We begin with a deliberate provocation: queer(ing) early modern children and childhood . Separately, the terms âqueerâ and âchildâ have been subjected to intensive scholarly scrutinyâthe former recently acquiring playfully prodigious polyvalence but simultaneously becoming threatened with depoliticization and sexual sterilization by its ubiquitous deployment as a catch-all replacement for former critical buzzwords like âcarnivalesque,â âabject,â and âsubversiveâ; the latterâparticularly following the 1960 publication and 1962 English translation of Philippe Ariès âs landmark study, Centuries of Childhoodâincreasingly interrogated as a historically and culturally contingent social construct. So, we wondered, might the two terms, forced to work together, exert productive pressure on each other? This collectionâin part the result of that intentionally anachronistic agitationâbrings together essays that view the narratological history of childhood through the lens of queer theory while also recognizing the mutual interdependencies of the two fields. Does the representation of children have a queer history? Does childhood invoke queerness, and vice versa? Can queer theory help us to unpack the peculiar aspects of early modern cultural depictions of children and childhood? Our answers to these questions are invariably âyes,â but such inquiries require the negotiation of a sharedâif still contestedâvocabulary to facilitate meaningful conversation. What constitutes âa childâ varies across times and cultures. Furthermore, attempts to ascertain subjectivity or agency âwho or what is queer, and who or what is doing the queering âprove as fraught in practice as do endeavors to determine precisely how to define what a child is, or to resolve what criteria unambiguously constitute and encompass childhood. As our essays collectively acknowledge, queerness, children, and childhood are all abstract linguistic constructsâa salient feature that is perhaps nowhere more conspicuous than on the early modern stage, which tended to rely upon the spoken word to create myriad phenomena: day and night; light and dark; time and temporality ; seasons and weather; place and space ; effects and properties ( Macbeth âs âdagger of the mindâ [2.2.38], for example), offstage sights, sounds, and occurrences; and evenâas Lucy Munro âs essay in this collection reminds usâmetamorphic transformations . In what follows, we aim to suspend our preconceived ideas about what we think we already know about children and childhood in order to seize upon their discontinuous historical , cultural, and narratological peculiarities. In the process, we not only seek to question how children and childhood might have signified in early modern English culture, but also reflexively to consider why we read early modern children and childhood as queerâwhat roles and functions are exposed by the queernesses of premodern children and childhoods, which might help us more effectively to query our own historically and culturally specific ideological presumptions?
The zeitgeist of childhood studies has been mobilized by historical and political concerns in recent queer scholarshipâwhat Kenneth Kidd calls âqueering the child, or exposing the childâs latent queernessâ (2011, 183)âthat are particularly relevant to the study of early modern drama. In 2002, KarĂn Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson asked, âWhat is Queer Theory Doing with the Child?â in an article that acknowledges the risks of invoking the child, a figure that appears at its âmost stableâ and âunquestioned and unquestionableâ when read âin its absolute singularityâ (2002, 35). The child tends, they suggest, to pose an anti-theoretical moment of resistance to analysis because the child as an idea implies the existence of the ârealâ child whose essential, self-determined identity secures an essential reality beyond language. In her subsequent work on childhood, Lesnik-Oberstein maintains a critical skepticism about attributions of âvoiceâ and âagencyâ to children, usefully warning humanists how, even in studies employing deconstructivist approaches, âchildhood often continues after all to be retrieved as ârealâ in the endâ (2011, 4). Often collapsing this very distinction, Lee Edelmanâs No Future (2004) expresses a crucial distrust for the essentialist figure he calls âthe Child, â which he sees as an inevitable symbol of the compulsory heterosexual mandate to reproduce and thereby secure our collective futurity . For Edelman, children unwittingly validate symbolic relations that fetishize their futurity and privilege their innocence, all in the service of a heterosexual , conservative ideology that reproduces itself at the expense of actual, lived, queer experiences. At his most angry, Edelman exclaims, âFuck the social order and the Child in whose name weâre collectively terrorizedâ (2004, 29). This deliberatively offensive attack is aimed directly at members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and Intersex (LGBTQQI) community, whose demands for equality Edelman sees as having been side-tracked by the assimilationist pursuits of gay marriage and adoption rightsâan agenda representing the queer family as an unthreatening extension of, or equivalent to, straight kinship networks. Some queer critics have complained that the gay liberation movement sacrificed too much of its radical identity as a counter-cultural alternative to straight society by insisting that its constituents be recognized as legitimate members of the status quo. Equality under the law , such critics lament, does not necessarily translate into an environment that fosters and promotes queer lifestylesâespecially when the obfuscation of queer existences is routinely achieved in the name of protecting the children. The irony is that, even though the modern ideal of childhood innocence would, on the one hand, deny children sexual knowledge , subjective sexual agency, and sexual identity, it insists on the other that children are implicitly straight and in need of vigilant protection from the corruptive influences of deviant queerness. While most activists ultimately support the move toward equality that has been achieved by the gay marriage and adoption movements, some remain critical of how queer relationships have achieved widespread cultural validation only by emulating straight, reproductive marriage, thereby contributing to what we might call the eradication or un-queering of queerness through assimilation. The truly revolutionary move, following this logic, would be for queer communities to reject altogether straight institutions and legal contracts like marriage and parenthood , thereby refusing to surrender to church and state the powers to evaluate, legitimize, and/or invalidate queer social, sexual , and kinship bonds .
So, what do contemporary debates about gay marriage and adoption have to do with queer depictions of children and childhood in early modern drama and culture? As the essays that follow illustrate, early modern assumptions about the patriarchal production of heirs underwrote a conservative social order and political imaginary that bears striking resemblance to the status quo whose futurity Edelman sees modern constructions of âthe Childâ securing. As Lesnik-Oberstein (2011) reminds us, however, it is crucial to remember that the subject of our study is neither children nor childhood per se, but rather discursive and dramatic constructions thereof, which provide no access to any âtruthâ about children, childhood, or âthe childââparticularly given that no such transhistorical, transcultural essence even exists. While we are sympathetic to Lesnick-Obersteinâs premise that we cannot distinguish or diagnose any (in)correct or (in)authentic voice of the early modern child since âthere is no such âvoice,â neither for the child nor for any other identityâ (2011, 10), we also remain convinced that discursive, dramatic constructions of early modern English children and childhood, like those interrogated in the chapters that follow, rehearse some of the cultureâs foremost expectations and ide...