"In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture. Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siècle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater."

Psychoanalysis introduced us to the queer child when it located “perversion” in infancy and posited an adult genital sexuality gradually achieved through narcissistic, oral, and anal pleasures.  In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Sigmund Freud famously suggested that homosexuality was regressive – that it meant getting stuck at a primitive, extra-genital stage of development.  But another strain in his thought universalized perversion and lamented the libidinal sacrifice required by “normal” adult genitality.  Arguably, it is from this Victorian understanding of psychosexuality that the idea of the ever-threatened and threatening “child” emerged – a child at once innocent of fully realized sexual knowledge and the seedbed of abnormality; a potential victim of corrupting adult perversion and the pervert haunting each of us.  The impeccable childhood requiring protection at all cost, the childhood structuring therapeutic optimism (and hopefulness as such) results from the disavowal of both psychoanalytically domesticated queerness and the psychically mature queer.

In the polemical No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman uses psychoanalysis to draw attention to the figural Child (as opposed to living children) at the heart of contemporary politics — the synonym and symptom of the political, or the Symbolic.  The Child, according to Edelman, is the antiqueer: the phantasmatic object that promises Imaginary wholeness and enables discursive unity by screening out the unreachable thing, or disavowed constitutive lack in the heteronormative order.  Edelman exhorts queers to turn away from the politics of “reproductive futurism” — the Child in the name and for the protection of which we perpetually are encouraged to sacrifice the present.  He argues that such a politics always excludes the queer, indeed is constituted by the queer’s abjection.  Edelman tells queer theorists and all outcasts to fuck Little Orphan Annie and the wide beckoning eyes of Tiny Tim; and also to fuck the ultimately impossible liberal queer variant of reproductive futurism: same-sex marriage, adoption, and so on.  Instead, Edelman challenges queers to attempt to occupy the politically unthinkable position assigned to them by the social order (a position they cannot, by definition, escape anyway) in order to undo it from within – to embrace negation, jouissance, and the ruthless work of the death drive.

Since the appearance of Edelman’s book in 2004, the unthinkable has happened.  The queer child has become visible in contemporary popular culture and political debate not as a scare image to be feared by “normal” adults or a pathological adolescent to be cured by therapists, but a positively cathected victim: the target of homophobic bullying at school; the suicidal teen needing support and recognition; the beneficiary of transnational adoption or sex reassignment surgery afforded by understanding parents; the one for whom it eventually gets better. Alongside and perhaps in reaction to Edelman’s controversial intervention, and also in response to the return of the repressed queer child in public discourse, queer theorists have begun to probe the field of cultural production aimed at children in order to create fairy tales of political futures, new political imaginaries, feelings of hope, potentiality, freedom, experimentation, wonder, and enchantment.  Some in queer studies are treating the affective field in which the child is ensconced as rife with the kind of imaginative plasticity that makes possible the envisioning of political and social alternatives.

Despite Edelman’s call for the queer refusal of the Child and the entire symbolic order it signifies, queer theory seems unable to let the child go, or to successfully mourn its loss.  The child has become that thing queer theorists cannot not talk about.  In fact, queer studies, psychoanalysis, the history of childhood, and the politics of the Child are increasingly converging.  Kathryn Stockton, for one, explores childhood as a queer, nonlinear time of “sideways growth” – an elastic temporality that permits children not simply to “grow up” in one vertical continuous movement, but to expand horizontally, incorporating sensations, emotional connections and experiences (masochistic scenes, violent impulses and seductions, for example) later disavowed by the retroactively conceived, figural Child.  She not only asks how gay children play with the asynchronicity of their queer, publically impossible and deferred identity, but also looks at the undeniable strangeness of all children.  Stockton takes apart the implied whiteness and middle-class privilege even of the polymorphously perverse and onanistically inclined psychoanalytic child (the child queered by Freud) to illuminate other models of “dangerous children”: the child queered by innocence, the child queered by color, the child queered by money, the grown homosexual seen as a child, and the gay child made ghostly, unavailable to itself, by legal and parental misrecognition.  As queer theorist Jasbir Puar points out, gay children are promised that they will “get more normal” in adulthood – succeed financially, find acceptance, love, community, family, and so on.  But, in the smart words of one blogger, “it gets better a lot sooner if you are white, cisgendered, and middle-class.”

This workshop brings together a group of scholars and clinicians working at the intersections of childhood studies, psychoanalysis, psychology, pedagogy, and queer theory in order to have a conversation about queer children and the queerness of childhood.  It seeks to investigate the child as a critical tool, a political trope, an affective field, a site of cultural production and consumption, a psychoanalytic subject, and a living, breathing historical personage to whom we are ethically beholden: a figure for both queer political possibility (Jack Halberstam) and political or symbolic death (Edelman).  Participants were asked to explore questions such as: Who is the queer child and why does it continue to command the attention of queer theorists and psychoanalysts?  What is queer about childhood?  What is childish about the queer and queer theory?  Why does queer studies cathect the childlike and the infantile? How do its libidinal interests dovetail with those of psychoanalytic theory and practice? When the child is shorn of its bourgeois whiteness and denied its heterosexuality, does it still require our protection, and if so, what kind?  When the queer child grows publically, nonlinearly, what do we gain?  New collectivities formed around failure?  Alternate temporalities offering hope, and, paradoxically, success and futurity, i.e. a new normativity?  Finally, if we keep putting the child at the center of our (anti) politics, how can we remain critical of the social conditions and symbolic effects of this investment? What does the concept of the queer child do to notions of childhood? What does it mean for the queer to “fuck the figural Child” (Edelman) when the gay child is already fucked, in suicidal crisis?  How can we attend to the sideways growth of all children?