Kathleen Kellett

storytelling and scholarship for young adults and children

TRANSCRIPT: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters and I Saw the TV Glow: The Queer Child Shapeshifter, Part 2

INTRODUCTION

            Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this is – finally – part two of the queer child shapeshifter. Part 1 was all about Nimona by N.D. Stevenson – I love that character so much that I couldn’t resist doing an entire video on her – and now I am going to talk about My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris and I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. You don’t need to watch the Nimona video before watching this one, but I certainly recommend checking it out when you’re done here.

            This video is also part of my Monsters of Childhood Innocence series. Since I’ve gotten an influx of new subscribers since the last video in that series – which, hello! Thank you for joining us! – I figured I’d do a very quick recap of some of the main concepts we’re dealing with here. So I am looking, as always, at “childhood innocence” as a socially constructed idea. Childhood itself is socially constructed. That is to say, while obviously humans start as babies and then progress in stages through childhood towards adulthood, the way those stages are interpreted and therefore treated by society varies greatly from culture to culture. When does childhood begin and end? What knowledge should children have, and how do they acquire it? Are children inherently good or bad? All of these questions have had varying answers across time and space. Of course, the answers to these questions have profound material impacts on kids’ lives: they determine who interacts with kids, how kids are educated, and where kids physically spend their time. So “socially constructed” definitely doesn’t mean “not real”: all of this stuff organizes our lived experiences. But social constructions are not universal, and they are not immutable. They derive from human culture, and human culture is always in flux.

            For more specific history on the social construction of childhood innocence, you can check out my first video in the series, but suffice it to say that in the contemporary Western world – and in many cases a lot of the rest of the world, as well, as part of Western globalization – we have landed on a collective understanding of childhood as a time of innocence. Innocence can mean absence of guilt, it can mean ignorance or lack of experience, and it can mean the presence of moral purity. Childhood today generally winds up as a site where all of these are combined and conflated. (Some sources for further reading on this subject are in the works cited in the description.) Childhood is also a major site of cultural anxiety, because innocence is imagined as quite fragile. Lots of cultural categories and identities have been perceived as threats to this innocence. Even mere knowledge of certain topics can destroy innocence, because remember, one of the associated meanings of innocence is ignorance. And since all of those meanings of innocence get mixed up together, we wind up with a situation where if you know too much or know about the wrong things, you’re also no longer morally pure – or even free from moral guilt. One of these categories that is perceived as a threat to childhood innocence is queerness.

            So where does that leave you if you are, in fact, a queer child? Historically, nowhere great. “Queer child” is often seen as a contradiction in terms: if childhood means innocence, and knowledge of queerness destroys innocence, then you literally can’t embody both at the same time. At least so say the social constructions. In reality, there are plenty of people who are both queer and children, and these constructions leave them in a very precarious position.

            But what about the monsters of it all? Well, monstrosity is a metaphor that has been used in many ways across cultures to represent our cultural anxieties, those things that we perceive as threats. So unsurprisingly, queerness and monstrosity have a long history together. But that doesn’t have to be all bad. Figures such as the shapeshifter may have originally been associated with queerness due to negative stereotypes about deception, animalistic subhumanity, or just failure to embody social norms, but for probably about as long as monsters have been used against the queer community, we have also found ways to reclaim them. So today we’re going to explore two narratives by queer creators that use shapeshifting – defined broadly – as a way of portraying the embodied experiences of that thing that is not supposed to exist: queer childhood.

M.O.B. VS. WOLFGIRL: MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS

            My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a two-volume graphic novel by Emil Ferris. It follows 10-year-old Karen Reyes as she tries to solve the murder of her neighbor, Anka, in 1960s Chicago. As you can see from the depiction of Karen, and from the title of the books, we are absolutely immersed in monstrosity from page one. The conceit of the graphic novels is that we are reading Karen’s notebook: the whole account is her own graphic diary. This makes her a very artistically talented 10-year-old. Karen is obsessed with monsters: she loves creature features and horror magazines. She depicts herself consistently as a monster. The very first sequence of the first volume shows Karen transforming into a werewolf – except she also already starts as a wolf-girl, with pointed ears, tusks, and claws. This is what she perceives as her default state, but she can always become more monstrous. She describes the physical transformation of not only her body, but of her gendered clothes: “The nightgown which Mama was so proud of finding for a steal had ripped to shreds. It was a shame because even though I never liked the girly look of the nightie, I knew that mama would be super disappointed because I hadn’t ‘taken care of my things.’” Karen imagines her howl ringing through the neighborhood, and surrounding adults saying things like “Kill the monster!” and “Let’s smoke that freak!” When a brown youth sitting on the sidewalk says, “Maybe it can’t help being different and maybe you shouldn’t be pestering it in its lair,” a white adult answers, “Dumb Indian.” Karen pictures herself in her transformed state – the only part of her nightgown that remains is a bow around her hairy neck – as the mob approaches. But then she awakes from her dream crawls into bed with her mother, no longer hulking, but still a wolf-girl. She explains, “What freaks me out is that one day they could turn me into one of them … M.O.B. = Mean, Ordinary, and Boring.”

