“I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy”: An Analysis of the Tomboy and Queer Time in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women
Open AccessIn the wake of a 2017 New York Times article and a subsequent book published in 2020, author and scholar Lisa Selin Davis fell under fire in liberal and conservative circles alike for defending the figure of the tomboy. Taking a hardline stance that aimed to distinguish the tomboy from queer connections, while affirming transgender and gender nonconforming identities, Davis’s work studying and defending the tomboy only served to perpetuate a narrow understanding of the figure within the contexts of gender/sex/sexuality by confining it to childhood. This thesis attempts to intervene in the discourse prompted by Davis’s work to establish the tomboy as a queer child figure, who, when unencumbered by a normative construction of linear time and development, can provide an alternative way of doing gender/sex/sexuality. By using Jo March, the main character of Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 domestic novel Little Women, as a case study, this research uncovers the historical construction of the tomboy in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras as a model of white femininity, a tool of maintaining cishetreropatriarchy, and a method for invalidating or belittling queer children. By engaging with key works in gender theory, queer theory, and trans theory by Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Katherine Boyd Stockton, and Elizabeth Freeman, among others, this thesis not only calls into question the constructed opposition of queerness and childhood, but also illustrates how the tomboy as the queer child can challenge normative stages of development and “straight” time in order to disrupt the myths of gender fixity and naturally occurring gender/sex/sexuality. In the end, this research concludes that the tomboy, when it is deconstructed from its figurality within the symbolic order of the white cisheteropatriarchy, offers a way of doing gender/sex/sexuality that resists normative understandings of time and narratives of queer opposition to the figure of the child.
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