chapter 2

TEMPORALITY, SELFHOOD, AND THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE

The adolescent is a very queer creature.

—Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld, “Youth and Health”

The adolescent, like the child, is a mythical figure of the imaginary that enables us to distance ourselves from some of our failings, splittings of the ego, disavowals, or mere desires, which it reifies into the figure of someone who has not yet grown up.

—Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul

Here is a philosopher who fancied that the world was “known” when he had reduced it to the “idea.” Was it not because the “idea” was so familiar to him and he was so well used to it—because he hardly was afraid of the “idea” any more?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The figure of the adolescent evoked at the turn of the twentieth century was openly constructed with an ever-shifting set of characteristics by new institutions negotiating for their own authority and expertise. Through the work of G. Stanley Hall and others, the emerging institutions of medicine, psychology, and education set the figures of the child and the adolescent at the center of their investigations. The function of these figures in institutional discourses was not merely to exercise control over the young, as one might expect, but to compel adults—parents and teachers—to defer to institutional knowledge over their own. Ironically, however, twentieth-century articulations of adolescence were less often accompanied by scientific certainty than they were fraught with the specter of the unknown. For example, Dr. Margaret Lowenfeld (1890–1973), a pioneer in the fields of pediatric medicine and psychology, began her lecture on “Youth and Health” delivered to the British Red Cross Society in 1934 with a bold declaration: “The adolescent is a very queer creature. All of us who are in intimate contact with the adolescent feel at times completely baffled.”¹ Like many twentieth-century constructions of adolescence, Lowenfeld’s primary definition rests on the strangeness and unknowability of the person called adolescent. The word “creature” echoes the distancing language used for insects and animals. She counts herself among those “in intimate contact with the adolescent” in contrast to others who do not know the adolescent in this way, drawing a clear line between those who are authorized to speak about adolescence and those who are not. Despite evoking the “adolescent” as a type of person, a “creature” she is in intimate contact with, an object of study that she can describe in generalized terms, Lowenfeld represents adolescence as synonymous with unknowability and with encounters that leave her “at times completely baffled.” This type of statement is common throughout the twentieth century—associated later with the unstable selfhood of the adolescent “identity crisis”—serving a key set of cultural functions to maintain normativity.²

Adolescence functions as a location for disavowal, a way to distance phenomena that troubles or baffles Lowenfeld, but it also functions as location for desire. The unknowability of adolescence makes Lowenfeld’s lecture all the more urgent and important, functioning to secure her professional role and its authority. The “discovery” of adolescence at the turn of the century as an “unknown” conveniently leaves much undiscovered, setting up the category in a productive relation to the endless pursuit of progress and scientific knowledge. One of the things these institutional discourses have in common is their purposeful evocations of the adolescent as a subject belonging to science and medicine. These purposeful evocations are so common, so insistent, that it is apparent how fragile these constructions were.

The idea that adolescence was discovered at the turn of the twentieth century may itself be a narrative constructed at the turn of the century. For example, the Journal of Adolescence confidently reported in 1900 that it was Indiana that “was the first state to formally recognize the study of Adolescence,” rather than naming Hall and his colleagues at Clark University in Massachusetts.³ Competing claims of discovery indicate a shared investment in discovery itself, a legitimizing pattern used in emerging fields of study like education and psychology in the first part of the twentieth century. Take, for example, the celebratory language of an early review of Hall’s Adolescence, titled “Dr. Hall’s ‘Adolescence’ Considered One of the Most Important in Years.” In addition to its abundant praise, the review concludes with a statement that also positions adolescence as a representation of the unknown: “It is astonishing how little we know ourselves. The whole truth about life is coming slowly, but it is certain that we have much yet to learn.”⁴ Adolescence is cast as a pathway for knowing the self, both as individual selves and collectively as humans, a locus of examination that will provide access to “the whole truth about life.” This characterization depicts its own moment—the turn of the twentieth century—as the moment when, at last, the whole truth is within reach. This statement expresses Hall’s own boastfulness on the significance of his research, but it also captures a disciplinary context of scientific “discovery” from which his work emerges. As should be apparent by now, the claim that adolescence is new does little to denaturalize it or disrupt its logic. Acknowledging the historical specificity of adolescence alone cannot dislodge it from projects of dominance, since the harkening of adolescence as a “modern” concept, and thus as a confirmation of Western superiority, is part of the work it does.⁵ So what is it that we mean when we attribute modern conceptions of adolescence to the turn of the century? What is it that we recognize in Hall, and how do the conditions of this recognition obscure both the past and our present?