            Monsters help Karen make sense of her world, and they help her identify herself with the people who live on the outskirts. She draws Anka, her murdered neighbor, as a ghostly blue, which she did even during Anka’s life. She explains, “She wasn’t actually blue … but she always looked as if she might start crying at any minute.” Her neighbor and friend Franklin naturally resembles Frankenstein’s monster. (Franklin, in the second volume, changes her name to Francoise, whereas in volume one, her trans identity is implied for the reader but is a bit over Karen’s head.) Karen’s ex-best friend, Missy, appears as a vampire, but only when she is being nice to Karen. Missy and Karen used to love monster movies and magazines together, and they each chose monsters that they most identified with. However, Missy’s mother severed the friendship because she declared Karen to be a bad influence – because of all that monster stuff, but also clearly because of her noticeable queerness.

            A lot happens in My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, and all of it is very heavy. In trying to solve Anka’s murder, Karen begins listening to tape recordings of Anka recounting her life experiences as not only a Holocaust survivor, but a survivor of extreme sexual abuse and exploitation as a child. Meanwhile, Karen’s mother is diagnosed with cancer, and her brother Deeze, who cares deeply for Karen but has an explosive temper, has dangerous secrets of his own. A lot of the second volume revolves around Deeze’s criminal dealings. Meanwhile, all of this spools out against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement – the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., takes place in the first volume – and general social upheaval in working class Chicago. So I am not going to go into nearly everything that happens in these books, and I’m actually going to focus primarily just on the first one. But if you haven’t read them and want to check them out, know that they are a serious undertaking.

            A lot of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters revolves around Karen’s uneasy relationship with knowledge. Many people keep important secrets from her, not least of all her mother and Deeze. Karen fashions herself into a detective to investigate Anka’s death, but she is also a detective in many other aspects of her life: her family history, her mother’s illness, Deeze’s guilt and morality, and of course her own identity. She can only approach many of these subjects obliquely, safely wrapped in layers of metaphor. For example, when her mother comes clean about her illness to Karen, Karen represents that conversation in a barely legible swirl of words around her more monstrous form. At the top of the page, it reads, “Sure it seemed like I was listening to them,” but the snatches of conversation are all warped. Some are about mundane topics and others are fragments of her mother’s treatment plan, but Karen can’t even finish writing the word “radiation.” Deeze and their mother’s denial are represented at the bottom of the page, as they declare that she will be fine, and Karen goes on to concoct her own denial through monsters: she decides to find a way to make her mother undead. Karen wants to know things, and she hates that people – especially her family – hide information from her because she is a child, but she also does plenty of her own evasion from painful knowledge.

            With that said, Karen is very aware of her own queerness, but this, too, she expresses primarily through her relationship with monsters. She remembers the last sleepover she had with Missy when they were still best friends. During their sleepovers, the two of them always watched monster movies and then went to bed holding hands. On the last one, they watched Dracula’s Daughter, where “there was this one part where Countess Dracula kidnaps this woman named Janet …” and Missy says wonderingly, “I think that the countess almost …” “…Kissed her…” finishes Karen. That night, Karen and Missy become “blood sisters,” pricking their fingers and holding them together. Karen draws the blood in the shape of a heart. While Missy is sleeping, Karen kisses her hand, and Missy sleep talks, “I love you Kare … I love you so much.” In the morning, Missy asks, “Karen, do you think that a girl could become the bride of Dracula’s daughter?” Karen answers, “If they love each other then why not?” It was after this night that Missy’s mother called Karen’s mom to complain about the horror movies that the girls had watched. She says, “That junk! I really should not be surprised as people of your class never protect their kids from bad influences.” Monstrosity is queerness and queerness is monstrosity, at least to Missy’s mom but also to Karen herself. They are linked by being “wrong” for children, so it makes sense that Karen and Missy would explore one through the other. In many ways, horror tropes and monster movies can be much more tangible to queer children than new and nebulous feelings of attraction, desire, or gendered ways of being. At least they can see the vampires and werewolves on TV.

