Queer Margins and American Youth

Session Abstract

Historically, young people have queered spaces designed to manage, nurture, and protect them and occupied sites designated as perilous to children's moralities, safety, and development. This panel explores how, across the twentieth century, children and adolescents in the U.S. made queer purpose of the locations in which they found themselves, through diverse gender and sexual expressions, affinities, longings, and actions. While this occurred within both the most normative sites and other spaces of American childhood, young people found queer possibilities on the margins, both in terms of their locales and of what experts, parents, and other adults considered proper for childhood and youth. We would like this panel to be co-sponsored by the Committee on LGBT History and the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. We would like to have A/V (slideshow) capacities.