PANEL 1
Queering America’s Progress Narrative: The California Ruins of Leland Stanford Jr.
Lee Edelman’s recoil from what he calls “reproductive futurism”—a social and political landscape where “the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought”—highlights the galvanizing oppressiveness of childhood and futurity as the basis for political action or national narrative. My goal in this essay is less to contest this account than to complicate it by considering how the child may function for the American national story not only as a way of projecting the future but also and just as importantly as a means of recollecting the past. Childhood, after all, not only serves as the promissory and emblem of futurity but also evokes the most deeply known individual experience of the past, of memory, and hence too of longing and loss. I argue that in the manifestation of such temporal loops of futurism and nostalgia childhood may serve less to enforce than to queer our national progress narrative. This essay employs the figure of one particular, if far from representative, California child to thus queer the generational stakes of America’s “manifest destiny” of industrial and continental expansion. As the son of one of the “Big Four” investors who at enormous personal profit built the transcontinental railroad, Leland Stanford, Jr. (1868-1884) belongs to a family that epitomizes the most extravagant proliferation of industrial and Californian progress. Yet through two European tours the boy developed a keen interest in antiquities and began a collection that would serve as the rationale and founding core of the Leland Stanford, Jr. Museum. His death in Italy, from typhoid fever, just two months before his sixteenth-birthday, makes the memorializing impetus at stake to some degree in all collections and museums poignantly actual in this one. In this essay I use the antiquarian attractions of art and collecting in the education and life of Leland Stanford, Jr. and the memorializing function of the Leland Stanford, Jr. Museum, to articulate the queer undertow of vulnerability, ruin, and most simply the past, within even our most strident narratives of invincible national progress.
Progressive Penology Meets Youthful Queerness in the Interwar United States.
Using the case of a tough teenage girl who was sent to a progressive reform school in California in 1926, this paper analyzes the relationship between idealistic disciplinary strategies of the interwar United States and unruly youthful queerness. I argue that the liberal-minded women reformers who composed most of the staff of the institution attempted to prescribe what I call “therapeutic discipline” for girls like the subject of this case study, but that youthful sexual and gender nonconformity threw their approach into question. As a reform strategy, therapeutic discipline was based in modern, explicitly psychological notions, especially the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler’s idea of the inferiority complex. But therapeutic discipline also advocated the provision of parental (especially maternal) substitutes for delinquents. The idea was to rebuild the delinquent ego, which had sustained crippling blows from adults; intergenerational compassion and even love would enable delinquent girls to “go right.” Throughout the United States, women reformers in the field of juvenile justice embraced this strategy in the 1920s. To these women, the strategy seemed relatively straightforward when it came to girls whose misbehavior was more or less “normal”—running away, defying parents, and engaging in premarital heterosex. But when it came to queer, gender-nonconforming girls like the one I analyze, therapeutic discipline was stymied. Potentially, extending compassion and love to queer girls would resemble taboo intergenerational eroticism. This could endanger the careers of the California institution’s staff, many of whom were unmarried women or even quietly homosexual themselves. The girl in question flirted with other delinquents in the school, wrote love poems that the staff intercepted, wore boys’ clothing whenever she could, was the object of both ridicule and massive crushes, and was the subject of institutional gossip about homosexuality, corrupting the minds of younger girls. The lack of scientific and social consensus about what caused homosexuality confused the institution’s staff even more. Attempting to find a solution to the girl’s disruptive presence, these women faced the possibility that their cherished ideals had limits, which forced them to consider disciplinary measures that went against their beliefs. This case study, therefore, is not only a situational study of the contradictions posed when good intentions meet chaotic presence of youthful queerness; it is also a consideration of intra-queer relations of power.
On Spectrality and History: Is a Normative Interpellated Childhood Inevitable?
In this presentation I engage the paradox that entry into symbolic systems such as language and culture is inherently interpellative. As Judith Butler noted in The Psychic Life of Power, subjectivity necessarily implicates subjection. How then are we to understand freedom and growth? Developmental assumptions of a linear and progressive path from infancy to old age are impositional, exclusionary, and inherently normative. Inevitably they produce restrictive and prescriptive pedagogies and modes of “therapy,” policing and correction for the errant, the deviant, and the rebellious. All the while we allow ourselves to project innocence and purity into the highly disciplined, regulated, pseudo-benevolent regimes of nursery, school, and family. A related concern is that the ultimate purpose underlying all this forced socialization is the manufacture of commodified capitalist consuming subjects who know their place in the production lines and shopping malls of consumer capitalism. A core thesis if my paper is that memory work – an address to spectrality and to genealogical filiation – has the potential to open up points of rupture where alternative lines and performative possibilities may be recognized.
