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Understanding queer children through films

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Gender And Sexuality Education Philosophy with Children Reflections on Pedagogy

RHEA KUTHOORE

November 6, 2022 · 6 min read

In this essay, I will employ Stockton’s understanding of childhood innocence, delay and growing sideways to analyse the queerness of the film Tomboy. The film follows the life of Laure/Mikael (10 years old) through the course of a summer break when they and their family move to a new neighbourhood. In the beginning, Laure/Mikael meets Lisa (a young and friendly girl in the same neighbourhood), who asks for their name using the French pronoun that suggests that she expects to hear a male name. It is then that Laure introduces themselves as Mikael and continues, for the rest of the film, to carry themselves as the rest of the young boys in the neighbourhood do. From playing football impressively to winning at wrestling, Mikael is not ‘caught’ even when they go swimming. It is only at the very end of summer, and after beating another boy for teasing their sister, Jeanne, that Mikael is ‘caught’ and forced by their mother to reveal to everyone that they are in fact Laure. The movie comes to a close, as it opens, with Lisa asking Laure/Mikael, ‘what is your name?’ ‘My name is Laure,’ they respond with a smirk across their face.

The film reflects Mickael/Laure’s childhood innocence through several perspectives. As Stockton identifies, “innocent” children are, as an idea, most likely to be white and middle-class as privilege grants them a sheltered childhood (Stockton 31). Consequently, “innocence” can be projected onto and derived from white and middle class children as their childhoods must not and does not encounter the evils of the world. By portraying the family as white and middle class, — the latter evidenced by their move to a suburban neighbourhood — the film invites its viewers to pay attention to the other ways in which Mikael/Laure is “innocent”. Here, one notices the extended moments of unadulterated play, tickles and laughter between Mikael/Laure and Jeanne in their new home as displaying of a protected childhood. Furthermore, from the very first scene when Mikael/Laure’s head is captured by the trees surrounding the car, to the scene when Mikael/Laure leaves their blue dress to hang on a tree in the forest after being forced to ‘reveal’ themselves, we repeatedly see wilderness as a space for them to be free and to discover themselves. The functioning of the imagery of “wilderness as discovery,” however, is dependent on the discoverer being “innocent” and normative rather than free and untamed to begin with.

Having scrutinised the ways in which the ideas of childhood innocence manifests in the film, I will turn to the ways in which “delay is seen as a friend to the child” (Stockton 62). According to Stockton, “delay is said to be a feature of a child’s growth: children grow by delaying their approach to the realms of sexuality, labour and harm (Stockton 62). Here, Stockton is referring to the societal practice of gatekeeping children’s participation in sexuality, labour and harm with the rationale that it is crucial for their wellbeing and growth to remain outside these realms until adults declare for it to be otherwise. In subtle ways, the film makes explicit the ways in which children are excluded and delayed from entering into adult realms and their awareness of the same. We see how driving is off-limits in the scene when Mikael/Laure is sitting on the driver’s seat of the car but is on their father’s lap. We also hear the awareness regarding delaying harm in Mikael/Laure’s response (“I am not allowed to!”) when offered alcohol by their father. We notice the weight of delay during imaginations of future possibilities. Jeanne imagines herself as a 35 year old (bathtub scene) and as a future hairdresser (when she is cutting Mikael/Laure’s hair). Finally, the film urges us to pay attention to how children are even delayed from knowing/understanding delay through the scene in which Jeanne asks Mikael/Laure to draw a watch (an indication of how she is yet to enter a specific adult temporarily that is dependent on the clock as she cannot read time) on her hand so that she can keep time while they go to play.

A crucial scene in understanding how delay impacts children’s lives is the one in which Mikael/Laure’s mother says, “I do not mind you playing the boy, but this cannot go on.’ At a surface level, this statement can be viewed as a reflection of the mother’s attitude towards a person who may feel or express themselves differently than the gender they were given at birth. However, by focussing on the word choice ‘play,’ we can speculate whether the mother’s fear was linked to this — not merely playing boy for a short period of time but being a more enduring boy — and hence, related to Mikael/Laure emerging as more fixed or permanent or “grown up.” Such a speculation is supported by the fact that tomboyism is punished when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence (Chinn 152). Given how Mikael/Laure is 10 years old and probably at the cusp of adolescence, can it be inferred that the mother, instead of trying to straighten their desire to express gender differently, was straightening their desire to emerge as an adult?

Having grappled with the ways in which Mikael/Laure is in a state of delay, we became acquainted with sideways growth. For Stockton, “sideways growth” refers to something that locates energy, pleasure, vitality and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive (Stockton 13). Mikael/Laure’s clay penis is symbolic of one such non-reproductive extension. Mikael/Laure creates a clay penis to insert into their costume while going swimming with their friends. On returning home, they place their clay penis in the same box as their collection of fallen milk teeth. By locating the clay penis in the same box as broken milk teeth, which are a marker of growth, we are drawn to attend to Mikael/Laure’s growing. Just as milk teeth fall and get replaced, the (clay) penis is queered as that which is replaceable (as it can be attached and detached), rather than reproductive (as it does not give birth), and one that allows Mikael/Laure to extend and fall.

Stockton also highlights how “the act of imagining oneself as something else” is a sideways accretion (Stockton 15). Through the films’ open-ending, we are disallowed from knowing what else Mikael/Laure was imagining themselves as. This intentional move prompts us to think beyond questions such as — is Mikael/Laure non-binary or are they trans or are they a tomboy? — to expand our imagination to new possibilities of growing. Moreover, the ambiguous ending of the film (when Laure smirks) can be perceived as a resistance against the teleological end presupposed in the idea of “growing up” and a metaphor for the undefinable space of “growing sideways”.

Citations

(1). The Queer child, or Growing Sideways by Kathryn Bond Stockton

(2). "I was a Lesbian Child": Queer Thoughts about Childhood Studies

RHEA KUTHOORE is an educator who is passionate about facilitating philosophical and feminist thinking amongst young people.

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