Description
Book Synopsis2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In
The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Hannah Dyer offers a study of how children’s art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging, and political value. Dyer suggests that childhood’s cultural expressions offer insight into the persisting residues of colonial history, nation building, homophobia, and related violence. Drawing from queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, settler-colonial studies, and cultural studies, this book helps to explain how some theories of childhood can hurt children. Dyer’s analysis moves between diverse sites and scales, including photographs and an art installation, children’s drawings after experiencing war in Gaza, a novel about gay love and childhood trauma, and debates in sex-education. In the cultural formations of art, she finds new theories of childhood that attend to the knowledge, trauma, fortitude and experience that children might possess. In addressing aggressions against children, ambivalences towards child protection, and the vital contributions children make to transnational politics, she seeks new and queer theories of childhood.
Trade ReviewExciting, tender, persuasive, and smart. Dyers’ book is a clarion call to care for the bodies we call children. Let their creativity, strange in all its beauties, tell us how they’re harmed—hurt by
norms that foster inequalities. I believe more than ever, thanks to Hannah Dyer, that “children” and “aesthetics” are the most profound pairing for safeguarding pleasure, for all living creatures, amid world trauma.
— Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century
The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood makes a necessary and nuanced intervention in contemporary theorizations of the child, balancing the sociopolitical with the material while interrogating the array of affects and artifacts always in dialogue with the child. Working from a vibrant interdisciplinary stance — including biopolitics, psychoanalysis, racial capitalism, queer theory, Dyer weaves a fresh framework to read the child and, as centrally, to query child development and its attendant affects. Engaging a generative lens of arts and aesthetics — films, contemporary artists and other cultural workers— that provoke audiences to recognize the layered arrangements of power that both surround and mark the child, Dyer’s lyrically crafted book is essential reading for the emergent field of critical child studies and for all of us who struggle to build freer and more joyous futures for all.
— Erica R. Meiners, author of For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State
"The range of Dyer’s objects of study is as impressive as her command of contemporary critical theory, and her project promises to significantly enrich the field of child studies and beyond. Highly recommended."— Choice
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Childhood’s Queer Intimacies and Affective Intensities
1 Queer Temporality in the Playroom: Ebony G. Patterson and Jonathon Hobin’s Aesthetics of Child Development
2 Art and the Refusal of Empathy in
A Child’s View from Gaza 3 The Queer Remains of Childhood Trauma: Notes on
A Little Life 4 Reparation for a Violent Boyhood in
This is England Epilogue: The Contested Design of Children’s Sexuality
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
