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theses

This dissertation departs from a question generated by the present: how has the child become gay, or transgender? Its four chapters trace a genealogy of these two children that contextualizes their genders and sexualities in a broader recalculation of the political, legal, and medical value of children’s bodies to the United States since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While queer theory and transgender studies, limiting themselves to retrospective narratives of childhood, have been able to understand the child only as symbolic or as a proto-memory of an adult subject, this dissertation approaches the child as a living body and a contested national resource bound to histories of eugenic medicine, policing and incarceration, and the struggle between the state and the family over children as unfinished persons. The first two chapters broach the gay child through the history of bullying and juvenile delinquency, first under the law and in schools, before looking at cyberbullying online. The third and fourth chapters provide an unprecedented history of the transgender child that focuses on the 1960s, while scholars have assumed there was no transgender child before the 1990s. While the gay and transgender child have become recently visible through their apparent newness, “Queer Theory is Kid Stuff” makes the case for critically assessing how their bodies incorporate the horizon of value invested in children to define human life and its viable futures.

ETD_6272

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Julian Gill-Peterson

doi:10.7282/T3GM8963

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.