Documenting the invisible: queered childhood in <i>Adolescentes</i> and <i>Petite fille</i>

French director Sébastien Lifshitz has distinguished himself as an auteur of queer cinema, building a cinematic archive of LGBTQ+ and queer existence that disrupts societal injunctions of cisheteronormativity that would render such lives invisible. Analyses of Lifshitz’s cinematic oeuvre have focused on depictions of queer sexuality and trans existence, but have largely ignored one film in particular, his 2019 documentary Adolescentes . The documentary has been put aside because the teenage protagonists Emma and Anaïs are not overtly queer in the sense that they do not openly defy norms of gender and sexuality. However, this article shifts the lens of queerness onto childhood, proposing a comparative study of Adolescentes with Lifshitz’s 2020 documentary Petite fille , which follows Sasha, a little girl who is trans. I propose that by bringing these films together in dialogue with childhood studies’ notions of the child as an inherently political social category, the queerness of Lifshitz’s oeuvre expands to contain the queerness of childhood as governed by normative adult–child power dynamics. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .