Ultimately, his queerness as a man-child character disrupts traditional boundaries and delineations of the child/adult binary and allows the child reader to witness the vulnerabilities of normative institutions while also appreciating diversity in non-normative family structures. 4 Karlson’s disruptive presence solicits frustration, but it also includes a positivity that cannot be ignored instead, his narcissism and primal desires can be appreciated as a legitimated queer visibility reinforced by his positive self-worth that is cultivated by his non-normative belief system in a queered space on the roof, and is buttressed by his resistance against himself being silenced or kept secret from this normative world. Through the lens of Jack Halberstam’s queer subcultures, Karlson’s queerness can be appreciated as a manifestation of a specific kind of literary man-child character in texts for children.īut as Westin points out, Karlson evokes a mixed response such as “disgust, wonder and passion” (130), polarizing both the characters within the story and the readers outside the book. His queerness as a man-child becomes illuminated by his position as someone who inserts his queer persona into the normative reality of Lindgren’s 20 th-century Stockholm. Karlson embodies this kind of queer man-child character because he defies categorization from the normative world through his many unconventional facets: the separated space he inhabits on the roof, his diminutive appearance, his self-important psychosocial persona, his bizarre interpersonal communications, and his scandalous antisocial behavior Throughout the series, Karlson violates traditional expectations of social interactions, familial ties, physical and verbal courtesy, and proper decorum regarding other people’s property, time, and needs.

2 Westin also describes Karlson as “a character that moves freely between different zones and positions: between earth and sky, between child and adult” (140) 3 Karlson’s mobility between child and adult informs the focus of this article on one specific binary – child/adult – and how Karlson subverts this binary as a queer literary white man-child character.Ī white man-child character can serve several functions within a text, providing comic relief and opportunities for adventure, instilling wonder, offering social commentary, or combining all the aforementioned while befuddling characters and readers through unusual behavior, speech patterns, and rhetoric. 1 As a person with a button on his stomach that operates a propeller on his back that allows him to fly, Karlson represents what Boel Westin describes as a “technobody,” which differs from Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg and refers more to “the technologized body or the body as an engineering product” (133).

Astrid Lindgren’s character Karlson from her Karlson on the Roof trilogy (1955–1968 ) could be analyzed as a subversive agent of quite a few different binaries, including the natural/artificial.

In other words, Cleto considers how “queer,” both as a noun and a verb, reconfigures or questions our socially constructed ways of living in, navigating through, or co-existing alongside traditional society. In his discussion about queer theory, Fabio Cleto notes, “Queer thinking thus promotes a sabotage of the manifold binarisms (masculine/feminine, original/copy, identity/difference, natural/artificial, private/public, etc.) on which bourgeoise epistemic and ontological order arranges and perpetuates itself” (15).

Karlson who lives on the roof