Proposal Abstract Submitted to NCUR-- sort of has to do with children's lit...

Smear the Queer:
The Cultural Shadows of a Child’s Game


*This is a proposal abstract that I sent to NCUR in order to be considered for their conference.


Famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget suggests, “it is through game playing, that is, through the give and take of negotiating plans, settling disagreements, making and enforcing rules, and keeping and making promises that children come to understand the social rules” (“The Moral Judgment of the Child”). This may be, but how do violent children’s games fit into the understanding of social rules? Carl Jung suggests there is an element of our society called “shadows” which are the aspects of our individual and collective psyches that we do not wish to acknowledge about ourselves. I contend that violent children’s play is a portrayal of those cultural shadows found in our social rules. For a more focused evaluation of the role of violent children games, I will examine the game Smear the Queer; the specific rules of the game will be provided to the audience so as to create a standard by which to focus the reading of the game. Also, I will take the important step of having the audience understand my focus of the word Queer as referring to the broad representation of Other rather than to a difference created by sexuality. By using various schools of thought on difference such as Queer Theory, Gender Studies, and Postcolonialism, I plan to dissect the various roles of the Other and the processes in which they are formed in the game. Upon further understanding of the various parts, I will portray the in-game journey of the “Queer” under the guide of Joseph Campbell’s theory of monomyth to assert how the child’s game is didactic in the ideological formation of the Other. By doing so, I will be able to show hoe this ideological formation manifests itself in the shadow world of cultures social rules.

Adam G. Benson



*I have actually already written most of this paper for my Advanced Comp. class. I'm pretty excited to have submitted a paper to an academic conference. Getting accepted would be a really cool and unique experience. This year, the conference is being held in April in the state of Wisconsin. If I get the opportunity to go, I would have a 15 minute presentation in which to discuss my paper.
It seems like one of the most relative questions for this class is if Children's games are as relevant as children's literature? I would argue that they are as important. We have touched a little on the rhymes that children incorporate into their games and how that is a form of literature.
Piaget's statement of understanding the social rules seems fairly accurate to me; their does seem to be a connection between child's play mimicking the adult world. If this is so, that play helps children understand the adult world's "social rules", could play be one of the losses in innocence that seems indicative of adult-hood? It seems possible, though I would highly doubt that it is the primary vehicle for loss of innocence. I believe that we try too hard to explain the loss of innocence as happening instantaneously. Rather than understand it as a process, we search for ways in which it happens instantly. For example, as people we want. The instantaneous loss of innocence is definitely more literary, but I doubt whether or not it is actually valid. Even the eating of the forbidden fruit was a process; Eve had to be tempted by the snake, which must require some loss of innocence to be able to be tempted in the first place. In my opinion, the loss of innocence is always going to be a process that will be represented in the popular conscious as occuring in a single moment.

*Interesting "loss of innocence" visuals.