Queering the child in post-millennial American independent cinema

Bulut, E, 2025. Queering the child in post-millennial American independent cinema. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

This study examines the representation of childhood in American independent cinema, focusing on how films portray its complexities through themes of innocence, sexuality, agency, and criminality. By analysing Little Miss Sunshine (2006), The Florida Project (2017), Mysterious Skin (2004), We the Animals (2018), We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), and Elephant (2003), this research explores how the figure of the child challenges normative ideas about time, identity, and adult-child power dynamics. The study begins by analysing how films with child protagonists, like Little Miss Sunshine and The Florida Project, use innocence to create a gateway into adult crises such as addiction, poverty, and suicide. These children are often depicted as deprived of agency, but their presence, paradoxically, deepens the cinematic world by offering a more ‘colourful’ perspective on adult issues. Through visual techniques such as framing and mise en scène, these films position the child as an observer or ‘looking glass’ often softening difficult subjects and shifting the focus to the adult characters' vulnerabilities. For instance, The Florida Project uses child-centred framing that relegates adult figures to the periphery, reinforcing the idea of childhood as a lens through which to view a fractured world. This innocence, however, is not just a phase to be ‘grown out of’; these films suggest alternative temporalities by engaging with queer time, a non-linear temporal experience where boundaries between childhood and adulthood are blurred. In spaces like Disney World or child beauty pageants, childhood and adulthood merge, creating ‘time capsules’ that challenge traditional expectations of temporal progression. The study then shifts to films that explore the sexualized child, such as Mysterious Skin and We the Animals, where children are shown as sexually active agents with desires and experiences that defy typical portrayals of innocence. In these films, the child’s sexual agency is central to the narrative, complicating the traditional binary between innocent childhood and mature adulthood. Mysterious Skin follows two boys whose traumatic experiences shape their sexual identities, while We the Animals portrays a boy’s coming-of-age story tied to physical and emotional exploration. Drawing on Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of erotohistoriography, the study examines how these films explore time through the embodied experiences of pain, pleasure, and desire, offering a queer temporality where childhood and sexuality intersect in non-normative ways. Finally, the study explores the figure of the criminal child, as seen in We Need to Talk About Kevin and Elephant, where adolescents commit acts of violence. These films depict adolescents who occupy a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, revealing the contradictory nature of adolescence as both a continuation of childhood innocence and a potential site for deviance and violence. By focusing on the impact of death and criminality on the temporality of these films, the study examines how adolescence is represented as a turbulent, destabilized phase, wherein the future is marked by uncertainty and crisis. These films challenge the traditional view of the child as the embodiment of “reproductive futurity,” as discussed by Lee Edelman, and instead frame adolescence as a space for resistance against normative societal structures.

In conclusion, this study highlights how American independent cinema uses the child to interrogate social, temporal, and identity norms. By exploring the intersections of innocence, sexuality, and criminality through a queer temporal lens, these films offer a complex portrayal of childhood as a site of both potential and transgression, challenging normative understandings of childhood as a singular, linear phase of life.

Item Type:	Thesis
Creators:	Bulut, E.
Contributors:	Name Role NTU ID ORCID Çakirlar, C. Thesis supervisor ECM3CAKIRC https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1171-8635 O'Shaughnessy, M. Thesis supervisor MOD3OSHAUMP https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1167-3214 Hardy, F. Thesis supervisor ECM3HARDYF https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0304-0206
Date:	January 2025
Rights:	The copyright in this work is held by the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the author.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	09 Apr 2026 15:11
Last Modified:	09 Apr 2026 15:11
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/55526

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