PANEL 2
What Does it Mean to Be an Adult if We Queer the Child? Laws of Consent in Comparative
Perspective.
Laws of consent hinge on two fantasies: that of the autonomous, undivided adult subject who knows his desire; and that of the innocent, dependent child who cannot know what she wants because her developing self is not yet whole. Legal ages of consent are variable and particular, but the concept universally flatters adults as a category by presuming that we always know what we want and are able to assent to it. We consent despite the fact that we cannot know exactly what sex (or marriage, for that matter) will be like until we have it, and therefore we cannot know whether it is something we could want without ambivalence. The child cannot legally consent to sex; perhaps only in the law is the adult’s consent straightforward. Sexuality and childhood are therefore mutually exclusive categories from the perspective of laws of consent, since the former relies on a desiring subject against which the latter is defined. Exposing the seams around ‘the child’ has the potential to destabilize the subject position of the consenting adult. Just as patriarchy is bad for men too, the hierarchy of consent limits our understanding of adult sexuality by insisting that it has nothing in common with the child. Queering the child therefore allows us to see the adult more fully divided and dependent. This paper takes a comparative look at consent and its legal thresholds, focusing on Soviet laws as exceptions that prove the rule. Reading for the logics that shore up the fantasy of the consenting adult, this paper argues that the sexual citizen’s consent is premised on the refusal of childhood sexuality, and it will conclude by asking us to imagine it otherwise.
Re-writing the Law: the Exceptional Child.
An unexpected take on Agamben’s work (2005) makes it possible to see how the Child can be transformed from an ideological tool conscripted into affirmations of normativity (Ahmed, 2010) to a site of productive resistance to the State which labors towards new symbolic registers. This paper draws on fragments from clinical work with families who spiral into crises as their children brush up with and are anticipated to crash against the normative social order. In these cases, parents have experienced an impasse, feeling increasingly destabilized and eventually in despair over a perceived forced choice: to side with collective mandates thus asking their child to bear those injunctions’ painful psychic impact or to remain faithful to their child’s/their own radical Otherness risking rejection with its own attendant emotional and social costs? The deceptive nature of this polarity will become apparent as I track how these parents were able to inventively declare a state of exception and through this psychic maneuver, locate a psychoanalytic Third (Benjamin, 2003) making it possible to rework the meanings that the rule of Law has held for them and their families. My emphasis will be on how the blend of the fact of childhood’s underdeveloped psychic surfaces together with the discursive position of the Child as idealized and innocent (Bruhm & Hurley, 2009; Edelman, 2004), can offer the necessary traction to question and reconfigure Otherness’ ties to social Law and to the authority of the State.
Sex Panics, Child Prostitutes, and Global Sporting Events, or: How to Save a Sexually Precocious Child and Get a Luxury Hotel for Free.
The Brazilian government is currently undertaking the largest crack down on prostitution ever seen in Rio de Janeiro, shuttering safe and legal commercial sex venues using technicalities, shaking down and harassing sex workers to drive them away, and raiding brothels under the guise of looking for sex trafficking and child prostitution. Sex workers classified as “trafficked” include teenagers and adults who actively “resist” being rescued and suffer physical and sexual abuse as a result. I argue that this is part of a broader governmental strategy to clean up highly visible red light districts in advance of the World Cup and Olympic Games in order to convert the valuable real estate into hotel properties, sports facilities, and other luxury venues while also promoting an image of the country as tough on child sex crimes and a champion of women’s rights. Furthermore, I position this co-opting of feminist and human rights rhetoric as part of a larger strategy to attain a coveted permanent seat on the UN security council that is coming at the expense of the people it purports to help. Far from saving children, the crackdowns are actually producing the opposite effect: allowing the proliferation of outdoor child prostitution, pimping and exploitation of sex workers not by clients, but by police and government agents. Based on ethnographic work in the sex industry in Brazil as well as rhetorical analysis of media narratives, this paper examines several high profile “rescue” operations of teenaged cis-gendered and transgendered girls while also drawing into question assumptions about consent, agency and sexual precocity as well as racialized discourses of foreign predation.
