We’ve invited Erica Kanesaka Kalnay to reflect on her recent essay in Victorian Studies.
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We’ve invited Erica Kanesaka Kalnay to reflect on her recent essay in Victorian Studies.
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“We invite interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary engagement with children’s rights and protection, and the ways in which they are linked to debates of intergenerational coexistence and futures, with an emphasis on decolonial and childist approaches.”
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