As early as the 1920s, we can find claims resembling those in recent social histories, locating the origin of adolescence at the turn of the century. Take, for example, the Transactions and Proceedings of the National Association of State Universities, which boasted in 1928 that “another development of the last twenty years . . . is the discovery of adolescence.”⁶ Claims about scientific discovery were not confined to academic contexts. An 1897 advertisement for Bradfield’s tonic appearing in the Macon Telegraph proclaims, “The period succeeding youth is now more desirable than adolescence. The strangest thing is that it has not been discovered before with all the examples that exist in history.”⁷ These examples, above all, demonstrate the appeal of the narrative of discovery itself—a narrative of progress in which the present is our inevitable arrival point. The category of adolescence is made possible by this narrative, which is at its heart a story about the development of civilization, a process of evolutionary growth in which adolescence is an example, a metaphor, and a confirmation of one’s investments and projections for the future. It is highly adaptable, used for various and contradictory purposes, and yet it works according to a specific logic, a way of mapping time, selfhood, and social hierarchy along a developmental continuum. Valerie Walkerdine observes that this is how developmental psychology operates to this day, confirming itself through “a grand, totalizing story, the story of children’s development, a scientific story testable, within limits, in relation to the methodological guarantees given about the treatment of scientific data, science’s claim to truth.”⁸ Claims about the discovery of adolescence throughout the twentieth century participate in this narrative mode of knowledge in which the history of adolescence itself is cast as a developmental story, part of an inevitable process of arrival at scientific truth and institutional accomplishment.

One of the consequences of understanding adolescence and “life itself” as a developmental story was that it required the displacement of situated, contextual, experiential knowledge with the stabilized, presumably objective “truth” of science produced by institutions. We can see this dynamic illustrated by Hall as he defensively asserts the objective “truth” of scientific knowledge in the preface to Adolescence. He laments the “dishonorable captivity to epistemology” in existing scholarly methods and the “present lust for theories of the nature of knowledge,” which he claims “have become a veritable and multiform psychosis.”⁹ He dismisses the types of self-reflexive, contingent knowledge that account for one’s experience and perspective in order to claim the “truth” for himself and his assertions about adolescence. His choice to call epistemological concerns a “psychosis” is a very telling strategy, one that uses the emerging institutional discourse of psychology to regulate whose speaking will be recognized as legitimate and whose will not. If we understand epistemology—“theories for the nature of knowledge”—to grapple with the limits of what is knowable, the instability of knowledge itself, and the shifting relational contexts within which knowledge is produced, then we can see here how Hall disavows these concerns to assert the authority of science and lay claim to his own expertise.¹⁰ After disavowing epistemological concerns, Hall insists that “we must turn to the larger and far more laborious method of observation, description, and induction.”¹¹

Expressing his faith in scientific objectivity, Hall wants to use these methods to study the “folk-soul, learn of criminals and defectives, animals, and in some sense go back to Aristotle in rebasing psychology on biology” because, he claims, “we know the soul best when we can best write its history in the world.” As discussed in chapter 1, Hall’s desire to study the “folk-soul,” criminals, defectives, and animals stems from his belief that they represent “earlier,” inferior forms from our evolutionary past. As Johannes Fabian reminds us, “there is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical, political act.”¹² Hall’s history of the “soul” is a form of historicism, which interprets all phenomena within a temporal process of development. He declares, “There are no finalities save formulae of development,” which he believes provide a map for directing the “soul” toward “indefinite further development.”¹³ Hall’s methods do not aim to objectively observe what is now but rather to interpret all observable phenomena as belonging to the past or to the future of a developmental process, one moving toward or away from a normative ideal that he narrowly defines as white, male, and middle class. Categories of age play a key role in supporting these directional, hierarchical logics of development today.

Adolescence is imagined to exist in a hierarchical relation to adulthood, and this relation reifies and obscures the power dynamics of other social relations, those between doctors and patients, institutions and individuals, as well as hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality. The array of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses I examine in this chapter contain overlapping categorizations of the criminal, homosexual, ethnic, savage, prostitute, deviant, primitive, queer, and delinquent as ways of dehumanizing marginalized populations within a developmental model as biologically deficient. Categories of age function as a temporal sleight of hand, relocating existing social hierarchies within the seemingly “natural” developmental trajectory of childhood and adolescence. Thus, the specifically “modern” category of adolescence that emerges in early twentieth-century discourses is a normalizing technology of power that both maintains and obscures these forms of dominance. This chapter layers categories of age, race, class, gender, and sexuality because of the historical and present entanglement of these identity positions within the logic of developmentalism. Judith Butler writes, “Though there are clearly good historical reasons for keeping ‘race’ and ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual difference’ as separate analytic spheres, there are also quite pressing and significant historical reasons for asking how and where we might read not only their convergence, but the sites at which the one cannot be constituted save through the other.”¹⁴ The presumed universality of categories of age illuminates the mutuality and coproduction of multiple categories of difference. Within the logic of developmentalism, adolescence appears not as a point of difference but as the ground from which difference itself is constituted.

