Queer Childhoods

"""A fierce and brilliant book. Mary Zaborskis argues that the U.S. and Canadian states queered minoritarian populations in order to unfit them for full citizenship. Deep in the archives of industrial schools, Native American boarding schools, and schools for the blind, Zaborskis demonstrates that these institutions targeted the sexuality of Black, Native, poor, and disabled students, preparing them for futures that would never come to pass. By attending to the experiences of actual children caught up in this biopolitical project, Queer Childhoods challenges pieties about education, the Child, and a queer future untroubled by these violent legacies of exclusion. ""--Heather K. Love, University of Pennsylvania ""Smart and provocative. Mary Zaborskis grapples with a history emergent in queer theory. How did specific institutions queer children against their will, for almost two centuries? That is, how were children from minoritized backgrounds 'sexually othered'--made 'strange, ' thus queer--so that they could be forced into normalizing scenes that guaranteed their failure to assimilate to norms? Here, the act of 'queering' is not to be embraced. It's a barbed dynamic that aims to manage lives and threaten certain futures. What a rending read--riveting and necessary. ""--Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century"