Junk food’s instant gratification introduced working-class children in antebellum United States to ideas of the good life that would slowly kill them.
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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
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