PANEL 3
Persisters, Desisters, Regretters: The New Science of Childhood Gender.
Can we measure the gender of a child? Can we quantify forms of masculinity and femininity and use them to predict the future sexual orientation or self-understanding a particular child will exhibit in adulthood? Is it ethical to try? As pediatric endocrinologists begin to treat transgender children with puberty inhibiting hormones in greater numbers, a new set of questions and a new toolkit of methodologies for answering them gains traction in psychiatry. The uncertainty and sense of urgency described by both the parents of gender nonconforming children and their physicians leads them to collaborate on research endeavors whose goal is find stable ways to identify, mark and predict the future gender identities of gender nonconforming children. In this talk, I describe the motivations for a new research agenda into childhood gender, the typology of adult gender outcomes it has yielded, and the development by psychiatrists of a fascinating array of new standardized measures for gender and a new typology of gender nonconformity.
Disciplinary Paternalism, or, Who’s Your Daddy?
Contrasting the sanitized uses of gay and lesbian families in media campaigns for gay marriage with the multiple ways that the familial has been eroticized in queer representation, this paper uses the idea of disciplinary paternalism to excavate how sexualized “daddy-play” functions as a means to interrogate racially gendered relationships of punishment and care associated with the state.
Queer Origins
In “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick articulated reasons for queer people to beware of “the etiology question,” pointing to the difficulty of separating exploration of the causes of homosexuality from the fantasy of preventing homosexual emergence. As Ellis Hanson pithily put it, in a homophobic society, “Why are you queer” is “less a question than a challenge to one’s civil rights.” Arguing, polemically, for a “strong, explicit, erotically invested affirmation of some people’s felt desire or need that there be gay people in the immediate world,” Sedgwick’s essay points to ways that even modes of gay affirmation can serve to punish forms of gay incipience. That threat perhaps goes beyond the homophobic assumptions of many etiological accounts—which cast the conditions of gay emergence in terms of deficiency or mistake. Critiquing ego psychologists who can stomach gay men only when the are “already grown up” and “act masculine” (and she compellingly shows how these two are linked), the essay’s powerful, persuasive, moving peroration in a sense subjects gay incipience to a horizon that resolves it in an identity—those gay people we can avowedly want to people our immediate world. Her term “proto-gay” makes explicit what might have been fudged by “queer child,”—had the latter term had wider currency in 1989—the state of suspension or potentiality prior to the formation of an identity, what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls the “interval” of the queer child. Sedgwick’s redemptive or reparative account would seem to have two objects at least nominally at odds with one another: the proto-gay child in a state of suspension or potentiality and the gayness that seeks to emerge from that potentiality, and, in emerging, to dissolve it. Recent changes have collocated “child” and “gay” in ways that could hardly have been anticipated a mere twenty years ago. If the period of latency has (in some cases) narrowed, the baffling question of origination remains: until homosexuality ceases altogether to be significant, and heterosexuality, to be normative, one will need, whether in junior high school or in graduate school, to become gay. The threshold that, marking that transition, constitutes homosexuality, can perhaps only be known in retrospect. The question of gay identity thus brings to the fore more generalizable questions of origination—a queerness of human consciousness inherent to it to the very degree that consciousness cannot originate itself. Glancing, perhaps, at scientific accounts of queer animals (Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance and Marlene Zuk’s Sexual Selections, for example), I explore some of the questions raised by queer origins in a reading of Eudora Welty’s “First Love.”
PANEL 4
Serial Killing Serial Children: Dexter‘s Counterfeit Families.
