Article

Childhood, queer theory, and feminism

n Lesnik-Oberstein Kar
University of Reading

Feminist Theory 11(3) 309321 ! The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464700110376281 fty.sagepub.com

Abstract Departing from the theoretical position that childhood is a construction of identity, this article examines queer theory about childhood, arguing that definitions of queer theory and of childhood affect each other specifically in complex ways. In relation to this, it is argued that even where queer theory defines itself as the dismantling of foundational categories, childhood often escapes this dismantling inadvertently and unintentionally. The reasons for, and implications of, this are explored. Keywords childhood, psychoanalysis, queer

In this article, I oer a further consideration of the child in queer theory.1 On the basis of Jacqueline Roses arguments in The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Childrens Fiction ([1984] 1993), I propose that the child has a tendency to recur as a foundational or essential real, even in some queer and feminist theoretical writings which express an explicit commitment to questioning essentialist notions of identity. As Rose argues, [a]nd yet for all the apparent shifts in the way that childhood is discussed, what always seems to return in the analysis, in one form or another, is this idea of mastery (Rose, [1984] 1993: 10).2 Both the child and gender are of course mutually implicated at every turn: the child both denies and founds gender and is the lynchpin of the family. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously argued about her own queer theorizing:
I see that it has been a ruling intuition for me that the most productive strategy (intellectually, emotionally) might be, whenever possible, to disarticulate [the various elements of family identity] from one another, to disengage them the bonds of blood,

Corresponding author: n Lesnik-Oberstein, Department of English and American Literature, University of Reading, PO Box 218, Kar Reading RG6 6AA, UK Email: k.b.lesnik-oberstein@reading.ac.uk

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of law, of habitation, of privacy, of companionship and succour from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called family. (Sedgwick, 1994: 6, italic in original)

In this article, I extend some aspects of this disarticulation and disengagement specically in relation to the child. The well-known and still much debated work of Lee Edelman, for instance, attends closely in No Future to the relation of the Child [sic] to futurity:
For politics, however radical the means by which specic constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to arm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. That Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneciary of every political intervention. (Edelman, 2004: 23, italic in original)

In terms of Edelmans questioning of the project of transmi[ssion] to the future the debate around his work has often concentrated on it as an example of the antisocial thesis in queer theory (Caserio et al., 2006: 819). Instead of arguing in favour of, or against this thesis, I want to suggest instead that, specically because of its treatment of the child, No Future is less queerly antisocial than it believes itself to be. The books argument construes queer theory as a particular story . . . of why storytelling fails, one that takes both the burden and the value of that failure upon itself [and] marks the other side of politics: the side where narrative realization and derealization overlap, where the energies of vitalization ceaselessly turn against themselves; the side outside all political sides, committed as they are, on every side, to futurisms unquestioned good (Edelman, 2004: 7).3 Psychoanalysis in this argument is seen to underpin this particular story through [t]he drive more exactly, the death drive [which] holds a privileged place in this book. As the constancy of a pressure both alien and internal to the logic of the Symbolic, and as the inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject from within, the death drive names what the queer, in the order of the social, is called forth to gure: the negativity opposed to every form of social viability (Edelman, 2004: 9). In No Future, there is an overt engagement precisely with the complexities and inherent risks of a psychoanalysis which claims to know an unconscious which cannot be known: for instance when it is stated that [this t]ruth, like queerness, irreducibly linked to the aberrant or atypical, to what chafes against normalization, nds its value not in a good susceptible to generalization, but only in the stubborn particularity that voids every notion of a general good (Edelman, 2004: 6). Nevertheless, this account of Lacan is disrupted by the way the child can after all be known as a gure and image and, therefore, also as not gure or image.4 From the start of this argument, queer theory is formulated as a gure or as gured and guring (Edelman, 2004: 3), which presumably is grounded in the view that politics, construed as opposite or not, never rests on essential identities. It centers, instead, on the gurality that is always essential to identity, and thus on

