Writing Sideways

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Tristan Taormino return to childhood

by M. Buna

In the introduction to her 2009 book The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Kathryn Bond Stockton makes a startling but seemingly tongue-in-cheek remark based on the standard linguistic definition of the term “queer” that includes explanations such as strange, eccentric, odd, deviating, and ultimately pejorative slang. Based on these strict categories, she asserts: “If you scratch a child, you will find a queer, in the sense of someone ‘gay’ or just plain strange.” Now, depending on the reader’s sensibilities, this remark may end up opening different interpretations, not all of them likely to work with the author’s intention of pushing forward a rather challenging idea: that a child is inherently queer regardless of what opinions you might have on this. Two recently published memoirs, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Touching the Art (Soft Skull Press, 2023) and Tristan Taormino’s A Part of the Heart Can't Be Eaten: A Memoir (Duke University Press, 2023) are also toying with this idea of the child as a queer being who might (or not) find a home in their biological family.