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Queerness in many ways is about something being awry and off kilter, and not going smoothly, chronologically, or predictably. That can certainly be said about this book review which managed to elude this writer's grasp for longer than anticipated and thus my own sense of dislocated time permeated the reading of the text, a situation which only added to the text's success in dislocating reading from any easy positionality or normatively established apperception, requiring a readiness to be challenged by the in-between, outside, excluded, permeable, indecipherable, and the attachments to meaning that produce the socially sanctioned norms and expectations of childhood. This edited collection addresses queerness and childhood, each hefty themes in their own right, with an air of freshness built upon a foundation of psychoanalytic theory, primarily that of Freud, Lacan, and Laplanche, and impactful queer contributions since queer theory's resurgence in the 90s which sought to expand the limited identarian foci of gay and lesbian studies and challenge normativity in all aspects of human existence and not only in the arena of sexuality.
There is a timeliness to the arrival of this text as anxieties about childhood continue to resonate and permeate social bodies and are increasingly perceptible in media, policy, legal frameworks, the psychology of children, and relative to the continued diversification of family structures and changes to traditional communities. Current discourses on transgender children reflect these changes and associated tensions. The significance of the queer child is posed by the collection's editors, Anna Fishzon and Emma Lieber, who draw inspiration from Eve Sedgwick's queer textual analyses and Lee Edelman's challenge to the centralization of the child in the dominant social norm that is reproductive futurity. They ask
What can we make of this apparent dialectical synthesis of the Child and the Queer? Is the queer child a newly created object or an o