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the gural relations in which social identities are always inscribed (Edelman, 2004: 17, italic in original). But where the child is summed up as that which has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust (Edelman, 2004: 11), the argument continues by considering that [i]n its coercive universalization, however, the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse to prescribe what will count as political discourse (Edelman, 2004: 11, italic in original). How can a distinction be drawn between the image and the historical children in this way? It suggests that the social, which above all queer theory is here invoked to critique, will reappear in the guises of, for instance, a historicity which is known and present, and moreover, to be known simply precisely as childhood and its lived experiences. This is the historicity of which it is further argued that politics is a name for the temporalization of desire, for its translation into a narrative, for its teleological determination (Edelman, 2004: 9). In other words, historicity is critiqued here for being not about an inevitable passing of time, but about a politically produced investment. Nevertheless, with the mention of the lived experiences of any historical children there is already a re-introduction of real children with a real future; a future which is after all inevitable and which must be planned for and taken in to account. Moreover, and crucially, where the historical child and the image Child can be recognized without question each as such, the regulat[ion of] political discourse is doubled, rst fundamentally founded upon a split here between the historical child and the image Child, and then, again, in a gurative status which is acknowledged and addressed as not permitted to be acknowledged and addressed by us (we). Somewhat ironically perhaps, my critique therefore runs precisely counter to the criticisms of his work that Edelman himself predicts, partially perhaps in an attempt to pre-empt them, in a footnote where he asserts that:
[t]here are many types of resistance for which, in writing a book like this, it is best to be prepared. One will be the deantly political rejection of what some will read as an apolitical formalism, an insuciently historicized intervention . . . A variant will assail the bourgeois privilege [. . . Some] might be inclined to dismiss the book for its language (which they will call jargon), for its theoretical framework (which theyll view as elitist), for its diculty. (Edelman, 2004: 157158)

This irony is relevant to the diculty at hand. Edelmans misdiagnosis of where the problems of this book might lie is telling, even if it is proposed as a diagnosis of the problematic readings of resistance, and not as a self-diagnosis of its own possible failings. I can elaborate this irony further in terms of what it reveals about what is at stake in gures and guration by pointing to the considerable number of positive responses to No Future which indeed happily take up those historical children as reassurance in the midst of endorsing its overall project. Denis Flannery, for example, writes that Edelman argues against the domination of early twenty-rst

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century political life by the gure of the Child writ large, a gure Edelman is keen to separate from historical children to which the order he criticizes is so murderously indierent (Flannery, 2007: 23). John Brenkman (2002a, 2002b), meanwhile, disagrees with Edelman over psychoanalysis and its relations (or not) with politics, but not about the child, of whom Brenkman writes that I have also not challenged [Edelmans] criticism of the gure of the child as futurity, because I nd it is very persuasive (Brenkman, 2002b). This begs the question of how, for Brenkman, that gure of the child is somehow not implicated in, or aected by, disagreements about psychoanalysis and politics. Or to put it dierently, what kinds of psychoanalyses can be seen to be signicantly divergent in terms of relationships with politics, while maintaining the same understandings of that child, with its concomitant commitments to an unquestioned division between real, historical, children and the gure Child of the Symbolic? Despite claims such as those by Stevenson and Sedgwick, for instance, that queer theory lays particular stress on breaking down these dichotomies (Stevenson, 2006), No Futures upholding of a distinction between the theoretical [child] and the actual [child] (Stevenson, 2006) is understood as such and enthusiastically endorsed in the works of several queer theorists. Benjamin Bateman, for instance, argues that Queer culture . . . must imagine a political order in which the needs of children are not inimical to the interests of queers, and it must celebrate . . . that which is most queer, and queer-able, in children (Bateman, 2006); while Michael Cobb writes that something about children less as actual beings and more as what they are made to signify livens up queer theory (Cobb, 2005). Tim Dean too follows the child as that which is both present and queer: we cannot protect kids from perverts, because we cannot eectively insulate any child from him- or herself (Dean, 2006: 827). Is the (queer) child then to be a sort of comfort after all in and for this understanding of queer?5 Also, after all, in work such as No Future or Kathryn Bond Stocktons The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009)6 where the child is repeatedly and overtly challenged as comforting or comfortable? No Future overtly understands both psychoanalysis and the child as inherent risks, including in terms of its own critical engagement with them. The books argument therefore meticulously anticipates its own inevitable failure to master these risks, although in that sense it also neutralizes that failure by a mastery of it. Nevertheless No Future does fail in not anticipating the return of the real child and its real future in its arguments. In imagining them as already external and irrelevant to its argument, No Future does not see them as risks after all. I am not analysing in Edelmans argument a generalized and generalizable inevitability of failure in relation to an unmasterable unconscious, manifest as the problem of the child. Neither am I claiming for my own critique the possibility of the achievement of a mastery of a yet higher order than No Futures or any other discussion aiming for a non-essentialist position with regard to identity. I am instead considering the child as risk indeed: one which mobilizes specic and precise problems and diculties, although in turn these specicities and precisions are not only issues of

