queering kidlit

Tonight I watched a Frontline special about Facebook and today’s teens’ quest to accumulate as many “likes” as possible. It’s a big business, of course, because corporations are closely monitoring internet trends and they’re eager to exploit those who have thousands if not millions of followers. I’m not a Luddite and I spend a fair amount of time on Facebook, but watching this report made me ill. The content that goes viral has little if any value to me and I certainly don’t blog about provocative issues in order to gain subscribers. I use blogging as a way of organizing and sharing my thoughts, and I use Facebook as a way of staying connected to the world even when I’m indulging in an introvert episode of silence and/or seclusion. Last week a friend, author Olumide Popoola, posted this quote by the late José Muñoz and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I had the chance to take a course with José while I was in grad school at NYU but didn’t. I missed a few important opportunities in those days and still regret that I gave up a chance to “study with the best.” I never took a course on queer theory but I think it’s time I took a closer look.

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”
– José Ésteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

Lately on Facebook I’ve seen a lot of shared posts from WeNeedDiverseBooks in which popular books about white kids are placed alongside similarly-themed books that feature kids of color: “If You Liked X, Read Y Next.” One person posted so many of these that I nearly unfollowed her. The more I saw these “comps,” the angrier I got. It’s a clever idea, but one that seems designed to attract white readers. That’s always troubling to me but I was more concerned by the way in which “comps” end up reaffirming the status quo. I think again of that article on relatability—do you really need to be lured across the color line by the promise of sameness? Amazon uses this sales strategy quite effectively on its site and I am often interested in seeing which other books people buy when they purchase one of mine. But what happens when you write a book that doesn’t have a white comp? If you can’t say, “It’s just like Divergent!” does that mean no one will find value in your particular narrative? My publisher listed A Wrinkle in Time on the back cover of A Wish After Midnight, which is a ridiculous comparison. I insisted they add Octavia Butler’s Kindred, but of course, many (if not most) white readers don’t even know about Octavia…

A friend of mine is a scholar who focuses on transgressive sexuality and we’ve often talked about the impact of the marriage rights campaign. Like many others, it bothers her that so much time, energy, and resources are going into this single issue when the LGBTQ  community (and queer youth in particular) have other pressing needs to address. Like me, she’s single, child-free, and uninterested in marriage. She wishes that the LGBTQ community had pushed for something far greater than marriage, which in some ways reduces the message of equality to, “See? We (homosexuals) are just like you (heterosexuals). We just want what you want.” Marriage across the developing world is on the decline, so why invest so much in a ship that’s sinking? Of course, I support marriage equality and want that right to exist for anyone who wishes to claim it. But I don’t want a nuclear family. And I won’t have access to the benefits that are reserved only for married people. Queerness, it seems to me, is about what else is possible when we stop clinging to the status quo.

So what would that look like in the children’s literature community? It might mean taking a course with Maya Gonzalez’ School of the Free Mind instead of being the only person of color in an MFA program. It might mean self-publishing uncomfortable or unusual books instead of pruning our stories until they conform to “mainstream” standards. My black feminist advisor in grad school used to insist: “There’s always a third way.” That’s what’s on my mind tonight…