            In my Nimona video, I talked about Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child, Or Growing Sideways in the 20th Century. Stockton explains that “growing up” is a trajectory on which queer childhood cannot remain. The non-sexual yet still future-straight capital-C Child – that is, the Child as ideal, as symbol, not as real person – that figure is expected to progress through developmental milestones that lead them to a heteronormative future, but for the child who already cannot embody a heteronormative present, there is no choice but to grow sideways: become something other than either child or adult – so other than human, really. This sideways growth is frequently experienced with great anxiety, as the child fears the future they cannot fit into, but also cannot envision the future they actually will inhabit, as it has no blueprint or socially sanctioned script. Monsters can easily become a way of imagining and contextualizing this sideways growth, as we see with Karen. If all you know about your own identity is that it is off-limits for a human, especially for a child, then the category of monster makes a lot of sense as a stand-in.

Shapeshifters in particular illustrate aspects of queerness that may be keenly felt by children. In “The Werewolf as Queer, the Queer as Werewolf, and Queer Werewolves” – my kind of title – Phillip A. Bernhardt-House explains, “While vampirism offers the possibility of transcending the human condition, lycanthropy appears like a step not only backward, but downward on the evolutionary scale, into the dirt and excrement of earthly existence, a world both visible and distant from ordinary human operations” (165). Karen is clearly aware of the ways in which she is seen as backward and downward in society. It’s not only a matter of her queerness, but her race – her absent father is Latino – and her class, as her mother is a “hillbilly” from Appalachia. Her difference is embodied, not otherworldly. But, despised as she may be by the M.O.B., she also uses her werewolf identification as a source of power – really her only source of power. Bernhardt-House writes that “the werewolf’s form changes constantly and unexpectedly,” which makes it “a much greater threat to any enduring sense of identity” (165). Threatening to the majority, yes, but comforting to Karen, who lives in fear of becoming one of the M.O.B. as an adult. Being locked into one form of adulthood, which she experiences as hostile and grotesque in and of itself, is the source of her nightmares. As a werewolf, Karen does not have to experience that. She imagines that she can shift away from those traps of hegemonic identity that would await her if she were simply growing up instead of growing sideways. But this liberating aspect of monstrosity sometimes lets her down when it can’t actually set everyone free from the march of time and the human life course. She is furious when monsters cannot save her mother from death, and she briefly turns against them, even though she still draws herself as a monster child. In grief, she is cut off from both the human and the monstrous – and if that isn’t an absolutely devastating use of the monster metaphor, I don’t know what is.

Monsters and monster media are quite literally presented as a means of self-identification in these graphic novels. Karen only draws herself as a human once, very reluctantly, at her brother’s insistence that she draw herself as she really is. This takes place right before she tells him “I like girls,” and he responds by telling her to keep that a secret for her own safety. So how can she draw herself as she really is? She can’t live the reality, so she needs the metaphor. Media and metaphor are often kids’ only recourse for understanding themselves, in the absence of opportunities to seek out real information about queerness. That absence is often heavily enforced due to the ways at thchildhood and queerness are constructed as incompatible categories. James Joshua Coleman and Jon M. Wargo explore this phenomenon in their article “Queer Civics, Hermeneutical Injustice, and the Cis-Straight Nation State: Reading the Illusion of LGBTQ+ Inclusion through the (Queer) Child.” That’s a lot of title, but the key phrase that they examine is that idea of “hermeneutical injustice,” which is the injustice that results from withholding knowledge in a way that prevents people – in this case, children – from having access to language or context that would help them understand their own experiences. So if you’re a queer kid, and you experience attraction or gender in a way that you can intuit is not the way you’re expected to, you may not be able to understand anything more than just that amorphous sense of difference if you have never been presented with information about the existence of queer identities. I mean, how are you supposed to come up with a full comprehension of that in isolation?

Well, you’re not supposed to come up with it, which is the entire point of withholding the knowledge in the first place. Coleman and Wargo explain that the capital-C Child is imagined as one who is “in danger, one who is cisgender, straight, white, and innocent” (640). Any acknowledgment of the possibility of a queer child “functions within the cis-straight nation-state as a threat to futurity itself. The existence of the Queer Child highlights the fundamental truth that the Child can be queered, and such queering disrupts the organizational logic of the cis-straight state” (641). In other words, it all comes back to reproductive futurity. Nation-states, like the U.S., not only culturally believe in the primacy of the nuclear family, but they enshrine that belief into the functioning of its institutions – education, healthcare, the workplace and myriad consumer markets. All of this is interpreted morally as good and right and necessary, and anything that threatens it is interpreted as evil or even monstrous. The Child is both the precious product of these systems and the guarantor of their future. If that goes off the rails – if the Child fails to progress from pre-sexual “innocence” to predestined cis-straightness – then the stakes are the Nation itself.