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the child.7 As Daniela Caselli, one of the other contributors to this special issue, writes in her consideration of queer theory specically in relation to the work of author Djuna Barnes:
Lee Edelman has argued that the queerness of which he speaks would deliberately sever us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves and hence of knowing our good. It is tempting to link this notion of queer to Nightwood and the Barnes oeuvre, but the use of deliberately in Edelmans formulation implies a willing subject radically self-aware in her negation of knowing her own good. (Caselli, 2009: 174, quoting Edelman, [2004] 2005: 5, Edelmans italic)

In other words, both Caselli and I are reading in Edelmans account a symptom of the death drive at work: a repetition which cannot recognize itself as repetition, even where and when the argument strains to the utmost to anticipate his own failure of recognition. In which sense then is the negation of the image of the Child the death drive? For No Future the death drive dissolves those congealments of identity that permit us to know and survive as ourselves (Edelman, 2004: 17); but what if, instead, the death drive is understood as precisely congealing identity (the child, not the Child) that permits us to know and survive as ourselves, whether we like it or not, unavoidably and intransigently? This is the death drive understood as the recapitulation constructing our/selves it/self. It is not a liberating or an antiliberating understanding of the death drive that I am returning to here, but a reading of the our/selves that also grounds No Futures us and we who both would live within and with-out the death drive. This complicates further the way in which this text relies on mastering the anticipation of not mastering. It suggests:
that the ecacy of queerness, its real strategic value, lies in its resistance to a Symbolic reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourselves in it, clinging to its governing ctions, its persistent sublimations, as reality itself. It is, after all, to its gures of meaning, which we take as the literal truth, that we owe our existence as subjects and the social relations within which we live relations we may well be willing, therefore, to give up our lives to maintain. (Edelman, 2004: 18)

This eects a heroism which is Romantic in its refutation of the possibility of heroism: the footing of this narration slips around inclusions and exclusions which are all nevertheless encompassed by an unwavering external view. That, later, the text re-qualies its death drive [a]s the name for a force of mechanistic compulsion whose formal excess supersedes any end toward which it might seem to be aimed (Edelman, 2004: 22) then constitutes a repetition of the mastery of nonmastery rather than constituting a retreat from having already harnessed the death drive to queer theory for its own ends. Finally, these repeated anticipations and qualications in the text themselves constitute a futurity as narrative, and a narrative of futurity, in which the promise of no promise is compulsively continually undercut in and as future for the future.

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In the midst of No Futures ongoing qualications of qualications of, and as, its understanding of the Lacanian psychoanalytic schemata the child consistently erupts as such reassurance. The Child is recognizable and recognized throughout as separate from those actual, esh-and-blood children (Edelman, 2004: 49) against whom the force [of the social imperative to grasp futurity in the form of the Child] directs its aim . . . provoking the violence they are made to suer in the name of a God who, some report, urged us to suer them (Edelman, 2004: 49, italic in original). This is the child of, and as, pathos, unironized, as ubiquitously present as in any futuristic work, as are the Catholic children whom, the text asserts with legitimate outrage, Cardinal Bernard Law failed to protect . . . from sexual assault by pedophile priests (Edelman, 2004: 29). And it is at the point of pathos that the danger of the diculties of the child and psychoanalysis come to matter (and come to matter) most clearly. For at these points, and because of these points, the radical force of this queer does not just collapse, but speaks its oppression. This occurs not in the way the text had wanted to prescribe as an accession to queer guration, but as what precisely produces that guration of the queer in its own terms: when it is further stated how Cardinal Law [w]ith this fatal embrace of a futurism so blindly committed to the gure of the Child . . . will justify refusing health care to the adults that some children become (Edelman, 2004: 29), these adults now share in the pathos of the children they once were, by virtue indeed of once having been those children, as well as the pathos of not all those children having become adults (some are children still?). The violent force with which No Future advocates [q]eers must respond to Cardinal Law and the Popes pronouncements, elicits a frisson of excited admiration amongst some of its readers, apparently thrilling to the taboo-breaking [f]uck the social order and the Child in whose name we are collectively terrorized8 (Edelman, 2004: 29). But, given the historical, esh-and-blood children for whom the text wishes protection as much as it claims Cardinal Law and the Pope wished but did not enact, as the text asserts No Future can be read to be inadvertently saying exactly what Cardinal Law and the Pope say, even if they did not do it. But, then neither does this argument do it here. What exactly are the consequences for such a texts proposed queer project of claiming as a doing what is within its own terms a saying? The overt proposal in No Future is that the threat that the queer gures is embraced and acceded to as such, and this threat is not dened by the text as gured only by what the queer is said and seen to say, but also by what it is seen and said to do and be. So is the threat of the queer to the social as it is gured according to this text not precisely the belief that queers do indeed sexually threaten children? By assuming historical esh-and-blood children from the outset, the real (not the Real) is nevertheless assumed. The consequence must be either that that real is, here, after all resisted (queers do, or should, not really fuck children),9 which would, presumably, constitute exactly the kind of liberal position that this text is seeking to critique, or that the real is acceded to after all, which would constitute the threat indeed (queers really do, and should, fuck children). These arguments advocate the rst option, thus joining the liberals at the political table after all.

