Children dressed as animals dressed as children (or, The Meaning of Christmas)

Cuteness, I have argued, often rests on a double mimesis. It's not that the child is dressed as an animal so much as that the child is dressed as an already anthropomorphized animal.

Lee Edelman's No Future famously repudiates the politics of "for the children," a politics that imagines a capital-C Child that "marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism" (21). In what Heather Love has called Edelman's "star turn as Milton's Satan" (an absolutely right-on description), the unthinkable call to arms is absolute:

Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we're collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (29)

Against the Child and reproductive futurism, Edelman counterposes a sinthomosexual figure, which he describes first of all in the character of Charles Dickens's unrepentant Ebenezer Scrooge. The sinthomosexual is not quite gay, although he (usually he)* is certainly queer. Sinthomosexuality is not an identity but a function, the kernel of unreasoning negativity without which we have no Symbolic order. In A Christmas Carol, Christmas is a festival of reproductivity in the name of the Child, in which all children (innocent Victorian ones) are subsumed under the sign of the Christ-child.

[It will surprise no one that the processional for the King's College Advent service, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,** is always "Once in Royal David's City." The first verse is sung by a soprano choirboy (never a woman, of course!), and it is itself a Victorian children's hymn, first published in the 1848 Hymns for Little Children. The third verse is especially pointed in this regard:

And through all his wondrous childhood
He would honor and obey,
Love, and watch the lowly maiden
In whose gentle arms he lay.
Christian children all must be
Mild, obedient, good as he.

Theologically, the song is rather remarkable. But I digress.]

Scrooge's rejection of Christmas is merely a particularly recognizable subset of a broader rejection of reproductive futurism, and is for that reason depicted as monstrous. Who could hate Christmas? It's queer, unthinkable, and must be corrected—at least in the novel.

Thus, as Edelman writes, Scrooge is "converted to futurism through his life-changing vision of a futureless future," and thus "is granted the very gift of life he gives to Tiny Tim. But granted it only insofar as he gives that life to Tiny Tim, becoming a 'second father' to the boy by renouncing the intolerable narcissism that futurism projects onto those who will not mirror back its own Imaginary form" (50).

As early as 1993, Eve Sedgwick had already sketched out some of the consequences for queer theory of the ideology surrounding American Christmas, in which religion, capital, state, and "family" merge in a unison chorus of "'tis the season."***

What’s “queer?” Here’s one train of thought about it. The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice. The Church says what the Church says. But the State says the same thing: maybe not (in some ways it hardly matters) in the language of theology, but in the language the State talks: legal holidays, long school hiatus, special postage stamps, and all. And the language of commerce more than chimes in, as consumer purchasing is organized ever more narrowly around the final weeks of the calendar year, the Dow Jones aquiver over Americans’ “holiday mood.” The media, in turn, fall in triumphally behind the Christmas phalanx: ad-swollen magazines have oozing turkeys on the cover, while for the news industry every question turns into the Christmas question—Will hostages be free for Christmas? What did that flash flood or mass murder (umpty-ump people killed and maimed) do to those families’ Christmas? And meanwhile, the pairing “families/Christmas” becomes increasingly tautological, as families more and more constitute themselves according to the schedule, and in the endlessly iterated image, of the holiday itself constituted in the image of ‘the’ family.

The thing hasn’t, finally, so much to do with propaganda for Christianity as with propaganda for Christmas itself. They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. What if instead there were a practice of valuing the ways in which meanings and institutions can be at loose ends with each other? What if the richest junctures weren’t the ones where everything means the same thing? (5-6)

Christmas is about capitalism—of course; everyone knows that, albeit usually in the context of bemoaning it. Sedgwick's insight is that Christmas's univocality allows each of these sites of power—capital, the state, "the" (heteronormative, reproductive) family, religion—to stand in as a metonym for all the rest. You buy Christmas presents because you love your family because the Christ-child loves you because you love the Child because the Child is the future of the nation, and round and round. Christmas has meaning, we are continually assured, and it is all the same meaning—the single, univocal meaning that the unmeaning sinthome both opposes and makes possible. If Christmas is about "meaning," then a purely negative Scrooge is the reason for the season.

What's missing from Edelman's account, of course, is any serious consideration of the actual child— not Annie or the waif from Les Mis or Tiny Tim, but the real children whose debt-burdened future is illogically invoked as a reason to cut public school funding, for instance.**** This is a perspective that Kathryn Bond Stockton takes up in The Queer Child (2009), and a place where the relation between children and animals returns.*****

Why are children so cute when dressed up as animals? I keep returning to this question. Here is Ralphie in A Christmas Story (1983), dressed as an animal as part of the same ritual of gift-giving that will eventually unite him with the toy gun he so desires.