Of course, for many people, these ideas frequently remain unsaid, both because that’s how social constructs work but also because it sounds ridiculous when you lay it out like that. Though I suppose the political right doesn’t think so, because they’ve really been running full-tilt with the “queers are the downfall of society and especially the downfall of childhood” thing for a while now. But, like, it is genuinely absurd, you know? Sure, reproduction can’t happen between two uteruses or whatever, but all the women and babies who died in childbirth through the whole of human history didn’t bring all of civilization down, so why should a minority population of nonreproductive partnerships – plenty of whom use other means to reproduce now anyway? I didn’t recognize my own queerness until I was a full adult, at which point, I already had tons of queer loved ones, so the existence of homophobia didn’t make me like more upset once I realized it was also about me. I was already maximum angry at it, because it was about my friends. But I have found that having these attitudes aimed at you does really highlight their absurdity, because, like, I’m the downfall of society? Girl, where? I’m just out here trying to catch up with the laundry. I don’t say that to be like we’re all the same in an assimilationist way – we do not and should not have to live out the same values attached to the cis-straight nation – but like, we are all mundane. The risen ape and the fallen angel meet over a sink full of dishes. I think that’s worth putting out there in this discussion of the queer monster metaphor. Obviously, monsters are my whole deal, and I find a lot of value in monstrous identification and reclamation in many cases, but what we shouldn’t lose is our recognition that the whole thing comes from fundamentally a load of hyperbolic hysteria over the fragility of the status quo. And like, if the status quo is so unstable that I can wreck it as a monster, then I really think that’s not a me problem.

But I digress. Coleman and Wargo demonstrate that knowledge of queerness is interpreted as inherently sexual; not only that, the knowledge itself is said to sexualize children, which is the rationale used to forbid it. And of course, anyone who would sexualize childhood must be monstrous, because that is destroying the most fundamental construct of childhood, innocence. You see how all of this functions as sort of a self-sustaining cycle? That’s how we get things like the Don’t Say Gay laws and bills in various states that seek to forbid mentions of queer identity in education. These bills typically start with young children, because it’s easy to say, why should little kids have to hear about that stuff? Why do you want to compromise the innocence of the K-3 set? And then the rhetoric creeps its way up, like we see in pushing for, for example, book bans in middle schools and high schools – young adult literature is a frequent target of book challenges. That, in turn, sets the stage for raising the age of consent for things like transgender healthcare, until it is over the age of majority in several areas. You can vote and join the military at 18, but you’re too young for hormones.How would you even know yourself well enough yet (because we haven’t given you that knowledge)? (Again, links in the works cited to find out more.)Coleman and Wargo argue that all of these legislative moves constitute “an active attempt to maintain social power by denying knowledge and interpretive frameworks” (652).

So what does all that denial do to the kids themselves?  Scott McKinnon, Shirleene Robinson, and Robert Reynolds explore that question in “‘I Could Tell I Wasn’t Like Everybody Else’: Toward a History of Queer Childhoods in Australia.” They conducted interviews with queer adults to invite them to speak about the experience of growing up (or growing sideways) throughout the 20th century. Their study participants reported on exactly what Coleman and Wargo discussed: knowledge of queerness was off-limits, sometimes not even known enough to conceptualize at all. McKinnon et al. explain that this practice “erases the needs of LGBTIQ young people and positions adults seeking to support queer children – through, for example, the provision of age-appropriate information and resources – as threats to the sanctity of the innocent (heterosexual) child” (268). In the absence of straightforward information, the interviewees often “described a childhood sense of getting something wrong; an inexplicable and intangible error that was somehow beyond definition and yet that determined a great deal” (273). Their behavior – particularly gendered behavior – was policed by both adults and peers, but to an end that could not be spoken of around them. They knew they were breaking the rules, somehow, but were denied explanations of why the rules existed or even what the rules were. Information had to be gleaned obliquely, put together piecemeal. All in the name of protecting childhood.

Karen uses monsters to explain and even resolve that sense of “getting something wrong.” She perceives herself as both different in the present and certainly different in the future, as she can shapeshift into forms that are even more divorced from the norm. The main story does not seem at all resolved by the end of the second volume, but it also came out seven years after volume one, so who knows when a third volume may or may not appear. But meanwhile, Karen’s werewolf identification, particularly in the first volume, serves as a fascinating illustration (literally) of how queer childhood can be experienced in a society where those two categories are not supposed to coexist. After all, wolf and human aren’t supposed to coexist, either. Shapeshifters are, by definition, the embodiment of more than one incompatible category at the same time. That’s what makes them threatening – or, to kids like Karen, comforting. At least she is not alone in embodying contradiction.

