Queer Theory and Narrating Age Outside the Norm of (Re-)Productive Adulthood

Our contribution proposes queer theory as a productive lens for analyzing narrations about age and aging. We explore literary portrayals of childhood/adolescence, and of ‘old’ age—age categories that are both juxtaposed to the norm of the ‘productive adult,’ but that have rarely been considered together and hardly ever in the context of non-heteronormative desire. Literary works with queer characters hold specific potential to question, challenge, and reconfigure normative imaginaries of the life course as well as of ‘age-appropriate’ behaviors. In combining the research of children’s and young-adult literature with literary age studies and queer theory, we also consider how academic discourses have dealt with the category of age and how their underexplored intersection can provide new forms of imagining the life course. This chapter opens by highlighting important contributions of queer theory concerned with the life course and temporalities. We then examine productive connections of queer studies with core aspects of children’s and young-adult literary research and literary age studies. In the last part, we provide exemplary close readings of literature concerned with queer children/adolescents and queer older adults to illustrate how such portrayals can challenge normative ideas/ideals of age roles and the life course.