queer childhood can rupture conventional schemas of “growing-up,” as it undoes anticipated congruency, the enforcement of strict borders between childhood and adulthood, and forms affinities convened on grounds of mutual feelings of shame and difference. Queer growth does not always promise a teleological guarantee of progress, but may find pleasure in delaying the finitude and predictable foreclosures of developmental stages.

My notion of queer childhood borrows heavily from Kathryn Bond Stockton’s (2009) The Queer Child, or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Stockton shows how the belief that children are void of sexuality endures while at the same time children are assumed to be growing up and toward futures defined through heteronormative sexualities. Stockton characterizes the queer child as a subject that hovers above and outside of histories of childhood; troubling assumptions that the child does not and has never fantasized queerly. Stockton’s work demonstrates that in many renditions of the child, there exist both the occlusion of children’s sexuality and the tacit understanding that the child should grow up and toward heterosexuality. The gay child, she proposes, often has a “backwards birth” that solicits childhood as an adult work of reconstruction: When the straight adult is dead (decides they are gay), the adult then reconstructs their childhood to conform to their contemporary understanding of what it must have felt like to have a queer childhood. Stockton cites Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) to show how his seminal text linked the appearance of adult homosexuality (which at the time was often identified as “inversion”) to childhood sexuality. In Freud’s foundational text on the child’s possession of sexual wishes, he imparts a queer temporal schematic: The invert adult searches for the moment that “a sexual impression occurred which left a permanent after-effect in the shape of a tendency to homosexuality” (p. 25). Working with Freud’s text, Stockton writes, “Making room, it seems, for an invert child—though only through adult memory—Freud states clearly that the trait of inversion may either date back to the very beginning, as far back as the subject’s memory reaches” (pp. 24, 25).

The homosexual adult, then, must return to childhood and rework his or her memory of childhood to clarify the appearance of inversion. In this schematic, what is at stake is the adult’s remembering of childhood, not the child’s present. Stockton moves from Freud and through the 20th century to show that queerness and childhood are not often paired. Importantly, she is not simply interested in the idea of a gay child but also in the queerness of all childhoods, which results from the perpetual delay of reason that ensures adulthood does not come too soon. Unlike the normative idea of the child whose future we must save, the queer child promises nothing, although it may hint at contingent and provisional futures. Queer childhood is that which haunts normative descriptions and temporal positionings of what it means to grow up. Asking how the queer child grows despite the possibility of growing toward social legibility is a generative inquiry and in Stockton’s hands reveals part of how cultures that organize themselves around theories of childhood innocence often hurt children’s curiosity and imagination. Addressing the child as always already queer may be one way of supporting their imaginative inquiries about sexuality.

Stockton (2009) points out that the child and the homosexual have, historically, been positioned as oppositional, and so, the consideration of queer childhood becomes categorically provocative. The schematizing of childhood innocence and mutual rhetorics of vulnerability and its exploitation have devalued the child’s sexuality and ensured that the traumatized child is a figure hard to miss in most historical renditions of homosexuality (Kincaid, 1998; Kelleher 2004). James Kincaid (1998) and Bruhm and Hurley (2004) show how an easy collapse of all childhood sexuality into definitions of trauma forecloses careful consideration of the child’s agentic relationship to perverse and queer sexuality. Their work, like my own, is not interested in minimizing the corporeal or emotional impacts of sexual trauma experienced in childhood, but in understanding the possibility for children and youth to recruit amounts of bodily pleasure. With them, I am sure that the child can be hurt by theories of precious innocence that punish curiosity and assume the child’s status as victim. This literature does not elide or contest the psychosocial damage done by molestation, rape, and other forms of child sexual abuse. Rather, it shows how making childhood sexuality a taboo subject is one way to protect the child’s assumed proto-heterosexuality.