But contradiction is not the only meaning associated with shapeshifters. These types of monsters also cannot be contained by boundaries or limitations. Sometimes they triumph over them and bust free – but sometimes those boundaries can be pretty damn strong. So what happens when the shapeshifter does not have room to shift?

THE OPAQUE SELF: I SAW THE TV GLOW

            I Saw the TV Glow is billed as a psychological horror film. Psychological horror does not have to be as jumpy or big as other subgenres – suspense is the main tool here – but “horror” still kind of implies scares, so when I sat down to watch this movie, knowing little about it other than its rave reviews in queer circles, I was expecting in some way to be made afraid. But this isn’t a Silence of the Lambs or The Shining kind of psychological horror. We’re not dealing with terror, really, in this film. Instead, we’re dealing with dread and grief – grief for oneself, grief for a lifetime of getting it wrong. It’s a quiet film, its emotions often muted, but the heaviness of it can be crushing. It’s a pretty incredible piece of art, and if you have not yet watched it and are intrigued by my description of how upset it will make you – intended as a compliment – then maybe pause the video and go do so before continuing, because there will be spoilers herein. Or if you don’t care about spoilers, you can watch the video, and then go see the film for yourself afterwards.

            We begin the film with our narrator Owen introducing us to The Pink Opaque, the young adult TV show that has defined Owen’s adolescence and, in many ways, adulthood. Owen was first introduced to this film by Maddy, when Owen was just on the edge of puberty and Maddy was a few years older. Owen sneaks out to watch the show at Maddy’s house, and Maddy also provides Owen with tapes of back episodes, accompanied by her commentary on the lore and significance of the show’s plot and characters. In The Pink Opaque, two girls, Isabel and Tara, are psychically connected, and they fight the forces of Mr. Melancholy, who has dangerous powers over reality. He can imprison his enemies in the Midnight Realm, depriving them of their true identities and making them perceive that they are living lives that aren’t theirs. Isabel is the show’s protagonist, and Tara, who has been aware of her powers for longer, provides her with strength and resolve – and assurances that she isn’t crazy.

            Owen and Maddy can relate to many things within this show – not least of all, the need for a friend who understands them. A couple of years into their friendship based mostly around Maddy delivering VHSes to Owen, Maddy preemptively rebuffs what she fears may be Owen’s advances by saying, “I like girls. You know that, right? I’m not into boys.” Owen isn’t looking for that type of relationship with Maddy, so a relieved Maddy asks whether Owen likes girls or boys. Owen responds, “I think that I like TV shows.” Put a pin in that one! Owen goes on, “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all of my insides. And I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m still too nervous to open myself up and check. I know there’s something wrong with me. My parents know it, too, even if they don’t say anything.” Owen and Maddy have obliquely discussed their issues with their parents. Owen’s are overprotective, babying their teenage kid with early bedtimes. Owen’s mom is affectionate but, at this point, dying of cancer (an interesting plot point that this film has in common with My Favorite Thing Is Monsters). Owen’s dad, meanwhile, is distant and suspicious of his strange, quiet child. Maddy’s mother, meanwhile, is described as apathetic at best, while her stepfather is physically abusive. Neither of them feel capable of trusting the adults in their lives, certainly not with personal information about themselves and their feelings.

Owen asks if Maddy has ever felt that shoveled-out feeling. At first she says she doesn’t know, but then she adds, “Maybe you’re like Isabel … afraid of what’s inside of you.” The Pink Opaque is the medium through which they can communicate with each other and with themselves, just as monster movies are for Karen. This is why “I think that I like TV shows” is such a significant line. Owen needs the layers of metaphor that a supernatural narrative provides. “TV shows” become a stand-in for Owen’s desire and identity.

            The film is told in a nonlinear fashion, so we already know at this point that Maddy goes missing soon thereafter. Maddy had offered to take Owen with her, but Owen is too afraid to go – particularly with a still-dying mother. Maddy leaves only a burning TV in her wake, and The Pink Opaque is canceled within the month. Ten years, including Owen’s mom’s death, pass in a blur. Owen is working in a movie theater when Maddy reappears. She explains that she has been inside The Pink Opaque, and she needs to go back. Owen rewatches the final episode of The Pink Opaque, in which Mr. Melancholy buries Tara and Isabel alive and traps their consciousness in the Midnight Realm after cutting out Isabel’s heart. Mr. Melancholy shakes up a snow globe that features Owen’s younger self as Isabel loses consciousness. Owen proceeds to completely lose it. Justice Smith, who plays Owen, is very good at portraying the pressure-cooker-about-to-explode wheezing panic in this moment. Owen’s father has to stop his child from smashing headfirst through the TV set.