Ralphie's abject, miserable cuteness is inseparable from the ritual of gift-giving; indeed, it assures that the queerly gender-bending aunt who sends him the bunny suit (she believes that he is "perpetually four years old [and] also a girl") is domesticated into "the" family. With Ralphie's appearance on the stairs, the aunt's failure to respect gender norms and her likely spinsterhood are recuperated by the forces of Family and Christmas present. Cuteness overcomes queerness, and must do so at any cost to the child's dignity, for example.

Of course, you know what's coming after all this queer theory is a YouTube clip of an Old Navy commercial.

This is one of those tiny artifacts that one comes across, that's so overdetermined it leaves one nearly speechless. My first reaction was really "CHILDREN DRESSED AS ANIMALS DRESSED AS CHILDREN. SCROOGES." And I can't say I've progressed much beyond that. The ad is for something you are supposed to buy for a child, presumably as a Christmas present: "critter hats," which deck the child in bits of an anthropomorphized animal. We are meant to buy them for Christmas in more than one sense: they make great presents, but they also convert "the holiday's Scroogiest Scrooges" with their cuteness. Scrooge here is not a literary reference, not a character, not a person. A "Scrooge" is a function—the sinthomosexual who poses a threat to Christmas and to the child, who must be converted in order for Christmas to be saved.

This ad, which scores a point for capitalism (buy our hats!) by mobilizing child/animal cuteness against queer Scrooginess, seems indeed to belong to a broader genre of the Christmas conversion of the sinthomosexual. There is the text it literally cites, of course—A Christmas Carol. But where does the double animal/child mimesis of cuteness come from?

Exhibit C: How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The Grinch is the quintessential sinthomosexual; indeed, the song from the cartoon special that describes just how repulsive the Grinch is has become something of a holiday standard.

The Grinch himself is not cute; he can't be, despite being a cartoon figure. Comical, sometimes, yes, but not cute.

He is, however, accompanied by a long-suffering cute companion, his dog, made cuter in his more intense suffering when the Grinch straps some antlers to his head—an instance of animals dressed as other animals, which amounts to animals dressed as children dressed as animals. Before we ever encounter Whoville, the cute dog is the yardstick against which we may measure just how dreadful the Christmas-hating Grinch is; each of the Grinch's schemes is met with more of the dog's cute suffering.

But in the end it is Cindy Lou Who, an antennaed child, whose cute innocence is revealed as what is at stake.

This animal-child is not the direct cause of the Grinch's change of heart (just as Tiny Tim does not directly cause Scrooge's conversion), but she is of course the beneficiary. In a final scene, a reformed Grinch in a Santa suit carves the roast beast and paternally hands a slice to the antennaed girl, who in turn hands it to the antlered dog. The outsider Grinch is now part of the family, a family of innocents and cute animal-children in whose interest he must now think, and in contrast with his earlier abuse of the dog.

This is one way that animals are part of "the meaning of Christmas": they mobilize that apotheosis of Child-hood, cuteness—four out of five Scrooges agree.



This post and the Connelly citation are very much indebted to my sister Maria Cecire's dissertation chapter on the medieval "Christmas challenge," its adaptation in twentieth-century children's literature, and the Victorian construction of Christmas as a children's holiday.

[Added 12/29:] Thanks to Aaron, Gerry, Adam Kotsko, Mark Wood, and blckdgrd for links.

*Edelman rather pulls back on the question of the female sinthomosexual, seeing it as a complication that might dilute the force of his argument. Disgruntled as I am to see femininity once again treated as the deviant exception to the rule instead of half of humanity and therefore central to the question of what the rule really is, I must concede that I am swayed by No Future's formal brilliance (Edelman 165-6n10).

**And also the Emory University Lessons and Carols.

***See also this post at A Map of the Country, from which I cut and pasted the same Eve Sedgwick quotation (thanks!). The post addresses the pitting of gay people against Christmas in a campaign ad by Rick Perry. While to the average viewer, "gays in the military" and "war on Christmas" seem like a complete non-sequitur, Sedgwick observes that the national ritual of Christmas demands, above all else, affective uniformity, in which we all go shopping, we all "get in the spirit," and we all spend time with the heteronormative (and, as the my generation's bitter joke has it, homophobic) families that we all have and are exhorted to value above all other relationships. Queerness itself is a serious challenge to those univocal silver bells.