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A further example of the mutual implications of the child and the denition and project of queer theory occurs in Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurleys eponymous introduction to their volume Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004). Here is a queer theory in which the child is, as in No Future, split from the beginning. Here we nd a division between the normal child and the queer child, where the normal child is part of a simple story (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: ix) and the queer child is part of stories that often appear beyond the narrative pale (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: x), where [a]rchitects of the child in culture have developed elaborate means of editing out or avoiding the kinds of sexuality children arent supposed to have all in an eort to simplify what is, in fact, not at all a simple story (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xi). Immediately, this split construes two dierent levels: the simple story is already known to be inadequate to a sexuality which is known to be there in children, while the not at all. . . simple story correctly and adequately tells it as it is. The child and its sexuality are here already known and knowable, and, since the producers of the dominant narrative already know too what the full story about children and sexuality actually is, what is at stake at this point is the reassertion of that knowledge in the face of the eorts to edit out or avoid it. Queer theory, by this denition, is the advocate of a true knowledge of the child and sexuality, which troubles in so far as it keeps speaking up about this suppressed truth in the face of opposition. This is again a dierent queer theory from that of which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote:
Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive recurring, eddying, troublant. The word queer itself means across. . .: across genders, across sexualities, across genres, across perversions. . . . The queer of these essays is transitive multiply transitive. The immemorial current that queer represents is antiseparatist as it is antiassimilationalist. Keenly, it is relational, and strange. (Sedgwick, 1994: xii, italic in original)

The evidence for, and implications of, this dierence in theoretical approach emerges in the same areas as in No Future: the queer child is a gure (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: x), while a concomitant division between form and content (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xi) allows Alice in Wonderland to end with desire belong[ing] to the sister alone, as she superimposes the banalizing form of the child-story over the content of what that child is telling (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xi, italic in original). The correct child as content is conrmed in this interpretation. The introduction to Curiouser engages with several of the complexities of these issues, and yet the attempt to address them is also unable to heal the split included from the start. When the problem for Robert Owens in recording authenticity in the section on Exhibit B: The Real Queer Child (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xi) is discussed, there is a retreat in some respects from the claim of the possibility of the child speaking itself:
[Owens] says that his problems arise from quoting, not talking, which assumes that what his teenagers say is a transparent presentation of experience. But as Hayden

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White has argued, all discourses claiming to present the historical truth are themselves conned by the conventions of narrative. In the act of telling their lives to Owens, the youths have already made their realities into stories. Owens uses pieces of these stories, adds pieces of other authors stories, and sutures them all together using his own voice. The eect is a queer kid whose monologue is really editorial pastiche. (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xii)

But conne[ment] by conventions still diagnoses a restriction which relies on a knowledge of the fullness that has been lost, while the youths ma[ke] their realities into stories, relying on the youths knowledge of their realities and the processes that must be undertaken to transform them into stories. Moreover, Owens has a voice which can be recognized as authentically his own. These anchors of authenticity allow this text to diagnose the queer kids monologue as pastiche, implicitly dened as such against a queer kid who could, somehow, somewhere, after all speak authentically. Bruhm and Hurley, signicantly, understand Roses argument, as many Humanities scholars writing on childhood do (Lesnik-Oberstein, 2000), as being about partiality and imposition of identity on an underlying real child:
These books write the childs desire out of existence, eradicating the sexual child in the process. Jacqueline Rose has argued that childhood innocence [is]. . . a portion of adult desire, and in these books the child becomes a cipher into which adult desires and anxieties are poured. (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xiii)

