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
We’ve invited Jacob Breslow to reflect on his recent essay in American Quarterly. Read More
Critical Childhood Studies, Children’s Literature, and the Canon
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
We’ve invited Laura Soderberg to reflect on her recent essay in J19. Read More
Brigitte Fielder
What would critical childhood studies look like if a majority of our scholars imagined Black children not only as readers, but as capable and sophisticated readers for children’s literature? Read More
Sarah E. Chinn
Enslaved childhood resists the domination of white bourgeois figurations of child time, and imbricates and implicates it with slave time. Read More
Maude Hines
Thinking through and about childhood is integral to thinking about identity, systems of power, and possibilities for liberation. Read More
Courtney Weikle-Mills
Childhood is often aligned with whiteness and innocence, but what other roles can it play? What happens when childhood functions as part of a program of enforcing inequality, dating back to slavery? Read More
Carol J. Singley
How have we excluded the histories of adopted children, and kept children’s identities circumscribed in an ideology of biological essentialism that serves an outdated patriarchal social structure? Read More
Kenneth Kidd
I want to keep children’s literature as a priority for childhood studies, and P4C encourages that commitment. Read More