****Generally speaking, the language of what children owe and are owed is exceedingly strange.

*****Despite thinking that The Queer Child is overall a terribly compelling and smart book, I'm almost entirely unpersuaded by Stockton's account of "the interval of animal." The argument hinges on the fact that metaphor always includes a moment's delay, and that, I think, is too broad a phenomenon (not to mention difficult to document except by appeals to intuition) to account for the specific associations we see between animals and children.

Connelly, Mark. Christmas: A Social History. London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Print.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer and Now." Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print.

Q. Is there an entire Tumblr devoted to animals dressed as other animals?

A. Of course there is.

Double double

There's an uncanny (yeah, I went there) degree of consonance between my research and teaching lately. I'm currently working on an article on the animals and children (and feral children), and one of the things I'm writing about is that there's usually a double mimesis at work in instances of the cute and the uncanny. For instance, in Sianne Ngai's example of a cute, "anthropomorphic" frog sponge, the sponge isn't just anthropomorphized. Instead, the sponge is made to look like a frog that has in turn been anthropomorphized. Likewise, these poor pets are animals that have been dressed up to look like children dressed as animals. Mimicry is thought to be the particular domain of children and animals. (This is why we always fear that kids will do exactly what they see on TV. I mean, sometimes they do tie a bath towel around their necks and try to fly. Mimics!) It seems that, faced with one another, children and animals just go the whole hog and mimic doubly.

Now a student rightly notes the same dynamic at work in Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS, of which we watched a clip in class (since I am the meanest teacher). My student writes:

As I mentioned in class, I think maybe the core of the problem is that when I see Cats the Musical, I don’t see cats; I see people acting like cats.

After Tuesday’s discussion, I realized that the creepiness is actually one level deeper than that. It’s not just people pretending to be cats, it’s people pretending be cats pretending to be people. The reason why Mr. Mistoffelees gets a song/poem is that he does magic like a human magician. He hunts mice and whatnot, but he also does tricks with dice and cards, which require opposable thumbs (and...wit), which we have and cats do not.

I've had research and teaching converge before, but this is really kind of amazing. (It helps to have great students.)

(Posts related to the article in progress: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)


Ngai, Sianne. "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde." Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-47. Print.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

Better (than this): cuteness is a moment in the uncanny, the heimlich moment subject to reversal. The uncanny has a diachronic dimension that we tend to efface in our attention to it as a minor aesthetic category.

(By the way, Marilyn Ivy writes about the link between cuteness and the uncanny here [Muse], though I would go further than she does.)

Noted:

1. The uncanny is the original minor aesthetic category.

2. Cuteness is a special (heimlich) case of the uncanny.

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’" In Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmud Freud. Ed. James Strachey et al. Vol. XVII: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. 218-52. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955. Print.

Ngai, Sianne. “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005): 811-47. Web. JSTOR. 5 February 2011.

Automatism is modern

In the q&a after Sianne Ngai's recent talk here on zaniness (which was fantastic), I pulled a classic if annoying move and asked about one of my own research interests. One of the articles I've currently got in the hopper is about affective and domestic labor and states of automatism in women in the early twentieth century. According to Ngai, the zany mode originates in the commedia dell'arte character of the zanni, a personal servant whose job it is to manage social ties. Since Ngai had remarked on the almost compulsive quality of the zany, I asked her to expand on the connection between zaniness and automatism.

Ngai's response was to distinguish between the zany and "animatedness" (from her first book), animatedness being mechanical and evidence of a loss of subjectivity, whereas the zany is an excess of subjectivity, of constantly performing affective labor of various sorts in a manner that models the labor structure of late capitalism.

The follow-up question, had I wished to pull another classic yet annoying move, would have been this:

Isn't automatism sometimes precisely an excess of subjectivity?--subjectivity bubbling up through the body whether you will it or no? I think of psychoanalysis, of automatic writing, etc.

Zaniness, as Ngai so convincingly characterizes it, is automatic in the sense that it is compulsive; it can't be stopped. But I'm also backhandedly persuaded that automatism isn't quite the right word to describe that loss of will, at least in the postmodern context that interests Ngai. It seems to me that the main problem with thinking about zaniness as, on one hand, the form of labor in late capitalism, and on the other hand, as automatic, is actually a historical problem. There's something modern, and not postmodern, about automatism. The machine is only an interestingly strong point of comparison for a human being without will when machines are understood as meaningfully different from people to begin with. That notion starts to break down somewhere midcentury. To insist that machines don't have subjectivity--or rather, to make subjectivity the question to begin with--is a modern gesture. T. S. Eliot may be horrified by the typist's "automatic hand," but, typists all, we're not disturbed in the slightest. Click. Click. A general agnosticism about subjectivity characterizes postmodernism.

The zany may have a long history, but if late capitalism is where it truly comes into its own, then the question of automatism is moot.