            Owen represses all of this enough to meet Maddy again the following night. Maddy tells her story: in the ten years since running away, time began to pass too fast, too artificially. Her life felt empty and incorrect. Maddy gets in a coffin and pays someone to bury her alive. At first, she predictably regrets this decision, but when she finally loses consciousness, she wakes up as Tara. The Pink Opaque is real, and everything she has been through as Maddy is just the dark hallucination of the Midnight Realm. What’s more: Owen, she claims, is Isabel. If she buries Owen and herself alive, they will return to their true selves, psychically connected once more. We have seen the younger Owen in Isabel’s clothes with Maddy – cosplay or real memory? Owen doesn’t know – but Owen also doesn’t follow Maddy to the grave or to rebirth. Maddy leaves alone, never to be seen again. And time continues to pass.

            Owen’s father dies, and Owen inherits the house: “I decided to stay in the house. It was time for me to become a man. A real adult. A productive member of society.” Owen also directly talks to the camera to claim, “I’ve even got a family of my own. I love them more than anything.” We, the viewers, do not get to see this family. Owen closes the front door before we can follow inside to this ostensible domestic bliss. They may as well not be real.

            Owen now works in a Fun Center – like an arcade, Chuck E. Cheese type of birthday party place for kids. Between these two “adult” jobs that Owen has had – movie theater attendant and Fun Center employee – Owen has remained ensconced within places of escape, of remove from the grown-up world, and even from reality in general. Fictional narratives, games and tokens – nothing that holds tangible meaning outside of these buildings. But when Owen tries to revisit the fictional escape of The Pink Opaque, it’s all wrong. The cast is different, younger; the effects cheesier, the morals obvious and hokey. It’s like trying to go back to Buffy and instead getting Alex Mack. (Also, more on Buffy in a minute.) Meanwhile, Owen’s lifelong asthma is steadily worsening, making each breath painful to listen to, like someone suffocating underground.

            Finally, Owen, now looking old and haggard, reaches a breaking point. At a child’s birthday party at work, Owen starts screaming in panic and pain: “You need to help me! I’m dying right now!” The partygoers stop singing, but they otherwise don’t react. They also might as well not be real.

            Heaving for breath, Owen goes to the bathroom and coughs up blue sludge and dirt. Shirtless and gaunt, Owen slices a boxcutter through the middle of – his? Her? – torso to reveal glowing TV light. Owen holds open the skin and bathes in the blinding illumination with an expression of something like joy, or maybe relief. But then – Owen, covered up again, hurries through the Fun Center and apologizes to everyone in sight for the earlier outburst. The wheezing is worse than ever.

            And then the movie ends.

            So: whew! I managed to avoid pronouns for Owen right up until the very end there – which was not easy to do, let me tell you – but, while Owen may still not have a clear idea, I’m going to run with “she” from here on out, due to the identification with Isabel. The writer-director, Jane Schoenbrun, has said that this is a movie about Owen’s egg cracking, which for those of you unfamiliar with trans expressions, means the moment of realization about one’s own gender identity. As I Saw the TV Glow attests, this “moment” can be very long.

            You may be wondering why I put this movie in the “shapeshifter” category, and it’s true that I am stretching the definition here, though I think if you’re going to stretch the definition of anything, “shapeshifter” makes sense. I do think, however, that the Owen-Isabel and Maddy-Tara pairings function as kinds of shapeshifters because of some of the things we discussed with My Favorite Thing Is Monsters as well as in my earlier video on Nimona. Starting with the obvious, we do have multiple forms here, more than one body inhabited by the same identity. The horror, however, is not the ability to be two things to exist at once – that smashing of boundaries that shapeshifters represent – but instead the inability to shift. It’s the maintenance of boundaries that is literally killing Owen.

            Neither Owen nor Maddy remain children or adolescents in this story – both grow to adulthood – but the focus on nonlinear time and the primacy of a young adult piece of media are highly significant. Again, we have this presentation of growing sideways, just as Stockton laid out. The narrative keeps circling Owen back to her youth and then skipping ahead in her adulthood, glossing over what are theoretically huge life milestones, like marriage and becoming a parent. It’s the adolescent connection with Maddy that really matters, along with the metaphors contained within Owen’s youth media touchstone that make her feel – real? Like herself? She doesn’t even really know what those things mean, but she knows that The Pink Opaque is more solid than anything else in her life. Owen has failed to really grow up, but she also ran out of room to grow sideways – or, more accurately, she refused the opportunity to do so. She would not go down into the earth in order to come back up in a parallel place. That was too scary – too much like death.