Queer theories of childhood are often brave in the ways that they wade into such taboo territory in order to show how what is considered perverse is often a mode of securing heteronormativity. Queer theory can be helped in its desires to prove that children are capable of possessing complexity and sexuality by exploring work done in the fields of early childhood studies and sociological studies of childhood. This is because these fields and their associated methods of inquiry prioritize the child’s possession of knowledge and agentic relation to the world. Halberstam’s (2011) theory of childhood tendered in The Queer Art of Failure is an example of why queer theory might learn to appreciate these disciplines’ encounters with material children. Although the text carries persuading examples of what can happen in the fecund import of philosophies on childhood to queer theory, Halberstam’s depiction of childhood also relies on ideas of what children do and like which seem a little too groundless or purposely hollow:

… children do not invest in the same things that adults invest in: children are not coupled, they are not romantic, they do not have a religious morality, they are not afraid of death or failure, they are collective creatures, they are in a constant state of rebellion against their parents, and they are not the masters of their domain. (p. 47)

A more thorough reading of the literature published in childhood studies may have demonstrated to Halberstam that children are, for example, afraid of death, demonstrate anxiety of social failure, and sometimes have great difficulty working with others. Halberstam’s theory of children claims that they are not romantic, but in The Queer Art of Failure there is a romantic notion of childhood, in which a binary between childhood and adulthood is reified. Trying not to think of the child as a site of pure resistance to normativity (as Halberstam arguably does), I am interested in what queer theory, while it lucratively continues to debate the terms on which the future is realized, can do when it is also interested in the quotidian lives of children and their structural differences. In the same vein, I have been asking what childhood studies could do differently if, as Robinson (2005) and Tobin (2007) appeal, it was more interested in queer theory or at least queer affect that circulates in spaces where children move. In the next section, I counter queer theories of childhood (such as Edelman, 2004) that empty the child of matters related to its physical embodiment in order to interrogate the forgetting of vital evidence of children’s remarkable experiences. I suggest that queer theory might consider giving the child’s body back in order to recognize the ways its form is animated by histories of race.

Racialization and violence in queer theories of childhood

As Lee Edelman (2004) states in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, our culture is obsessed with the child as the entity for which we build a future without conflict. For Edelman, the fantasy of the child as innocent futurity and as the object for which sociality is organized disciplines LGBTQ individuals. In order to be legible and productive subjects in the social imaginary, we must be operative members of what he terms “reproductive futurism.” He explains, “Queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (p. 3). The “cult of the child” (p. 19) signals an always already impossible future to which queers are promised potential belonging if they uphold the contract of futurity which assures that culture is repeated without difference. The reproductive body, in this schematic, becomes an emblem of achieved adulthood that signals the loss of childhood. Those who do not reproduce cannot be privileged in a symbolic order that celebrates life-producing sex as paramount contribution to humanity. So, Edelman asks that we learn to find pleasure in sites and acts that do not secure a future. Queerness, for him, is on the side of the death drive, never finding solace in identity, only ever disturbing the social categories that try to make us legible to others (p. 17).

Edelman’s assertions are critical of liberal movements in queer communities toward replicating normative structures of kinship and progeny, which he understands as forlorn pleas for recognition from a culture that privileges those who secure repetition. No baby, no future, and thus no sincere privileging in the symbolic or political world (p. 3). Edelman hopes for a queer renouncement of loyalty to the child, a loyalty he believes rushes toward a future made of equality while ignoring the past and present conditions that create violence for LGBTQ individuals and communities. This rush toward the Child is a disavowal of the persistent hum of the death drive. Better, he thinks, to understand queerness as that which is destructive to the social order and in contradiction of reproductive futurity. Edelman capitalizes the Child, as conceptual figuration, in an effort to distance it from material, embodied children. Edelman’s work has not been taken up in a sustained way by the field of childhood education and perhaps this is why. His polemical text cannot account for the child’s queer existence, and although his provocations to the rhetoric of childhood innocence are sharp, they may be bettered by collaboration with scholarship that embraces the child’s agency. Edelman’s now seminal evocation of the child as innocent futurity is not relational or able to hold space for a theory of flesh and blood children, and I will now discuss some of what is lost in its inability to account for the traumatic loss of statelessness, genocide, or war.