They further state that [w]hile no one would suggest that there is no such thing as a child, there may very well be no denition of child that applies to all situations (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxv), summing up the apparently unquestionable, commonsensical position that a qualication of the child nevertheless preserves it in the face of any enquiry, and that any enquiry could not conceivably go further than such qualication.10 As Judith Butler writes of this same issue with respect to her arguments on gender and the body:
Theorizing from the ruins of the Logos invites the following question: What about the materiality of the body? Actually, in the recent past, the question was repeatedly formulated to me this way: What about the materiality of the body, Judy? I took it that the addition of Judy was an eort to dislodge me from the more formal Judith and to recall me to a bodily life that could not be theorized away. . . restored to that bodily being which is, after all, considered to be most real, most pressing, most undeniable . . . And if I persisted in this notion that bodies were in some way constructed, perhaps I really thought that words alone had the power to craft bodies from their own linguistic substance? Couldnt someone simply take me aside? (Butler, 1993: ixx, italic in original)

Childhood and the body are in these senses both symptoms of a retrieval of the real in queer and feminist theories, and, intentionally or unintentionally, direct the

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outcomes of the arguments in which they appear. The introduction to Curioser, for instance, reviews and critiques a number of theoretical scenarios with respect to the child and sexuality, in order to nally settle on a suggestion about how to tell a dierent story . . . about kids, sex, power, and fantasy (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxvii). This story is also to be developed throughout Curiouser as the recast[ing] of the conclusions of the scandals and panics about children, and the authors who create them in order to
force us to imagine where the desire of the adult and the desire of the child might diverge. Only then can we conceive of children as desiring creatures who, although tough to access in theory, exist and make stories beyond the simple ones adults see in them. (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxxiv)

This perspective conrms the adult and the child to be known already as separate entities, with divergent desires, where what is placed in the future is the forc[ing] of our (us) imagin[ing] the location of the divergence of their respective desires. Once the location is found by us, then it is already known in the narrative perspective that a conception of children will take place, although everything that ostensibly follows on from that conception is already present here: the tough[ness] of access in theory, as well as the capacity to exist and make stories are already known here. Along the way, this narrative perspective attributes to itself a status beyond both that of adult or child according to its own denitions, as it claims knowledge beyond the simple [stories] adults see in them. Bruhm and Hurley conclude with the assertion that [t]he gure of the child is not the anti-queer, but its future is one we might do well not to predict (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxxiv) although this future has just been predicted here, albeit not in its own reading of its reading. This dierent story therefore relies on a critique of temporality, but, as with No Future, this critique turns out not to be as radical as it would like to think. Bruhm and Hurleys introduction, while referring to and considering a range of psychological ideas about childhood and sexuality, maintains the founding separation between the child and the adult, and therefore, inevitably, between a separate and autonomous past and present. This can be tracked further in the discussion of the dierent story (or the same story but with a dierent ending (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxvii)), a reading of Peter Straubs story The Juniper Tree ([1990] 1991). This story is discussed in order to critique the idea that sexual contact between a child and an adult necessarily leads to trauma, as the story itself is presented as a critique of the inevitability of such trauma because
[the story] interposes the narrators analysis of what happened in the movie theatre with a somewhat dierent category of narrative memory, one that is less symptomatic of the trauma he understands himself to have experienced. There seems to be a difference between the narrators ocial recounting of the experience and the actual emotional memories that surround that experience, as if the very telling of the story

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resurrected the child who lived it rather than pronouncing on the child that adult imagines being there. For example, there is the following line, written in the present tense of a remembered now . . . (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxviii, italic in original)

An absolute separation between child and adult, and between past and present, consistently underpins this interpretation: an ocial recounting is seen to be separatable from actual emotional memories by a shift from past tense to the present tense of a remembered now. Even within this formulation, the tensions strain against one another, for the present tense is nevertheless remembered, which places both memory and now in the past.11 This diculty of an actuality which nevertheless can not be quite actualized by a past present tense is noted by the as if which makes it after all not actually actual. Nevertheless, an insistence that the child is resurrected, somehow spontaneously and autonomously dwelling within memory, indeed triumphing over memory as memory by resurrecting the lived, persists in the claim that [g]one is . . . the queer child whose queerness disappears as childhood disappears; this child likes the experience that is meant to terrify him, or at least likes it more than the adult narrator who remembers it (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxviiixxix). The child who lives outside and beside memory and the adult who remembers it, permits this text to conclude that [c]learly, remembered childhood sexual experiences can be traumatic or pleasant; the problem that interests us most here is how to make sense of the childs pleasure without pathologizing it or reducing it to trauma (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxix, italic in original). This conclusion further derives from an understanding of trauma as Freud describes it, where the meaning lies not in the experience but in the memory . . . The adult narrator overlays his own remembered experience with another narrative, one that renders him victim (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxix). Experience here, as in the discussion of Owens and the queer child, remains the site of authenticity, even when stories written or oral do not. This leads to a move of trauma from experience to memory, so that the adult narrator can overlay one with the other where both are nevertheless remembered, just as the child who lived it can both be remembered and triumph over memory through resurrection. The ambition here to speak with queerness about the vexed realm of trauma in order to allow for the possibility to narrate a pedophilia that will have been benign (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxix) relies on knowing some childrens experience as being pleasurable (rather than traumatic) and this guarantees the benign nature of the events in those cases. As at the start of the argument of the introduction to Curioser, an assertion and defence of knowledge about the sexuality of the child denes this queer theory and contradicts the ambition that we cannot and must not try to predict in advance what psychological, emotional, and political stories will arise from childhood sexual engagement (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxx). Key here is the dierence between Bruhm and Hurleys position, and a psychoanalysis which reads memory, and therefore, childhood, as a wish-fullment produced in the present as the past. In this psychoanalysis, there is no childhood or

