Research Catalog

Details

Description

1. 155 pages; 21 cm.

Summary

1. "In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, 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 development can hurt children. In using the analytic practices offered by queer theory, Dyer considers how some cultural institutions and histories perpetuate what she terms 'asymmetries of innocence'. Offering a new ethics of child care, she urges scholars, teachers, parents and practitioners to critically account for the ways theories of child development can reproduce inequality. 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. Dyer celebrates art made on behalf of children's imaginations in order to assert that in the aesthetics of childhood, a new future can be conjured"--

Series statement

1. Rutgers series in childhood studies

Uniform title

1. Rutgers series in childhood studies.

Subject

1. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Children's Studies
2. ART / Criticism & Theory
3. Sexual minorities
4. Aesthetics
5. Child development
6. Queer theory
7. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gay Studies
8. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory

Contents

1. Introduction : childhood's queer intimacies and affective intensities -- Queer temporality in the playroom : Ebony G. Patterson's and Jonathon Hobins aesthetics of child development -- Art and the refusal of empathy in A chlild's view from Gaza -- The queer remains of childhood trauma : notes on A little life -- Reparation for a violent boyhood in This is England -- Epilogue : The contested design of children's sexuality.

Call number

1. JFD 20-3888

Bibliography (note)

1. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Author

1. Dyer, Hannah, author.

Title

1. The queer aesthetics of childhood : asymmetries of innocence and the cultural politics of child development / Hannah Dyer.

Publisher

1. New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2020]

Copyright date

1. ©2020

Type of content

1. text

Type of medium

1. unmediated

Type of carrier

1. volume

Series

1. Rutgers series in childhood studies
2. Rutgers series in childhood studies.

Bibliography

1. Includes bibliographical references and index.

LCCN

1. 2019002451

Other standard identifier

1. 40029538765

ISBN

1. 9781978803992 paperback
2. 1978803990 paperback
3. 1978804008 hardcover
4. 9781978804005 hardcover

Research call number

1. JFD 20-3888