Since Matteus already already hit many high points of the book, I am going to try to focus on the intersections between the three pieces we read–including the review essay, which it looks like no one else is covering.

First, I did a lot of work on lesbian writers in the nineteenth century, particularly the poet and novelist, Amy Levy, for my undergraduate thesis, so I am familiar with the contexts of homosexuality and homosociality within which Eric Tribunella attempts to position Left to Themselves, but am not at all familiar with queer literature for children. Tribunella’s essay was therefore fascinating to me! The review essay “Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children” was also great, because it gave me some ideas for sources I might want to put on my annotated bib. Even though my annotated bib isn’t really about queerness right now, both No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive and Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children sound incredibly helpful for my project, and possibly even illustrative of a subtext or another implication to the project I hadn’t fully acknowledged. I describe my project (on days when I am feeling coherent) as aiming to revise Deborah Nord’s idea of the woman writer as flâneuse, whose writing constituted a “struggle to escape the status of spectacle and become a spectator” (Nord 12). I see Nord’s approach, which is based on close readings of individual autonomously-authored mostly canonical novels, as bound to a logic that sees women’s agency as dependent on their ability to commandeer male privilege—both the privilege that came from writing in the novel form and the privilege that came from existing outside of the urban environment as a masculine spectator. My project would ask what happens when we examine periodicals as a site for working out alternative models of female, urban identity. The archive I want to use for this project is that of girls’ periodicals—particularly more radical, and therefore perhaps shorter-running, girls’ periodicals.

Because of this, I appreciated the focus of both Tribunella’s analysis and that of some of the books reviewed in Michael Cobb’s essay on the adolescent boy as a culturally overdetermined site of meaning. Though it may seem a small part of his overall argument, Tribunella’s assertion that “as part boy and part man, Philip is able to claim or embody simultaneously the familiar boyhood privilege of same-sex romantic friendship and the emergent figure of the adult homosexual” (385) illuminates the secret of this novel’s ability to walk the fine line between homosexuality and homosociality. Because Philip embodies both types simultaneously, he acts similarly to the kind of optical illusion that, when looked at in one way, looks like a decorative table, and when looked at in another way, looks like a face in profile. The fact that the novel can be perceived as a gay novel by the boys for whom it was intended and as a novel about traditional homosociality by the men buying it for their male children—depends on the adolescent, and therefore, liminal status of its protagonist. This is interesting to me because the reason I turned to girls’ periodicals at all was because the figure of the girl was under a lot of political and ideological pressure in the nineteenth century (and today). I thought if one could see models of femininity being developed overtly and self-consciously, it might be in periodicals for girls, where this pressure often came directly to the surface in the form of didactic stories and articles.

Cobb’s review essay, “Childlike: Queer Theory and Its Children,” also discusses several books which chronicle the ways in which adults still use the rhetorical figure of “the child” for political and ideological purposes. While in No Future, childhood is characterized as a political tool, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s essay in Curiouser documents how we can conceive of alternative models of “the child,” including those of “sideways growth” (127). I am interested in the idea of “sideways growth” brought forward in Stockton’s essay, and the idea of having “no future” as a group as, in some sense liberatory, because many of the examples of girls’ periodicals I have given (and many of the examples I know of) are very much focused on girls’ futures (whom they will marry, how or whether they will be educated, etc.). I would be interested to see whether or not stories of sideways growth could provide me with a model for looking at female urban identity as it manifested in periodicals, and if so, whether homosexuality or romantic friendship might have played a key role in the formation of such identity. Though the kind of homosociality Tribunella discusses was also a cardinal aspect of girls’ lives (as Sharon Marcus points out in her great book, Between Women) when such bonds were of primary significance to the women involved and maintained throughout life in romantic friendships or informal marriages, women were considered to have done something out of the ordinary (though certainly not as stigmatized as male homosexuality until the end of the century). Therefore, it seems like queer stories or stories with queer subtexts, because they were often understood as stories about the continuation of something (the bonds of romantic friendship or homosexual love) might provide one (or more) models of femininity that could serve as alternatives to that of the flanêuse. Such a model of identity would also be particularly suited to a medium like the periodical in which regardless of the ends of individual stories, growth is always to some extent sideways, additive, always contingent upon the next installment, but also on the ways in which the installment fits in a predictable, but still novel way within each issue, each whole (a cognate in formal terms to the way a marriage or long-term friendship might be narrated, as opposed to a story that ends with “happily ever after”).

Finally, this brings me to Barbie’s Queer Accessories, the book on which I was supposed to have blogged. Carrie first suggested that I read this book about a year ago, when I was working on an essay about the unorthodox way in which Rosamond Vincy (a character from George Eliot’s Middlemarch) interacts with the Keepsake, a beautiful book designed to win women’s hands in marriage, but that, in her hands, was transformed into a tool for manipulating the men in question. Therefore, what I expected was lots of stories where girls did interesting things with Barbie. This is, of course, what I got, and I thoroughly enjoyed it! I love seeing scholars talk about actual children (period!), and I also love seeing scholars discuss instances when actual children resist the scripts they are given. I guess I would have liked to see a bit more methodological rigor, though. I can’t help thinking as I write this post of Racial Innocence, and how much Bernstein’s concept of scriptive things would have given structure to Rand’s argument and a vocabulary with which to discuss the kinds of resistance she was discussing, though I appreciate the difficulties of what she is trying to do. In the words of her own disclaimer of sorts, deciding what constitutes resistance, and for what purposes one would want to classify it as such, is a major challenge (93). One thing I really appreciated about Barbie’s Queer Accessories was the method by which Rand classified her stories, using motifs she saw often enough to believe them themes of the way girls interact with Barbie (102). Just as Mattel’s proliferation of a line of Barbie items creates certain expectations and patterns of play in children (124), Rand’s classification system creates a sort of world of Barbie here, showing us the kind of stories people tell about Barbie. This method works because she herself is the first to say that we should not take her classification system in this way, highlighting in particular, the relative absence of femme stories from her archive (110). There is a certain humility about the way in which classifies the stories using her own entirely fabricated categories. It functions again, almost as a disclaimer, allowing her to acknowledge that from the very beginning, her categories of analysis were entirely dependent on the stories she found, and on her own perspective, through which they were all filtered (allowing her also to highlight aspects of her own identity that were not mirrored in the stories she found). Her self-created categories also put emphasis, as she says on the narratives people told, which again, leads her to make justifiable claims. As opposed to saying that children’s resistance actually means anything, she lends her powers to documenting the different ways that adult women understand their relation to Barbie. My big, big question after reading this chapter, though, is what was her methodology? I could probably read the first chapter or introduction to discover this, but right now, I am just going to think in hypotheticals and use the evidence I have to extrapolate if possible. Rand says at one point, that she observed children playing with Barbies in addition to asking adult women about their memories of Barbies. Certain evidence suggests that her sample was constructed at least partially from people she knows, which suggests it might hold an uncharacteristically high percentage of lesbians and politically left-leaning people, which might lead me to question certain of her assertions—particularly, the idea that most, if not all, Barbie narratives are merely “straight acting” (139). Given the sample she provides in this chapter, I certainly agree with her; I just wonder if her sample was large enough or random enough to say this with any accuracy. Looking forward to discussing the texts at greater length in class!