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experience which can speak itself. Neither, therefore, are there childhood sexual experiences which are remembered as either traumatic or pleasurable, whereby the pleasurable is by denition in opposition to, and incompatible with, trauma. For Bruhm and Hurley psychoanalysis is that which may speak with queerness about the vexed realm of trauma in order to allow for the possibility to narrate a pedophilia that will have been benign (Bruhm and Hurley, 2004: xxix). Instead, my critique here has relied on a dierent understanding of psychoanalysis which makes possible readings of the child which do not, as with Bruhm and Hurley and Edelman, rely on the child necessarily being that which needs to be either retrieved from, or released to, experiences of sexual relations with adults in the service of queer theory. I have argued throughout this article that queer theory can and should continue to question precisely why it is that such discussions do that to the child. Notes
1. Stephen Thomson and I initiated our consideration of queer theory, childhood and psychoanalysis in 2002 with our article What is Queer Theory Doing with the Child? which focused specifically on childhood in the queer theory of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1994) and Michael Moon (1998). 2. What is Queer Theory Doing with the Child? also suggested following Rose in relation to these issues: Why . . . risk mobilizing the child at all? Or is the issue here indeed that the mobilization of the child is not realized in both senses: recognition and deployment fully as risk? Might we need to consider that the child is in complex ways we wish to wrestle with here an intimation of the illlusionariness of fully realising at all? Theoretically speaking we will be suggesting that the child in queer theory (but certainly not only in queer theory . . . signals impending collapses of poststructural self-reexivity. (Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson, 2002: 37, italic in original) 3. I want to emphasize that I am not claiming to be uncovering or addressing any critics (including Lee Edelmans) conscious or unconscious intentions but am only interpreting texts. 4. See for my further extensive analysis of problems with the figure and also metaphor in the context of childhood and reproductive technologies Lesnik-Oberstein (2008). 5. See for further discussion of the queer or proto gay child Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson (2002). 6. I am very grateful to Kathryn Stockton for generously sending me part of the manuscript of her then still forthcoming book The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009) and for corresponding with me about some of the issues concerned. Stocktons close considerations of the child and metaphor, where metaphor is defined as constituted by a space of mutual comparison, nevertheless also retrieve an actual child through a figuration which is not that actual, and through perspectives where the child can after all be known as presence. So that although, for Stockton, The child is who

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we no longer are and, in fact, never were. It is the act of adults looking back (2009: manuscript p. 6), nevertheless, for example, then there are bodies (of children) that must live inside the gure of the child. Given that children dont know this child, surely not as we do, though they move inside it, life inside this membrane is largely available to adults as memory. (2009: manuscript p. 7)

7. See further on the child as risk also Thomson (2004). 8. For just one example, see: Viego (2007: 177). 9. The real would also be resisted in this sense if I read No Futures fuck the Child section as being itself ironic. 10. As Susan Honeyman writes on the response to my own first book on childhood (LesnikOberstein, 1994) in this respect: When Kar n Lesnik-Oberstein declared in Childrens Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (1994) that the child does not exist, Margaret Meek, writing on The Constructedness of Children, responded as if personally attacked . . . Meek has such an earnest concern for children that she has overlooked the limits of theoretical applicability to her personal experience with individuals. (Honeyman, 2005: 13) 11. Hegels reading of the impossibility of a present now could also be called to mind in terms of these problems of temporality I am reading here (for instance Hegel, [1807] 1998: 7987).

References
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