Queer Childhoods

Explores how the institutional management of children’s sexualities in boarding schools affected children’s future social, political, and economic opportunities

Tracing the US’s investment in disciplining minoritarian sexualities since the late nineteenth century, Mary Zaborskis focuses on a ubiquitous but understudied figure: the queer child. Queer Childhoods examines the lived and literary experiences of children who attended reform schools, schools for the blind, African American industrial schools, and Native American boarding schools. In mapping the institutional terrain of queer childhoods in educational settings of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century, the book offers an original archive of children’s sexual and embodied experiences.

Zaborskis argues that these boarding schools—designed to segregate racialized, criminalized, and disabled children from mainstream culture—produced new forms of childhood. These childhoods have secured American futures in which institutionalized children (and the adults they become) have not been considered full-fledged citizens or participants. By locating this queerness in state archives and institutions, Queer Childhoods exposes a queer social history entangled with genocide, eugenics, and racialized violence.

Mary Zaborskis is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Gender Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, HarrisburgMary Zaborskis is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Gender Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

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.

Heather K. Love, University of Pennsylvania:

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.