In a recent “Theories and Methodologies” section of PMLA devoted to children and children’s literature, Kenneth Kidd notes the impasse that queer theory has reached in regard to children: on the one hand, he says, we have Michael Moon, Eve Sedgwick and others speaking of the “protogay” child in such a way that threatens to essentialize and sentimentalize the child rather than to “interrogate” it as a cultural construct; on the other hand, we have Lee Edelman calling for us to dismiss the Child as a symbolic figure of heteronormative fantasy and reproductive futurism, suggesting instead that we embrace the very negativity that comes from rejecting the Child’s symbolic promise. Our range of possible investments here is limited: we can either embrace the child as a vulnerable waif in need of our protection, or we can reject it as the monolith of normative culture. I propose a way through the impasse of the child in queer theory by bringing together the models of affiliation that Sedgwick establishes in “the avuncular” and Kathryn Bond Stockton reads in the queer child “grown sideways,” and to read this blend within the treatment of children in Season 4 of the Showtime drama, Dexter. In “Tales of the Avunculate,” Sedgwick suggests that we trace a queer affiliation not through the biological domestic father (and his laws of the normative) but through the uncle, a figure who often functions in literature as offering the possibility of a life and pleasure outside the normative family. Stockton’s figuration of the queer-child-grown-sideways makes a similar argument from the point of view of the child rather than the adult, suggesting that we read for children whose affiliations take them sideways into forms of identification that aren’t parental or future-oriented but that eschew linear temporality. These queer modes of identification—much like the knight in chess who moves up or down but to the side at the same time—might help us re-situate the child within a richer emotional space than queer theory has currently allowed. We can see such a space in Dexter, Season 4. This season presents us with a crisis in the life of the serial killer, such that he is required to attend to his domestic responsibilities in a more heightened fashion than in prior seasons, due to the birth of his son, Harrison. While much of the season turns on the usual platitudes of family and protecting children from harm, its episodes also present a subtext by which Dexter’s home life is not only crushingly banal (for both himself and viewers), but also socially irresponsible. We get numerous scenes in which Dexter is about to capture and kill Trinity, the season’s guest-villain, but which get interrupted by phone calls from Dexter’s wife Rita telling him about baby’s first words, asking him to pick up another case of formula, or fretting about Harrison having a fever (of a paltry 100.1). For all of Dexter’s determination to be a “good father” in this season, it becomes clear that being a “good father” really means being an absent or inattentive father, as attention to “fatherhood” in its most mundane aspects also puts Dexter’s children (and other children) at risk. At the first level, then, Dexter Season 4 has as its project the simultaneous adoration of family and its devastating critique. Into this mauvais foi family, enter the character of Scott. Scott has been abducted by the Trinity Killer (aka Arthur Mitchell) and is forced to perform a scene from Arthur’s childhood in which he replicates for Arthur the loved and nurtured child that Arthur never was. As a “counterfeit” Arthur, Scott is made to live out the “real” Arthur’s desires before the real Arthur then kills him off (a murder whose symbolic weight is impossible to miss). Scott is the child-Arthur located sideways, in that he is a symbolic enactment or embodiment of Trinity as a child; he is the child-Arthur who is projected outside and alongside the distraught adult. And he is even more than this. As the figure through whom Dexter might protect his own children and perhaps re-write his own tragic childhood, Scott is also the symbolic displacement of Dexter, Dexter’s biological son Harrison, and his step-son, Cody—Cody who himself both is and is not Dexter’s son. What the season gives us, then, and what I want to tease out at more length, is the powerful emotional network created by the dizzying chain of serial displacements in Dexter, Scott, and Arthur. Here the murderous toxicity of the American family (the family of Edelman’s reproductive futurism) is replaced by the complexly fraught relations of replacement or counterfeit children. Ultimately, I suggest, this network of relations takes us past the domestic narcissism to which Dexter’s home-life is condemned, and into the terrain of the “sentimental” as Sedgwick attempted to recuperate it in Epistemology of the Closet—a sentimentality that can only work for the child queered by the displaced familialism of the encounter with the counterfeit.
Just Adults: Protracted Infancies, Patti Smith, Lena Dunham, and Other Cool Catastrophes.
This paper begins to think through some issues about coolness and kidification by paying attention two key “texts” of our cool-obsessed historical moment: Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids and Lena Dunham’s event television series, Girls. I argue that in these examples, the Figure of the Child stands in for neither heteronormative futurity nor non-normative development/expression struggles. Instead, Smith and Dunham illustrate another use of queer childness that is more akin to “childishness,” authorizing an epidemic of needy narcissism and pathological indulgence that enables all sorts of ethical abuse in a public sphere that is hoping we glamorize and aestheticize our increasing unwillingness to do anything for anyone else.
How Phranc Sculpts a Lesbian Childhood in Cardboard
Phranc is a butch lesbian musician and multi-media artist who sculpts clothing, food, shoes, and other household items from cardboard and paper. Many of the sculptures replicate the material culture of Phranc’s childhood in the 1960s in California. My talk closely reads several of the sculptures with an emphasis on the ways in which they invite or prompt—“script”—actions that the sculptures simultaneously thwart or frustrate. I argue that the sculptures, in the context of their self-contradictory invitations, offer witty and sometimes melancholic commentary on the pleasures and terrors of butch lesbian girlhood in the mid-twentieth century United States.
