Gabrielle Owen
This form of exploitation, the use of the child to meet adult needs, is built into the social conception of what a child is in the first place. If such a relation appears “natural” according to the definitional bounds of what a child is, then we must reckon with the degree to which exploitation is foundational to the Western idea of childhood itself. Read More

Kristen Proehl
Queer friendships challenge the devaluation of platonic relationships in contrast to romantic, familial, and/or biological relationships. Queer friendships, I argue, are a pervasive convention of YA literature and play a crucial role in many adolescent protagonists’ understanding of their identities and relation to the world. Read More

Mary Zaborskis
Expanding where and how we locate queerness in childhood makes visible the ways that children and youth institutions have been central to maintaining racialized, bourgeois, settler-colonial, able-bodied norms around gender and sexuality. Read More

Laura Laffrado
Hawthorne’s works for children were trivialized as subliterary at the same moment that much of his other work was authorized and endorsed by scholars in central ways. Read More