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With a title reminiscent of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Queerness of Childhood: Essays From the Other Side of the Looking Glass opens the concept “childhood” to the dreamy qualities of transference and its unspoken influence. Fishzon and Lieber's literary and cultural study of queerness in childhood orients us to questions of temporality, phantasy, the desire to know and the problem of translatability—questions that arise from the gap between, on the one hand, discourses on childhood, development, queerness, and, on the other hand, their continuous circulation of meaning. The collection of essays uses classic novels, memoirs, film, and historical study of concepts such as “queer” and “childhood” as metaphors through which the reader is invited to think about the contemporary situation of gender. Elements of the queer child— the odd, the inexplicable, the wayward and the gifted child—are identified even in surprising places, such as Dostoevsky's (1880) novel The Brothers Karamazov. A central preoccupation of the book constitutes the intricate interaction between psychoanalysis and queer theory, with the question of how theories that destabilize the representational help us “think the unthought of normalcy” (Britzman 1998, p. 80). On the one hand, the book attempts to intervene by urging queer theory to turn to psychoanalytic discourses on infantile sexuality and polymorphous temporality, and on the other, return psychoanalytic theory to its “obscure or repressed origins” (Fishzon and Lieber, p. 2).
This book comes at a particular history of psychoanalysis, a time of deep debates concerning trans and nonbinary children. These debates that have been particularly heated and the metaphors used in cultural discourses to describe concern over child's future, the possibility of regret, and the disruption to development reflect myriad unconscious threats:
fragmentation, disruption, contagion, all of which are displaced onto gender. I approach the book with strong