Stockton writes that the queer child is displaced in time, haunting the adult that she becomes. Because the language and knowledge of queerness is withheld from children, the children themselves can rarely claim the label of “queer child,” so it can only be applied retroactively. Therefore, “The protogay child has only appeared through an act of retrospection and after a death. For this queer child, whatever its conscious grasp of itself, has not been able to present itself according to the category “gay” or “homosexual”—categories culturally deemed too adult, since they are sexual, though we do presume every child to be straight. The effect for the child who already feels queer (different, odd, out-of-sync, and attracted to same-sex peers) is an asynchronous self-relation. Certain linguistic markers for its queerness arrive only after it exits its childhood, after it is shown not to be straight” (6). We can easily sort of substitute in “transgender” for “gay” here in the case of Owen in I Saw the TV Glow. Owen felt hollowed out with a shovel as an adolescent, but without recourse to understanding why. All she had access to was Maddy’s offer of identification with Isabel, but even this did not make full sense in the moment. Only as an adult can the possibility of actually being Isabel be spoken – the idea that maybe Owen was Isabel all along, even retroactively: a girl child, a trans kid who can now be identified as such if Owen claims the self-knowledge of being a trans adult. But this identity is still displaced yet through denial. Owen keep getting older, but Isabel doesn’t: she is still a teenager, and the implication is that if Owen buries herself and returns to The Pink Opaque, she would be, too. She would grow not even sideways but backwards into who she was meant to be. But going back isn’treally possible, is it?

Trans people have, of course, been incredibly vilified both historically and now, and people who have been treated as monsters often turn to monster stories and metaphors as ways of explaining their experiences, as we have shown. But also the idea of “transformation” is the barest step away from “transition,” so a lot of these monster metaphors can be particularly resonant for trans writers and thinkers. Theorist Susan Stryker doesn’t go with the shapeshifter, but instead adopts Frankenstein’s monster’s identity in her essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” She writes about her body as a “technological construction” (245). Owen has not been technologically constructed in the same way, since she has avoided the knowledge that would allow her to do that, but she is a mediated construction, a construction of TV light and scripted characters, considerably more so than she is ever flesh and blood. I mentioned Buffy before: not only is the name “Tara” a deliberate reference to the landmark lesbian character from that show, but the actual actress who played Tara has a cameo, prompting an “Eyyy!” of recognition from the two queers on my couch – i.e., me and my wife – when she popped up. This was clearly the intended reaction for the intended audience. We are meant to get the reference, to find that retroactive touchstone for so many queer adolescents who did not quite yet know or admit to themselves that they were queer. I mentioned in my Nimona video that I wrote a whole gay werewolf young adult novel manuscript when I thought I was straight, so I can kind of speak to mediated sublimation and construction of proxy-selves through fantasy and monstrosity and metaphor! Also through specifically youth media, the construction of retroactive younger identities, although I don’t want to overstate that point for myself, since I did start it for my MFA in Writing for Children and that’s also what I always write. But I mean, still. Stryker connects with Frankenstein’s monster, Karen and I connect with werewolves, and Owen connects with a magical girl with the power to fight off the monstrous Mr. Melancholy. (Schoenbrun is not interested in subtlety here.) We find something bigger, other, displaced in time and space and “development” to make sense of our past and present selves. And if we are lucky, we get to shift, to take a form that feels real, no matter how maligned. No matter how “inhuman.” But as long as we keep withholding knowledge and context of queerness from kids – as long as the categories of queerness and childhood remain culturally incompatible – boundaries will remain in place around those kids who need to shift, to become something beyond the standard expectation. Those boundaries also can remain around adults. And they really can be suffocating.

CONCLUSION

            I went to Them.Us to collect a smattering of queer news stories that also pertained to childhood. Here are the past five as of this writing, which were published between October 30 and November 10, 2025. Number one: “Report: Trump Admin to Propose Blocking Hospitals from Offering Trans Youth Care.” Number two: “Trans Teen Awarded 5-Figure Settlement from Washington School District Over Assault.” Number three: “Texas Court Approves Partial Drag Performance Ban.” Number four: “Woman Crashes Out at School Board Meeting Over Queer Teacher Bringing Husband’s Brownies to Class.” And number five: “Maine Parents Demand Town Board Break the Law, Bar Trans Kid from Basketball Team.” Four of the five involve denying resources or knowledge about queerness to young people. The one about trans healthcare reports on drafted proposals for “rules that would prohibit Medicaid and Medicare programs from funding gender-affirming medical care for people under 19 years old.” So that stretching of the category of childhood is in full effect here, as now the federal government is seeking to expand the denial of care beyond the age of majority. These drafts were obtained by NPR and had not yet been filed. The drag performance ban, meanwhile, is already being enacted, and has been upheld by a federal appeals court for enforcement in Texas. This ban “currently criminalizes performances in which a performer is nude or appeals to the ‘prurient interest in sex’ in a public setting where minors might be present.” In 2023, this ban was blocked by the appeals court on the grounds that not all drag is sexually oriented, but now it has been unblocked but only for enforcement against legitimate “sexual” drag, which really begs the question of sexual according to whom? The language of this ban is vague and broad – many, including myself, would argue deliberately so – but one thing that it’s clear about is its stated purpose of “protecting minors.”

