Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability

Queer Childhoods explores how the institutional management of children's sexualities in boarding schools affected their future social, political, and economic opportunities. It argues that these schools produced new forms of childhood that secured American futures but did not consider institutionalized children full-fledged citizens.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 22 January 2024
Publisher: New York University Press

Tracing the United States' investment in disciplining minoritarian sexualities since the late nineteenth century, Mary Zaborski's Queer Childhoods delves into a ubiquitous yet understudied figure: the queer child. Queer Childhoods explores the lived and literary experiences of children who attended reform schools, schools for the blind, African American industrial schools, and Native American boarding schools. In mapping the institutional terrain of queer childhoods in educational settings of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century, the book offers an original archive of children's sexual and embodied experiences.

Zaborski argues that these boarding schools, designed to segregate racialized, criminalized, and disabled children from mainstream culture, produced new forms of childhood. These childhoods have secured American futures in which institutionalized children (and the adults they become) have not been considered full-fledged citizens or participants. By locating this queerness in state archives and institutions, Queer Childhoods exposes a queer social history entangled with genocide, eugenics, and racialized violence.

Queer Childhoods is a groundbreaking work that sheds light on the often-overlooked experiences of queer children in educational settings. Through its meticulous research and compelling storytelling, the book offers a valuable contribution to the fields of history, education, and LGBTQ studies. It challenges the dominant narratives that have perpetuated the marginalization and oppression of queer children and provides a new lens through which to understand their historical and contemporary experiences.

In conclusion, Queer Childhoods is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the complex and multifaceted history of queer children in the United States. It is a powerful and essential work that will inspire and challenge readers to think critically about the ways in which institutions have shaped and limited the opportunities available to marginalized children.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781479813896