Date of Thesis

Spring 2026

Description

This thesis examines how Victorian and early twentieth-century British literature imagines queer childhood as a spatial condition that generates alternative temporalities, rather than as a stable identity. Focusing on The Well of Loneliness (1928), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), and Peter Pan (1904) and Peter and Wendy (1911), this project argues that queer childhood emerges within literary environments that actively produce misalignment with normative developmental logics of innocence, growth, and reproductive futurity. Drawing on the work of Lee Edelman, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Elizabeth Freeman, and Guy Debord, this study contends that childhood is not simply a preparatory stage oriented toward heterosexual adulthood, but a contested site where space shapes how bodies move, orient, and experience time.

Chapter One argues that Morton, the estate in The Well of Loneliness, functions as a contradictory queer geography that both shelters and disciplines Stephen Gordon’s development, revealing how queerness emerges through spatial experiences of comfort, exclusion, and failed inheritance. Chapter Two turns to Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world, showing how Carroll’s unstable landscapes produce queer childhood through disorientation, deferred arrival, and the disruption of linear time. Chapter Three examines Neverland as a spatial system of suspended futurity, where cyclical repetition replaces progression and childhood is held in an ongoing present severed from its expected movement toward adulthood, marriage, and reproduction. ⅷ Across these texts, space does not merely contain queer childhood but generates the temporal conditions—disorientation, delay, and suspension—through which it becomes legible. Ultimately, this thesis reframes queer childhood as a lived spatial and temporal condition produced through environment. In doing so, it demonstrates how literary worlds reorganize relations between bodies, space, and time, challenging dominant narratives of development and futurity.

Keywords

Queer Theory, Literary Theory, Childhood, Phenomenology, Space, Time

Access Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Major

English

First Advisor

Ted Hamilton

Second Advisor

Emily Loney

Third Advisor

Jean Peterson

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