ABSTRACT
Children cannot retain their innocence of sexuality while learning about normative heterosexuality, yet this inherent paradox runs throughout many classic narratives of children’s literature. A recalcitrant ideological confl ict thereby emerges within the genre, in which innocence and heterosexuality clash and conjointly subvert its foundations. Much of children’s literature implicitly or explicitly endorses heterosexuality through its invisible presence as the de facto sexual identity of countless protagonists and their families, yet heterosexuality’s ubiquity is counterbalanced by its occlusion when authors shield their young readers from forthright considerations of one of humanity’s most basic and primal instincts. This tension between innocence and sexuality renders much of children’s literature queer, especially when these texts pointedly disavow sexuality through celebrations of innocence. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley posit the assumptions behind children’s sexuality: “There is currently a dominant narrative about children: children are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions. At the same time, however, children are also offi cially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual.”1 This presumed innocence of sexuality in children’s fi ction often entails the rejection of aging and the perpetual celebration of childhood, such that heterosexuality appears as a spectral presence within its pages, yet no less powerful and coercive due to its invisibility. Although lionized in much of Western culture as defi antly normative, heterosexuality, in particular rhetorical circumstances, faces pejorative discourses that color it as abnormal, deviant, and queer.
