Abstract
This manuscript takes, as a starting point, the assumption that childhood is neither self-evident nor natural. It is, as Henry Jenkins puts it, an indistinct and constantly renegotiated concept that must be “enforced and inculcated upon children.”1 One of the most astute and productive treatments of childhood comes from the work of James Kincaid, whose books Child Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture and Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting underpin much of the analysis in this chapter, particularly the fetishization of childhood innocence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Random House, 1962), 72.
Ellen Pifer, Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 46.
Qtd. in Patricia Holland, Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery (London: I. B. Taurus, 2004), 71.
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 113– 14.
Sabine Bussing, Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 2.
Ann Douglas, “The Dream of the Wise Child: Freud’s ‘Family Romance’ Revisited in Contemporary Narratives of Horror,” Prospects 9 (1984): 293–348. Douglas draws heavily on the theories of Sándor Ferenczi, a contemporary (and sometimes adversary) of Sigmund Freud. For my work, his notion of the “wise child” and “the unwanted child” will be useful sources for later analysis.
Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953–1968 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 184.
Vivian Sobchack, “Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange,” in Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 147.
Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 206.
Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 97.
Harry Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 4.
Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 4.
See Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Illicit Pleasures: Feminist Spectators and Personal Best,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 183–96, and Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Richard Dyer, Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2004).
Kevin Ohi, “Narrating the Child’s Queerness in What Maisie Knew,” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 82. Ohi’s use of the word “disidentification” recalls Jose Estes Munoz’s use of the term to describe a form of identification in which the subject does not “lose her/himself” in the chosen object but rather identifies through commonalities and social inequities. Brett Farmer has used this notion in Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) to theorize gay male identifications with the female star in cinema. Likewise, I want to suggest, like Ohi, that queer spectators have a “murderous disidentification” with the revolting child and that this identification is not an imposed infantilization but rather an acknowledgement of commonalties.
Paul Kelleher, “How to Do Things with Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the ‘Child in Danger,’” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 152.
Leo Bersani, Homos ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 32.
Ellen Showalter, “Introduction,” in The Bad Seed, by William March (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), vi.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One (New York: Vintage, 1990), 103.
Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xvii.
Michael Cobb, “Queer Theory and Its Children,” Criticism 47.1 (winter 2005): 119–30.
See Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) and “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material),” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 57– 80.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Edelman chooses to use the capitalized term “the Child” to refer to the concept of “reproductive futurism” and the avatar of its political power in order to distinguish it from actual children or children’s bodies.
Ellis Hanson, “Knowing Children: Desire and Interpretation in The Exorcist,” in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 110.
Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3.
Copyright information
© 2015 Andrew Scahill
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scahill, A. (2015). Revolting Children. In: The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481320_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481320_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57792-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-48132-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)