Contemporary Children's Literature and Film by Kerry Mallan

Author:Kerry Mallan [Mallan, Kerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230231504
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2011-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Not playing the game

The child subjects (of whatever orientation) of children’s literature, whose fluid and transitional lived bodies and identities fall all too easily into this domain of ‘uninhabitability’, have emerged as an unsurprisingly rich site on which to focus and sharpen these debates. Nowhere are the debates more contentiously conducted, however, than over the bodies of young children; and it is the literature featuring especially young child protagonists that I have decided to focus upon here. Luna (2004) is narrated from the viewpoint of Liam’s younger sister, Regan, in a series of shifting time frames that move between present-day realities and their earliest childhoods told as (italicized) flashbacks. They reveal the transformation of Liam’s daytime identity as ‘Liam’ into his nighttime identity as ‘Luna’, ‘A girl who can only be seen by moonlight’ (Peters, 2004: p. 2). Funny Boy (1995) is set in 1970s Sri Lanka and is also narrated in the first person, and retrospectively by the now adult protagonist, Arjie, who recounts the ‘remembered innocence of childhood’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 5) and tells the story of his ‘transfiguration’ into ‘another, more brilliant, more beautiful self’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 4) through his playing with his girl cousins their childhood game of ‘bride-bride’: ‘the culmination of this game, and my ultimate moment of joy was when I put on the clothes of the bride’ (Selvadurai, 1995: p. 4). The French film Ma vie en rose focuses on seven-year-old Ludovic whose first appearance is as a reflection in a mirror through subjective camera focusing on the range of fetishized objects with which Ludovic is adorning himself with elegant hands: bejewelled earrings; necklace; lipstick-painted full, red lips. The action then cuts to a pair of slim feet wearing (his mother’s) too big red shoes, tripping downstairs to present himself (late) to the assembled guests at his parents’ garden party. Ludovic emerges in the form of an idealized Greek goddess, clad in a pink silky dress (his sister’s princess dress), and is viewed by the party guests (and by us, the viewers implicated in the male gaze2) as a freak, a comic turn, ‘The joker of the family’, his father announces.

These narratives break rank with the heterosexual imaginary that works to produce, uphold, and perpetuate an ideology of the child as gendered and normatively heterosexual but necessarily asexual; it is one of the most taboo, least discussed, most regulated, and least researched areas of child development (see Sedgwick, 1998; Kincaid, 2004). It is arguable that each of these child protagonists hovers on the cusp of an ambiguity over the question of child sexuality in the transgender identities portrayed. In every case, the process of the children’s redressing is unambiguously and subjectively sensual as they make their transition to their ‘other’ self that is unequivocally experienced as a source of bodily pleasure. Thus, Luna ‘shimmied in front of the mirror. The layered fringe on the dress she was wearing swayed in waves. ... Examining the length of herself, she hooked her long hair over her ears and wiggled her hips again’ (Peters, 2004: p.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.