Queer Childhoods

Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability

Mary Zaborskis

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781479813896
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479813926
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Shortlist, 32nd Annual Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book
Finalist, 37th Annual Lambda Literary Awards in LGBTQ+ Studies

Explores how the institutional management of children's sexualities in boarding schools affected children's future social, political, and economic opportunities

Tracing the US's investment in disciplining minoritarian sexualities since the late nineteenth century, Mary Zaborskis focuses on a ubiquitous but understudied figure: the queer child. Queer Childhoods examines 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.

Zaborskis 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Institutionalizing Children, Queering Childhoods
• 1. False Promises of Heterosexualization
• 2. Reforming Sexuality, Displacing Home
• 3. Compulsory Sterilization
• 4. Cleansing and Contaminating Sexuality
• 5. Sexual Orphanings
• Epilogue: What’s My Damage? On Attachments to Queer Theory
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author