Andrea Smith (2010), in an essay on convergences and distrust between queer theory and native studies, responds to Edelman’s production of a subjectless critique of childhood innocence. ² She posits that “Edelman’s anti-oppositional’ politics in the context of multinational capitalism and empire ensures that the continuation of th[e] status quo by disabling collective struggle designed to dismantle these systems” (p. 47). ³ Smith’s request that a theory of queer childhood makes room for recognition of the genocidal foundations of nation-states in North America deepens my understanding of child rights as contingent on relationality, nationality, and access to knowledge. Smith notes that “while Edelman contends that the Child can be analytically separated from actual children,” an indigenous critique of his text reminds us that in the context of genocide, “Native peoples have already been determined by settler colonialism to have no future” (p. 48):

If the goal of queerness is to challenge the reproduction of the social order, then the Native child may already by queered. For instance, Colonel John Chivington, the leader of the famous massacre at Sand Creek, charged his followers to not only kill Native adults by to manipulate their reproductive organs and to kill their children because “nits make lice.” (p. 48)

In this circumstance, the Native child is not invested with assurance of futurity and cannot cohere in Edelman’s privileged portrayal of the cult of the Child. The Native child, for Smith, is queered because it “is not a guarantor of the reproductive future of white supremacy; it is the nit that undoes it” (p. 48). Smith makes her ambivalence toward Edelman’s project clear: She finds “the idea of reproductive continuity as homophobia” (46) useful. However, she also makes it clear that she finds

Edelman’s analysis lapses into a vulgar constructionism by creating a fantasy that there can actually be a politic without a political program that does not always reinstate what it deconstructs, that does not also in some way reaffirm the order of the same. (p. 47)

She continues, “That is, it seems difficult to dismantle multinational capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy without some kind of political program, however provisional it may be” (Smith, 2010). Smith invokes Jose Munoz in her assertion that “relationality is not pretty,” but is required in the context of genocide and its enduring violence (p. 47).

Edelman’s and Smith’s texts help to clarify that there is a dilemma in administering education and rights to material children while revising a theory of childhood that encompasses its queer dynamics. I trace Edelman’s and Smith’s conversation here with the aim of demonstrating the difficult necessity of making conceptual and figurative references to childhood relate to concerns about how material children are treated. After No Future, and attentive to Smith’s critique, I wonder if and how thought surrounding childhood might be sufficiently queered so that it resists being constrained by normative developmentalism and productively challenges how national, racial, classed, and gendered affiliations and identifications impact the distribution of rights and administration of education to children. This query, though related, is not accounted for in Edelman’s polemic because he juxtaposes queerness to children. Although Edelman aims to deposit his critique in a post-political world, his analysis has been critiqued as an effort to elide collective narratives of struggle.

In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Jose Munoz (2009), the revered queer theorist, offered a critique of Edelman’s theory of childhood. Munoz revisited his own childhood to apprehend how he developed an understanding of himself as sexually non-normative. In the book, he recalls a moment where he learned his gender as shame, in which he felt “queer” and began to prudently conceal his difference. While reflecting on his own origins, he considers recent murders of queer, racialized youth in the United States to ask how thinking the child, as only abstraction, elides the impact of racism. Munoz’s book is, in part, a response to Edelman’s polemical attempt to unfasten queerness from humiliated optimism and refuse compulsions to defer to the future. Against futurity, Edelman takes down the cult of the child in shrewd and deliberate jabs at breeders and futurists. Munoz, on a different path, points out that the Child which Edelman builds as his thesis’ target devalues the impact of structural disparities such as race, class, and gender. Not all kids, as Munoz insists, are wanted in the future or receive the state’s protection. Here, he is allied with Andrea Smith. Tavia Nyong’o (2011) has made similar statements about how the rhetoric of innocence permits its own sorts of violence:

(B)lack popular culture, with its pained awareness that the privileges of childhood are unequally distributed, has long held an ambivalent stance toward this dominant culture of the child. We can be as sentimental as anyone else about imagined childhood purity, but our culture also contains great reservoirs of skepticism towards the ideology of the child, whose vulnerability and value in American culture are so often restricted to the white child, with the black child serving as a kind of foil, always already streetwise, tough, precociously independent. (p. 52)

Queer theories of childhood that do not account for histories of nation-states, slavery, or genocide cannot help effectively reimagine pedagogy of and for children. What does holding “childhood” and “queer,” seemingly opposites, in some kind of productive tension achieve if it cannot also consider the devastating effects of racism or colonialism? The It Gets Better social media campaign, as summarized below, offers an account of queer futurity that does not carefully attend to the corrosive force of racism and its colonial antecedents or the ways that social class can erode one’s ability (or desire) to transgress the location in which they are embedded.