PANEL 5
P4C and the Child Philosophers
In 1970, inspired by 1960s social activism and eager to promote critical thinking in young people, philosophy professor Matthew Lipman published his philosophical novel for children, Harry Stottlemeier’s Discovery, which (through the help of grant from the NEH) was used for teaching purposes in the Montclair public school system of New Jersey. Protagonist Harry and his friends are fifth graders who embark on a series of philosophical questions in their daily lives, involving logic, epistemology, and ethics. The book was used in classrooms, and that success alongside positive media attention helped lead to the establishment of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (IAPC), headquartered at Montclair State College where Lipman was appointed. Students involved in IAPC programs ostensibly saw significant improvements in their reading and critical thinking skills. Under Lipman, the IAPC devoted itself to producing pedagogical materials, beginning with additional novels written by Lipman and accompanying teacher workbooks. Lipman also designed graduate level programs in the field of Philosophy for Children – acronym “P4C” – and in 1979 founded Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, which folded in 2011. While the P4C movement was headquartered at Montclair, other universities as well as various institutes undertook work with public school students. Wikipedia reports that “Before the Department of Education cut funding for such programs in the early 1990s, there were over 5,000 programs in K-12 schools nationwide which engaged young people in philosophical reflection or critical thinking, more generally. This number has dropped substantially.” While official support for P4C programs has faded, the idea that children are natural philosophers persists, and lately we’ve seen a resurgence of this notion, in child-rearing literature, in writing for children and young adults such as Sophie’s World, and in how-to volumes such as Dr. Seuss and Philosophy. Moreover, the child’s philosophical nature is linked to her capacity for “wonder” – an important keyword for P4C — and imaginative play. In The Philosophical Baby, for instance, child psychologist Alison Gopnik holds that babies have much richer imaginative, cognitive, and relational abilities than we typically grant. “By the time they are two or three,” writes Gopnik, “children quite characteristically spend much of their waking hours in a world of imaginary creatures, possible universes, and assumed identities . . . In the past, this imaginative play has been taken to be evidence of children’s cognitive limitations rather than evidence of their cognitive powers” (29-30). Gopnik emphasizes the power of children’s “counterfactuals,” a term borrowed from philosophy which Gopnik glosses as “the woulda-coulda-shouldas of life, all the things that might happen in the future, but haven’t yet, or that could have happened in the past, but didn’t quite” (18). Counterfactuals are “dreams and plans, fictions and hypotheses” (19). It’s a short step, she holds, from the counterfactual imaginary friends and imaginary societies (paracosms) of childhood to the imaginative worlds of adult cultural production. Lipman, Gopnick and other P4C advocates look to childhood to revitalize philosophy along conventional humanist lines, drawing on childhood as a kind of natural, renewable resource. So, too, do posthumanist philosophers, who see childhood not as ground zero for wondrous engagement but rather as, in the words of Avital Ronell, “a security risk for the house of philosophy.” Philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Christopher Fynsk, and especially Jean-Françoise Lyotard call on childhood, and especially infancy (a term derived from the Latin infans – without language), to resist enlightenment faith in human agency and rationality. “Childhood,” Ronell extrapolates, “enters a breach into the very concept of the human and makes us ask, once again, what it means to be human” (103). In The Postmodern Explained, first published in French as The Postmodern Explained to Children, Lyotard writes: “Childhood is the monster of philosophers. It is also their accomplice. Childhood tells them that the mind is not given. But that it is possible” (100). Here is a different kind of idealization – childhood is that which interrupts classical humanism – but it is an idealization all the same. My paper focuses on the P4C movement and on general claims to the child as exemplary philosopher. Such claims variously normalize and queer the child, as one might imagine. Child philosophy threatens to encourage precocity, but also to return adults to a child-like state or subjectivity; child philosophy is positioned against developmental or cognitive psychology (Piaget especially) and emphasizes queer temporalities, growing sideways, and so forth. That the baby is a philosopher (as well as creative writer) seems a queer proposition indeed. Child philosophy may queer philosophy as much as the child, moving it away from rigorous academic practice (and especially analytic philosophy) and (back?) toward popular engagement and/or humanist inquiry. At the moment, my sense is that we see in child philosophy the same contradictory impulses toward normative identity and radical alterity that we see in psychoanalytic and queer-theoretical discourses of the child. Like psychoanalysis, and like some queer theory, child philosophy positions the child as “researcher” or “theorist” as much as subject or threshold. I am also interested in child philosophy as both a parallel discourse to and a user of what we call children’s literature.
