Queer Theory's Child and Children's Literature Studies

In 2002 Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson published an essay entitled “what is queer theory doing with the child?,” addressing work in the 1990s by Michael Moon and the late, great Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the “protogay” child. Something inappropriate, even scandalous, was their answer, as one might surmise from the accusatory shape of the question. In their reading, Moon and Sedgwick essentialize rather than interrogate the protogay child, such that said child becomes “an anti-theoretical moment, resistant to analysis, itself the figure deployed as resistance” (36). For Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson, queer theory is insufficiently alert to the lessons of poststructuralist theory and especially to the ongoing interrogation of “child” and “childhood.” Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson specialize in childhood studies, and Lesnik-Oberstein is a well-known scholar of children's literature. Her 1994 Children's Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child extends and takes inspiration from Jacqueline Rose's The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children's Fiction (1984), which ushered into children's literature studies a powerful and lasting skepticism about “childhood” and “children's literature.”