Making childhood education “Get Better”

In 2010, an American initiated, though internationally responded to, social media campaign—It Gets Better—was created to show children and adolescents that it is okay to be gay because a kinder future hangs in the wings. It Gets Better is full of advice on how to turn out gay, which in 1991 Sedgwick pointed out was naught. Meant to show young LGBTQ people that there is a future beyond mandatory schooling, where homophobia can feel stifling and constant, It Gets Better is a strategy to prevent the high rate of suicide among this population. Initiated by Dan Savage, a White American media personality and author, and his husband, Terry Miller, It Gets Better began with a YouTube narrative in which the men describe how their lives improved after school and when they became adults. Savage says that because it was unlikely that schools would allow him to speak about sexuality to children, he used social media to “speak directly to LGBTQ kids … ” (Savage and Miller, 2011: 4). The very format of It Gets Better, then, is informed by a knowing assumption that children’s schools will be resistant to discussing non-normative and queer sexuality.

The campaign became a widespread phenomenon, inspiring 50,000 user-created videos and 50 million views. Quickly, the Internet became populated with digital narratives of queer adult’s self-described resilience in the face of discrimination. What can exist in the aftermath of heterosexual failure is, according to It Gets Better, potentially livable—even desirable. In relation to my concern for the seemingly innocuous but effectively damaging impacts of normative theories of childhood development is a consideration of how the advice provided in this campaign does not evenly support queer children and youth. The campaign has been highly critiqued for its inadequate consideration of how race and class, for example, are elided in Savage and Miller’s characterization of overcoming homophobia. A contentious dialogue surrounding Savage’s project has surfaced, spurred by divergent approaches to queer futurity. There is a growing amount of activist response ⁴ and allied scholarly publications (Goltz, 2013; Majkowshi, 2011) that both critique the campaign for its shortcomings and sort through the psychosocial conditions which have compelled so many to participate in it. Many critics insist that the psychic and corporeal survival that is nurtured in dreams of a future that holds smaller amounts of homophobia and gender violence should not trump considerations of race, gender, disability, and other markers of difference. Jasbir Puar (2010) suggests that “Savage’s IGB video is a mandate to fold into urban, neoliberal gay enclaves, a form of liberal handholding and upward-mobility.” Puar appropriately asks, “But how useful is it to imagine troubled gay youth might master their injury and turn blame and guilt into transgression, triumph, and all-American success?” ⁵ It Gets Better aims to repair a world broken by homophobia’s injuries, but its liberal underpinning is devastating in its inability to submit that maybe things don’t get better, but we learn to live in the wreckage of queer damage.

As case study, It Gets Better offers a valuable and complex examination of how LGBTQ identities get sutured to and evicted from educational settings, and how expanding the terms of queerness to analyze the contemporary residue of colonialism and slavery in the United States and Canada, for example, is necessary. A major criticism of It Gets Better is that it does not aim to correct injustice in the contemporary moment or increase resilience toward oppression within schools, but postpones better feelings to the achievement of adulthood. The campaign could be improved by a thoughtful commitment to reducing homophobia and heteronormativity as it occurs in the present in childhood educational settings. Although the primary impulse of It Gets Better was a response to queer youth suicide and feelings of distress made from sexual difference, the application of its resultant cultural criticism to the field of childhood studies and early childhood education provokes a deeper understanding of what is at stake when children are not supported in queer explorations of sexuality. Both the campaign and its ensuing critiques admit that queer affect and homophobic damage circulate in classrooms and site of education and are thus valuable to a reworking of curricula and pedagogy for children.

