SUSPENDED BEGINNINGS OF CHILDHOOD AND NOSTALGIA Elspeth Probyn I am sometimes baffled when people whom I have only just met remark on the fact that I grew up in Wales. I am momentarily embarrassed by the thought that I’ve made a big deal over something small: growing up. If within cultural studies, feminism, and gay and lesbian writing returning to child- hood is not uncommon, it can, as I have found out, return to haunt. It is also a paradoxical turn; in my case I use the phrase “I grew up in Wales” as both a short form to explain the quirks of my accent and in a theoretical mode to try to indicate some of the backward-and-forwardness, the va et vient, the straying of any identity. But, of course, once said, it stations one, places one in relation to something that can take on the weight of an origin: that’s where you’re from, that’s why I’m like that, that explains it, etc. Here I want to examine some of the ways that childhood is produced as a sustained mode, indeed as a structure of feeling, within some gay and lesbian fiction. As the Belgian writer Am6lie Nothomb puts it in her novel about childhood and the desire of one girl for another: “Quand je serai grand, je penserai i quand j’htais petit” (when I’ll be big, I’ll think about when I was small). Her words can be used to sum up a pronounced trend within gay and lesbian fiction, a line that winds around a return to childhood. While in Nothomb’s tale, Le sabotage amoureux (1993), childhood is presented as sufficient unto itself-the narrator and the narrative mode are captured within being-child, indeed childhood is being itself (“Gtre enfants, c’est-i-dire Gtre” [83])-in Anglo-American circles a generation of grown-ups are think- ing out loud about when they were small. This is not an especially gay and lesbian phenomenon; nonetheless there are good reasons to consider the singularities of the queer turn to childhood. In this vein, I want to consider GLQ, Vol. 2, pp. 439465 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by license only 0 1995 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) Amsterdam B.V. Published in The Netherlands under license by Gordon and Breach Science Publishers SA Printed in Canada