            The brownies story is on its face the most ridiculous one, but at least it didn’t result in any action taken against the teacher who brings his husband’s baked goods in for his students. However, it’s worth noting that the woman who complained began her statement to the school board by quoting the Bible, specifically Matthew 18:6: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea.” So, you know, great. Meanwhile, the hubbub in Maine is literally over a student who wants to play on the third and fourth grade basketball team. I guess targeting an elementary school kid for wanting to play sports on a team that has no actual need to be sex segregated anyway because these kids are prepubescent doesn’t count as causing a little one to stumble, but I have to imagine it causes a little one a considerable amount of pain.

            That brings me back to the story about the teenager awarded a settlement for having been physically assaulted by peers as a thirteen-year-old in 2021. The kid’s family brought a suit against the school board because the school had been aware of the bullying environment and failed to adequately act on it. So like … story after story centered around the notion of protecting kids from puberty blockers, brownies, drag, and the big bad other 10-year-old on the basketball team – and yet who is really protected? Are the protected kids in the room with us right now? Because all I see are stories about real kids getting hurt. But as long as those categories of childhood and queerness are constructed as mutually exclusive, then that’s not how the arguments are framed. The kids getting hurt, by virtue of being queer, don’t count as kids. They’re something else in a child’s guise. An imposter; a shapeshifter.

            Okay, so having just made myself really angry and upset, I’m still going to say that we can’t despair. These narratives and metaphors are powerful, but so are the people who take these narratives and metaphors and make them their own, like Emil Ferris and Jane Schoenbrun. Neither My Favorite Thing Is Monsters nor I Saw the TV Glow is media for children; instead, it is media for adults who can recognize these cultural touchstones in the forms of creature features or Buffy-esque coming of age dramas, and then use them to understand childhood better. Plenty of adults, queer and otherwise, have come to reject the notion of the incompatibility of queerness and childhood. That’s why you have things like a teacher who brings in his husband’s brownies to school and parents who fight for their daughter’s right to play, and I cannot stress this enough, elementary school basketball. That’s why journalists and doctors and (some) policymakers are fighting back against withholding gender affirming care from young people. As bleak as it’s been out there – and god knows it’s been bleak – withholding knowledge of queerness from children is getting harder and harder. As the characters we’ve discussed today show, denial is a powerful force, but ultimately it’s really hard to un-know something that becomes known.

            Maybe someday shapeshifters won’t be a good metaphor for queer childhood anymore. I love werewolves more than I love most things, but that’s a worthy goal to work towards. Until that day, what adults can do – along with queer young people who have, against the odds, come into the knowledge of themselves – is weaken those boundaries of hermeneutical injustice for the kids in our communities. Speak up for kids to school boards and policymakers, and make the knowledge you have as accessible as possible. The more we help to peel away those barriers that our society has built around young people’s identities, the further those people can see beyond them – and they might be able to find a form that they actually want to shift into.

            Thank you so much for watching this video on this topic that is very near and dear to my heart. I hope that you enjoyed it, and if you did, I would appreciate it if you would like the video and subscribe to the channel for future discussions. I also am dying to hear your thoughts in the comments: do these stories of queer child shapeshifters speak to you and your experiences? Do you have any queer child shapeshifter recommendations for me?

            If you really want to keep the conversation going, consider supporting me on Patreon. Patrons get the chance to vote on monster stories to be included in future videos, as well as extra reaction videos to new-to-me stories. Plus, early in the new year, I will be setting up some book clubs, and $5 tier patrons will have first dibs on joining. Lots of exciting stuff coming up! Meanwhile, the most helpful thing you can do is share the video – the more people this reaches, the easier it will be for me to start up another project I am designing, which is a program of book clubs and academic/creative/activist mentorship services for teenagers.

            Next up on the channel, we will be continuing our conversation about queer child monsters, but this time, we’re bringing in the vampire. I hope you will join me for that conversation in two weeks. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon on The Monster & The Child for more monstrous food for thought.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheMonsterAndTheChild

Media discussed:

  • My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, vol. 1 & 2, by Emil Ferris (2017, 2024)
  • I Saw the TV Glow, written and dir. by Jane Schoenbrun (2024)

References:

kathleenmkellett

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