Tavia Nyong’o reminds us that It Gets Better was a response to the trouble which arises when queerness enters the site of education. Its messages insist that surviving school is possible. In response to the campaign, Nyong’o has written that

I think there is a bit of a queer salvific salvific wish going on in the It Gets Better videos, which exhibits a similarly melancholic refusal to work through the grief that might come with the recognition that it doesn’t get better.

He continues, “Maybe the secret truth that we repress is that school sucks, even when we find a way to make it work for us.” ⁶ Nyong’o’s suggestion that school could be better, that it is not enough to daydream of a future in which the student’s desires may be realized, might inspire early childhood educators to construct a more welcoming environment for the child who is “growing sideways,” as Stockton may deem it. Considering It Gets Better besides Munoz, Nyong’o and Smith’s arguments remind us that the psychic machinations at work in the adult’s compulsion to suggest that the world holds less amounts of homophobia for adults are resultant of a refusal to recognize the uneven distribution of justice and rights to children in the present.

To summarize, the It Gets Better campaign is an effort to assure LGBTQ children and youth that their future will hold less violence. As Munoz, Puar, Nyong’o, and Smith demonstrate, though, the future is not as kind to those whose bodies are imprinted with the legacies of colonialism or trans-Atlantic slavery, for example. The queer theory of childhood that I have been proposing would not find the campaign a suitable intervention because it does not address the present conditions in which children live and learn. The analytic possibilities made conceivable by theories of the child’s queer existence can only offer a better future if they turn back toward colonial pasts. In my attempt to address homophobia’s impact on childhood development, I have hoped to queer the damaging rhetoric of childhood innocence by suggesting that we, as adults, clear a path for children to symbolize negativity, queer affect, and sexual curiosity. Because, for queer theory, gender and sexuality are porous and mobile, a queer theory of childhood education should not be invested in predicting the child’s future identity, but rather attend to the child’s present curiosity about sexual difference. I have spent time with Edelman’s and Halberstam’s theories of childhood to show the limitations that arise when queer theories of childhood cannot bear the weight of the material child.

Conclusion: toward a queer future for childhood studies

A theory of the child by way of detour through queer theory can help to clarify the damage done when children’s curious investigations of sexual difference and agentic responses to structures of social violence are punished. There is, on one hand, the necessity of supporting LGBTQ children and, on the other, the related need to reimagine our theories of childhood so that they are not constrained by rhetorics of childhood innocence that invalidate the child’s potential queer desires. I have traced some of the convergences and antagonisms between the disciplinary fields of queer theory and sociological studies of childhood education in order to assist in cementing a methodological bond between child studies and queer theory. Familiarity with debates about childhood in queer theory, spun out of adult opinions on what the future should hold and how innocence should be distributed, may help childhood educators to better support LGBTQ children but also, more broadly, remap theories of childhood development so that all children can be better supported in their curious and creative resistances to injustice. I have advocated that our adult theories of childhood are compelled by our adult affective, remembered and unconscious experiences with education, family, and sexuality and underwritten by histories of race.

Strengthening a conceptual relation between “queer” and “childhood” can help to cultivate a culture of critique concerning the interruptive force of heteronormativity on the child’s development and, more broadly, expose asymmetries in how children are treated and the rhetoric of innocence is distributed. Queer theories of childhood may operate as analytics with which to make arguments about social relations between children and the adult world to which they must respond and in doing so invite questions about the embodied vulnerabilities, educational effects, neurological impacts, and narrative implications of discourses of childhood innocence. A vast majority of research on childhood development resuscitates liberal individualism, as it does not consider the sociality of pain caused by the communal experience of violence wrought under racism and genocide. Building a queer theory of childhood may be a project in which histories of race and racialization are better understood for their continued impact on schooling and education. Outlining an emergent discourse at the intersection of early childhood education, sociological studies of education, and queer theory, I have sought to broaden queer theory’s angle of analysis to include a consideration of the material child who must live through childhood. This collaborative formation can, I suggest, be a space in which methodologies and concomitant practices of childhood education can be made better.