Kathryn Bond Stockton

Kathryn Bond Stockton is Distinguished Professor of English, former Associate Vice President for Equity and Diversity, and inaugural Dean of the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah, where she teaches queer theory, theories of race and racialized gender, and twentieth-century literature and film. Two of her books — Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child (Duke University Press) — were national finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. In addition, her book Making Out (NYU Press) was a 2020 national finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir.

Stockton has taught at Cornell University's School of Criticism and Theory and, along with her university's top teaching award, she has received the Equality Utah Allies Award for LGBT activism, the NOW Lifetime Achievement Award, the YWCA Outstanding Achievement Award in Arts and Communication, the Crompton Noll Prize for Best Essay in Gay and Lesbian Studies from the Modern Language Association, and the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the highest honor granted by the University of Utah.

Under the heading " Congress Insists That the Child Must Be Harmed," the first chapter of Stockton's book The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (2009), discusses the Rind et al. (1998) controversy. She concludes powerfully that "Congress, it would seem, has acted only once to resolve against science: in order to say that children must be harmed." (p. 71). Stockton can be seen and heard speaking about her theory of the queer child in 2014 via Youtube, at a recorded conference hosted by the Center for European Studies at The University of Texas, Austin. In this session titled "Youth Sexual Rights," Stockton is the first speaker, followed by Prof. Thomas Hubbard reading a paper by the absent Prof. Gert Hekma (now deceased), followed by historian of Peter Schult Prof. Florian Mildenberger, and Robert Tiexera.

Selected Publications

• Kathryn Bond Stockton, “Growing Sideways, or Versions of the Queer Child: The Ghost, the Homosexual, the Freudian, the Innocent, and the Interval of Animal,” in Curiouser: On The Queerness of Children, eds. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004).

• Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Duke University Press: Durham, 2009).

• Stockton, (2016). The Queer Child Now and Its Paradoxical Global Effects, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, pp. 505-539.

"Anglo-America, caught in a dream from which it won't awake, is steeped in fantasies of vaporous innocence. These are largely suburban-driven fantasies, however they seep into national discourse. Thus, parental “terror” in the global north can still fixate on sexualization, worrisome signs of children’s being sexual(ized): not on hordes of children taking to the streets, living in the streets, running on the loose while they protest labor conditions, dominate festivals, or rather gleefully rampage shopping malls, as they do in Egypt" [...]

The United States is outsourcing its child. The “innocent child” our country is so fond of is made overseas in a very odd way, a way that turns innocence upside down, a way that even turns good old Orientalism inside out, forging a new weird version of it (kid Orientalism). We, as a public, produce this child for our own purposes, then feel justified running from it, as if its “desire” for us is threatening or somehow inappropriate (reverse pedophilia). The material needs of these children so readily feel like a kind of demanding desire to US viewers. Somewhere a child is desiring me, so I imagine, so I’m led to feel. Hence, my purple coinage — “reverse pedophilia” — stresses the feel of this threat of desire, though it is an imagined desire. It is aimed not by an adult at a child (the general public’s usual worry) but by a child at an adult, though in specific ways I reveal. And thus it’s actually difficult to do what I believe is ethical for sexual citizens: desire this child. Pursue this child. With all curiosity and with listening ears. Penetrate this child in this crucial way: get behind its face, get beyond the well-worn image of its face, push through the wall of its documented face. Why get past the face? The face, in this instance, blocks our sight, as we’re going to learn. Moreover, it protects us — in ways I wish it wouldn’t — from something tricky but valuable to do. This tricky thing involves our understanding, and our encountering, children’s passion for signification, alongside their own sexual desires. These forms of latency — signification, sexual desire — are always present, always growing now, at this very time (manifest latency)." (p. 506).

"Why did I call [the Child] a creature of delay? Because it could only state itself publicly, whatever it is, as something it was — “I was a gay child” — only after its straight life died, after a teen or adult “came out.” That is, the gay child was precisely ghostly because it could not live in the present tense, even though it often consciously, secretly had a relationship with the word gay — or with the word’s vague associations and connotations, without the word itself. In this respect, the gay child dramatized, intensified the bold dynamics of delay for every child, being held up in such intense ways. [...] Now delay is dwindling." (p. 507).

"Child sexuality, alongside the gay child, is ever more emerging from its shadow states, to the dismay of so many parents. [...] Indeed, a large group of US sex offenders is composed of children: kids texting pictures of their bodies to each other. [...] One can almost hear a collective plea from parents, at least these parents, who are crying out: is there a child some where who is innocent and, yes, maybe sexual, and wants our protections?" (p. 508).

See also

• Clifford J. Rosky. (2013). Fear of the Queer Child, 61 Buffalo Law Review. 607. - Useful article discussing the history of fear around "queer" children, discussing Stockton's work alongside David Halperin's and others, whilst conscious of the history of pederasty.

• Steven Angelides - fellow winner of the Crompton Noll Prize; both authors cite each other's work, and Stockton gave an endorsement printed on the back cover of Angelides' 2019 book The Fear of Child Sexuality : Young People, Sex, and Agency.
• Rachel Hope Cleves - Historian who mentions Stockton's work within wider debates around age-gap sex.