Misfit Children

An Inquiry into Childhood Belongings

Contributions by Jessica Balanzategui, De-Valera N. Y. M Botchway, Daniel Butler, Danette DiMarco, Julian Gill-Peterson, Ann Gonzalez, Stephen Hartman, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Mark Heimermann, Naja Later, Craig Martin, Sean Moreland, Derek Newman-Stille, Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo, Christopher Parkes, Andrew Pump, Awo Abena Amoa Sarpong, Maria Schwenk Edited by Markus Bohlmann

Not available to order

Publication date:

14 December 2016

Length of book:

290 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498525800

Misfits are often confused with outcasts. Yet misfits rather find themselves in-between that which fits and that which does not. This volume is interested in this slipperiness of misfits and explores the blockages and the promises of such movements, as well as the processes and conditions that produce misfits, the means that enable them to undo their denomination as misfits, and the practices that turn those who fit into misfits, and vice versa. This collection of essays on misfit children produces transmissible motions across and engages in scholarly conversations that unfold betwixt and between in order to make rigid concepts twist and twirl, and ultimately fail to fit.

Introduction - Markus P. J. Bohlmann
Chapter 1 - Maria C. Schwenk, “Lost in Limbo: Children in Puritan New England”
Chapter 2 - Sean Moreland, “Misfit Morella: The Sources and Influences of Poe’s Possessed-Child Narrative”
Chapter 3 - Craig Martin and Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, “Fostering Evil: Adoption Stigma and the Monster Child in Film”
Chapter 4 - Daniel G. Butler and Stephen Hartman, “‘This is How You Look’: Mimicry as Defense of the Actual (or Hidden) Child in Sandor Ferenczi’s Psychoanalysis”
Chapter 5 - Jessica Balanzategui and Naja Later, “‘Dark and Wicked Things’: The Slender Man, Tween Girlhood, and Deadly Liminalities”
Chapter 6 - Mark Heimermann, “Grotesque Adolescence in Charles Burns’ Black Hole”
Chapter 7 - Danette DiMarco, “Phototextuality and Racial Time in Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”
Chapter 8 - Christopher Parkes, “The Child Prodigy Ages Out: White Male Privilege as Trauma in John Green’s An Abundance of Katherines and The Fault in Our Stars”
Chapter 9 - Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo, “Disidentifying with Futurity: The Unbecoming Child and its Discontents”
Chapter 10 - Ann González, “The Postcolonial Double-Bind in Latin America: Cesar Vallejo’s ‘Paco Yunque’”
Chapter 11 - Awo Sarpong and De-Valeria Botchway, “Freaks in Procession? The Fancy Dress Masquerade as Haven for Negotiating Eccentricity during Childhood. A Study of Child Masqueraders in Cape Coast, Ghana”
Chapter 12 - Andrew Pump, “Queer Kids: Innocence, Beauty, and Stupidity in an Ideological State Apparatus”
Chapter 13 - Julian Gill-Peterson, “Growing Up Trans in the 1960s and 2010s”
Chapter 14 - Derek Newman-Stille, “Our Bodily Diverse Children Are Our Future: Disability, Apocalypse, and Camille Alexa’s All Them Pretty Babies”

Misfit Children is a fantastic new addition to the scholarship on childhood and various forms of non-conformity. There are none of the usual homilies about innocent children here, only an ever expanding archive of narratives, theories, and representations of the wonderful weirdness of the child and child worlds.