The Interapocalyptic Queer Child

Abstract

Apocalyptic narratives abound in twenty-first century children’s fiction. Child characters in television programs created for children are particularly useful for thinking our way through questions of linearity, apocalypse, and the future. This paper applies the rich theoretical lens provided by the intersection of queer studies and childhood studies to close readings of three characters from three animated children’s television programs: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, 2018–2020, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, 2020, and Adventure Time: Stakes, 2015. Each of these characters lives in a post-apocalyptic setting and faces the threat of a new apocalypse in her near future. The paper develops the term ‘interapocalypse’ to describe this temporality between cataclysms, a time in which multiple apocalypses are experienced and expected. Interapocalyptic time enables these characters to explore, disrupt, and defy normative teleologies of developmentalism. The three young protagonists experience bodily metamorphoses, embrace non-human loves and kin, and prioritize their now over the reproduction of past normativity into future contexts. The television programs analysed depict a rejection of reproductive futurity and an embrace of queer, interspecies, and interapocalyptic ways of being. By focusing on the present and rejecting predetermined futures, their characters embody a queer temporality that resists normalizing pressures. The bodily metamorphoses and interspecies relationships depicted in these animated programs symbolize the fluidity and multiplicity of queer identities, highlighting the potential for alternative ways of being that resist conventional developmental trajectories.