In a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Stockton provides an example of this sideways growth, one that revolves around “canine connections, making animal/child bondings, especially for girls attracted to girls, an outlet for feelings they long to express.”  Stockton gloms onto the scant references to the dog that belongs to Mrs. Dalloway’s daughter in an attempt to paint “the dog as delay—the dog as pause—marking Elizabeth’s space for suspension and lateral movement on the threshold of adulthood…an ally in schemes of resistance.” Stockton holds that in certain literary works, the girl/dog relationship is a way for the child to hold on to her childhood and thus delay growing up, but the concept itself seems tangential and questionable.

Sometimes a dog is just a dog. While reading this I couldn’t help but think that the trope of the tomboy would provide a much stronger subject in regards to the lesbian child pushing against growing up. The late Southern writer Carson McCuller’s body of work is populated with such girls. In McCuller’s short story “Like That” the narrator refuses to grow up. She proclaims she wouldn’t wear stockings or lipstick if you paid her a hundred dollars, doesn’t want to be hurt by a man like her sister has, and when her schoolmates start to talk about getting married, she gets up to play basketball. The narrator of McCuller’s story blatantly refuses to grow into the heterosexual strictures and rigid gender roles society has prescribed for her and by comparison the girl-dog relationship seems overly subtle.

Much stronger than Stockton’s theories on girls and animals is her discussion of how ethnicity can queer a child. Stockton offers a novel reading of the films Six Degrees of Separation, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and its racially reversed 2005 remake Guess Who. In each of these films a child is seeking a way into a family of a differing ethnicity than his own. Stockton conjectures that the child in these situations is a child birthed backwards. Because of its strangeness the child doesn’t start out as a child, but as a ‘queer.’ Stockton writes, “the black male protagonist seeks the approval of a white father—seeks to be his son—through different sets of knotted and strange deliberations…in each film, the child-intruder (a child queered by color) yearns to be Oedipalized to a white man…”  

An interesting facet of Stockton’s reading of these films is how the “child-intruder” forces the seemingly liberal parents to actually become the liberals they fancy themselves to be. It’s easy to espouse liberal beliefs, to chat about support for interracial marriage and accept the notion of homosexuality until it arrives in your living room, posing a palpable challenge to previously stated philosophies. As Stockton explains, “The parents…are truly becoming who they have not been, since, until now, no one has helped them be their words. Theirs is thus an analogue, in temporal terms, to Lacanian (mis)recognition in the mirror: what sits between them and themselves is time, rendered by a queer child who gets inside their image.”

Overall The Queer Child doesn't offer much new insight into depictions of queer children. Too often Stockton focuses on the minutia of inopportune literary sources in the crafting of her theories instead of turning her attentions to more rich and solid sources. Stockton’s book leads off a strong overview of the subject but misfires repeatedly when it attempts to formulate fresh theories.

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