Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood's Queerness

In Minor Troubles, Erin J. Rand investigates a series of controversies about youth sexuality and queerness from the early twenty-first century: adult concerns about teen sexting, the bullying and suicides of queer kids, trans youths’ access to gender-segregated bathrooms at school, and sex education. In the public deliberation and mediation of each of these controversies, the imagined qualities of childhood—innocence, vulnerability, nonsexuality, and, crucially, whiteness—are deployed by a...