Innocence, Heterosexuality, and the Queerness of Children's Literature

In this original new study, Tison Pugh examines various classics of children's literature, both old and new'”including L. Frank Baum's Oz books, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, Daniel Handler / Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events , Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl novels, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series, and David Levithan's novel Boy Meets Boy '”to explore the queer tensions between innocence and heterosexuality within their pages. Pugh argues that 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 conflict thereby emerges within the genre, in which innocence and heterosexuality clash and conjointly subvert its foundations. Pugh shows how 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. Innocence, Heterosexuality and the Queerness of Children's Literature reveals that this tension between innocence and sexuality renders much of children's literature queer, especially when these texts pointedly disavow sexuality through celebrations of innocence.