The queer aesthetics of childhood : asymmetries of innocence and the cultural politics of child development

Author / Creator

Dyer, Hannah author

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Summary

"In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Dyer offers a study of how children's art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging and political value...

"In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Dyer offers a study of how children's art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging and political value. Dyer suggests that childhood's cultural expressions offer insight into the persisting residues of colonial history, nation building, homophobia and related violence. Drawing from queer and feminist theory, psychoanalysis, settler-colonial studies and cultural studies, this book helps to explain how some theories of childhood development can hurt children. In using the analytic practices offered by queer theory, Dyer considers how some cultural institutions and histories perpetuate what she terms 'asymmetries of innocence'. Offering a new ethics of child care, she urges scholars, teachers, parents and practitioners to critically account for the ways theories of child development can reproduce inequality. Dyer's analysis moves between diverse sites and scales, including photographs and an art installation, children's drawings after experiencing war in Gaza, a novel about gay love and childhood trauma, and debates in sex-education. In the cultural formations of art, she finds new theories of childhood that attend to the knowledge, trauma, fortitude and experience that children might possess. In addressing aggressions against children, ambivalences towards child protection, and the vital contributions children make to transnational politics, she seeks new and queer theories of childhood. Dyer celebrates art made on behalf of children's imaginations in order to assert that in the aesthetics of childhood, a new future can be conjured"--

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