Often hailed as the first of its kind — a book-length treatment of queerness in children’s and YA literature (that will both put the song in your head and blow your mind about the things you never realized were queer… but are… all for the [not] low cost of $45.99!) — Kidd and Abate’s Over the Rainbow offers an interdisciplinary framework for queerness in kid and YA lit. However, the book still retains a damaging structure that operates on a distinctly non-queer platform, and I will spend much of the post discussing why/how that is.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading Over the Rainbow in a quite piecemeal fashion: I first took it out a few summers ago for the sheer pleasure of Tosenberger’s chapter on Harry Potter slash fanfic, and was immediately seduced by the piece on Nancy Drew and, of course, Tribunella’s piece on A Separate Piece (because when has the intersection of queerness and trauma not seduced me?).

That experience, for me, is part of the excellence of this book overall: it’s like a candy shop wrapped up in book binding, there for when you need an article on anything (unless you want a sustained treatment on race, for example, which seems to be a common theme across the cannon).

That expansiveness is, however, also a bit of weakness for me: divided almost awkwardly into “Queering the Cannon” (Part the First), “After Stonewall” (Part the Second), and “Queer Readers and Writers” (Part the Third). Though I won’t go into my gripes about using Stonewall as a violently inaccurate buzzword for “when [white cis] gay history began”, I want to call attention to both the strengths and potential weaknesses of organizing the book into these particular sections.

I absolutely love the idea of the first section: taking purportedly cishet, cannon texts like Harriet the Spy, Little Women, and The Wizard of Oz — which often have large, explicitly queer followings — and excavating them for their queerness is a brilliant way to start this groundbreaking collection. It lets the authors of these chapters proclaim, ‘we do not need to examine books where two women (for example) are making out in order to find queerness.’ This is a phenomenal move, and one that I am perpetually pleased to see right up front in Over the Rainbow.

However, I am constantly perplexed and troubled by the third and last section, as I am constantly perplexed and troubled by the last section of many anthologies (and syllabi, for that matter). These last sections — like this one, which covers not only fan fiction but computer games, and trans issues — are often reserved for more ‘risque’ items, more unconventional material, things that the authors/editors may in fact value quite highly but someone along the way — the anthology editors, the publisher’s editors, etc. — decides that in order to establish credibility for the text, these works must ‘go last’, ‘go speculative.’ A tendency both in academic anthologies and in many, many, many (once more for emphasis) MANY course syllabi — which, for example, include race and/or queer stuff and/or dis/ability stuff last, as almost an afterthought — Over the Rainbow succumbs to this temptation to lump a bunch of ‘suspect’ material in under the vague section heading of “Queer Readers and Writers” (have they not been discussing us the entire time?).

I am most disturbed by this, not only because of the implication that studying fan fiction and computer games is less ‘legitimate’ than studying straight-up (or not!) Harriet the Spy, but because two of the articles here foreground issues of transness. Is transness, then, also ‘suspect’ and somehow less legitimate, like fan fiction and computer games? I’m very nervous about this, though I am not finger pointing because I do not know at what point in the process these essays were relegated to the “last section” which seems, as I said, to be perpetually reserved for things the anthology largely doesn’t want to deal with upfront, like… race! Again, where is that here? It’s not ‘even’ foregrounded in the “last section” section, which is upsetting, to say the least.

Back to the trans stuff for one second: one of these two articles foregrounding trans issues, Battis’s on “Trans Magic” uses transgender-ness, it seems, as more of a metaphor for unlocking gender binaries than on people’s lived experiences of being trans. Much like the over-use of the term ‘queer’ to mean anything that transgresses… anything…. this usage threatens not only to dilute the power of the term, but to metaphorize experiences that are, in actuality, quite immediately real and in need of their own non-metaphorized analyses.

So, my overall take on Over the Rainbow: I’ve been having a love affair with this book and individual articles in it for years, but taking it as a whole? Where is race? Why is transness relegated “to the back” with other “suspect” materials like fan fic and computer games? Shouldn’t a book on queerness be a little bit more… well… queer in its structure??