The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood makes a necessary and nuanced intervention in contemporary theorizations of the child, balancing the sociopolitical with the material while interrogating the array of affects and artifacts always in dialogue with the child. Working from a vibrant interdisciplinary stance — including biopolitics, psychoanalysis, racial capitalism, queer theory, Dyer weaves a fresh framework to read the child and, as centrally, to query child development and its attendant affects. Engaging a generative lens of arts and aesthetics — films, contemporary artists and other cultural workers— that provoke audiences to recognize the layered arrangements of power that both surround and mark the child, Dyer’s lyrically crafted book is essential reading for the emergent field of critical child studies and for all of us who struggle to build freer and more joyous futures for all.
~Erica R. Meiners, author of For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State
Exciting, tender, persuasive, and smart. Dyers’ book is a clarion call to care for the bodies we call children. Let their creativity, strange in all its beauties, tell us how they’re harmed—hurt by norms that foster inequalities. I believe more than ever, thanks to Hannah Dyer, that “children” and “aesthetics” are the most profound pairing for safeguarding pleasure, for all living creatures, amid world trauma.
~Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century
"The range of Dyer’s objects of study is as impressive as her command of contemporary critical theory, and her project promises to significantly enrich the field of child studies and beyond. Highly recommended."
~Choice