The Queer Non-Places of Children’s Literature
In response to this workshop theme and against the backdrop of a growing body of criticism that explores the queerness of children’s culture, I have begun to wonder what the limits of queer childworlds might be. Working with anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of the “non-place,” I propose to explore the status of non-places in the context of two diametrically opposed sites of queerness in the context of children’s literature. The first is the often bland, usually white and middle class, mise en scènes of gay and trans- “issues books.” These books—such as Boy Meets Boy and Parrotfish— purport to represent queer culture and gay and trans youth to young people. But these texts are, I would suggest, as conspicuous for the worlds they leave out as for the ones they depict. Even where these books attempt to depict queer life, they ultimately eschew queerness in favour of reconstituting precisely the kind of “innocent homosexuality” that Leslie Fiedler diagnosed at the heart of American literature and which Christopher Looby long ago cautioned us against endorsing. In a sense, this genre of texts is driven by the fantasy of representing queer life to queer, even if a poignant irony attends that fantasy—namely that the desire to address the queerness of childhood ultimately overwrites queerness itself. The second queer “non-place” of children’s literature that I propose to discuss is that of bad children’s books. By this I do not mean books that get unfavourably reviewed or which are badly written, but books that do not (and cannot) exist, despite the fact that we can imagine them. The Internet abounds with such thought experiments. Titles in this category of unwritable children’s literature include “Polly Paints a Penis,” “Bukowski for Kids,” and “Fido Finds a Dildo.” The fact that such imaginary titles find themselves alongside more offensive offerings (like “Let’s Hurry or We’ll Miss the Public Lynching,” “Officer O’Reilley is 3 Months Pregnant,” and “Zippy Denies the Holocaust”) suggest, at once, that sexual explicitness ranks right up there with overt racism, transphobia, and holocaust denials—and that even broaching such topics is off limits. To the extent that the former category of books (those for and about queer and trans youth) foreground innocent homosexuality/gender identity (and thus dis-place queerness), the latter would seem to affirm the worldview that queerness is only as inappropriate for children as racist texts. Both the books held up as exemplary for queer youth and queer families as well as the bad, unwritable books that we are invited to laugh at, but not read or produce, reaffirm a boundary around childhood that presumes its wholesomeness. They go so far as to offer up an inversion (or perversion) of intersectional wisdom while also disarticulating individual identity from acts of queer world making and working hard to designate the spaces of queer non-places. The effect of these kinds of excisions and avoidances is the production of non-places for childhood in the sense that Augé describes: bland worlds through which people pass on the way to somewhere else and which are drained of the kind of anthropological content we might otherwise associate with queer (literary) history.
The Case of ParaNorman: The Visibility and Temporality of Queerness in Children’s Film.
When the stop-motion animated film ParaNorman was released in August 2012, much ado was made by both liberal and right-wing critics about the character Mitch, a dopey, beefy jock who also happens to be the first openly gay character in a mainstream animated movie (Anderson-Minshall). These critics, who alternately praise and disparage the inclusion of a gay character in a film ostensibly made for children, ignore two important points. First, children’s film (a problematic category in and of itself) has a lengthy history of queer circulations and latent identificatory possibilities (see, for example, the substantial queer corpus on The Wizard of Oz); ParaNorman’s visible gayness is not particularly groundbreaking in this regard. Second, ParaNorman’s queerness is not limited to its openly gay character: the film, about a boy who can communicate with the dead, is rife with more subtle and complex possibilities for queer readings and interpretations. In this paper, I argue that ParaNorman marks a fascinating moment for not only children’s film, but also popular culture more generally: both latent and visible queerness intersect in the film, indicating a noteworthy shift in how Kathryn Stockton describes the temporality of the queer child. While Stockton argues that queer adults require a “backward birthing mechanism” for narrating their own queer childhoods, ParaNorman suggests that young people have increasing access to representations through which they can self-identify as queer (or, at least, “gay”) in the present tense. However, by maintaining an element of occluded queerness through Norman’s character, the film also creates interesting possibilities for queer readings that exceed mere visibility.