The Politics of Difference

The category child appears as if it is universal, crossing all social divisions, the category itself seemingly innocent of social division. But this is only one of the more insidious functions of childhood as a Western concept. Jacqueline Rose points to how the fantasy of childhood “serves as a term of universal social reference which conceals all the historical divisions and difficulties of which children, no less than ourselves, form a part.”¹⁵ James Kincaid explains it this way: “By formulating the image of the alluring child as bleached, bourgeois, and androgynous, these stories mystify material reality and render nearly invisible—certainly irrelevant—questions we might raise about race, class, and even gender.”¹⁶ The category child, then, does not work in the same ways for all children, and its presumed universality obscures the ways that it functions to produce and maintain social hierarchies. The figure of the child—the child of reproductive futurism, the innocent child, the child who needs protection—this figural child is white. Robin Bernstein historicizes the link between childhood, innocence, and whiteness, noting the shift in the nineteenth century toward childhood “not as innocent, but as innocence itself; not as a symbol of innocence, but its embodiment.” She makes clear that “this innocence was raced white.”¹⁷ By the turn of the twentieth century, middle- and upper-class white children were “priceless,” no longer regarded as a potential source of family labor or income but sentimental objects now assigned increasing monetary value in adoption fees and insurance policies.¹⁸

And yet, it might be surprising to discover that child-protection laws that were passed around the turn of the century in the United States were put into motion by making the argument that children were like animals. Presumptions of innocence did not confer respect to children but rather linked children and animals, as we see in the naming of organizations such as the Board of Child and Animal Protection in Wyoming and Colorado, what eventually became the Humane Society. An article from 1904 in the Philadelphia Inquirer makes an argument for the Wyoming and Colorado models to be put into law at the national level: “A measure will be introduced into Congress, asking for the establishment of a National Board of Child and Animal Protection, with a secretary and offices in Washington. It was shown that there are a number of states without legislation of any sort for the protection of either children or animals. The horrible conditions connected with cattle shipped from the West suggested the project for a national law and bureau.”¹⁹ The “horrible conditions” prompting action here refers to an incident in which a herd of cattle worth $500,000 froze to death on a ranch in Texas the previous winter.²⁰ This logic linking the monetary loss of cattle with the need to protect children is a fascinating historical phenomenon, occurring at the moment when white children were identified as being the most precious and the most in need of protection. It seems clear that adoring, idolizing, or protecting the innocence of children is not the same as recognizing the personhood of children.

Kathryn Bond Stockton overlaps her theorizations of “the child queered by innocence” and “the child queered by color” under the same heading in her introduction to The Queer Child, a choice evocative of the ways these seemingly opposing constructions have something in common. The child queered by innocence is idealized, made distant and strange from an adult point of view, which can work also to make children distant and strange to themselves. But the child queered by color is not seen as innocent and thus is queered by exclusion from the category child. This construction is similarly mapped onto children whose families struggle to make financial ends meet: Stockton writes, “Experience is still hard to square with innocence, making depictions of streetwise children, who are often neither white nor middle-class, hard to square with ‘children.’”²¹ Many scholars have recognized the degree to which black and brown children are imagined in ways that exclude them from the conditions of dependency, protection, and innocence imagined to belong to the category child, but these observations do not always account for the “insidiousness of infantilization.”²² The assumption that innocence reflects a universal view of children obscures the complex reality of all children’s lives, but in particular the lives of protogay, queer, and trans children, poor children, and children of color.

Like childhood, the category of adolescence presupposes universality even while it does the work of differentiating and naturalizing racial hierarchies. In this sense adolescence, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, is a fundamentally racial category. Adolescence works within a developmental logic alongside childhood to embody not innocence and potentiality but more often regression and deviance. This tension between innocence and deviance in categories of age occurs because, as Jacob Breslow writes, childhood and adolescence “are not straightforwardly ontological; they are also, to varying degrees, temporal positions. They name subjects who are defined by a relation to futurity, growth, delay, and a temporal ‘estrangement’ from an adulthood that they are simultaneously defined in opposition to yet destined to become.” Breslow describes how categories of age work as temporal mechanisms, accounting for the contradictory ways that childhood and adolescence function to uphold existing social and hierarchical structures while themselves appearing to be transitory stages of life shared by all people.²³ Toby Rollo, for example, argues that it is the alignment of blackness with childhood, rather than the exclusion from childhood, that is responsible for racist depictions in which black people are represented as biologically grown but without “mature intelligence and self-control,” which continues to perpetuate notions of criminality and deviance recurrent in antiblackness.²⁴ Breslow accounts for this contradiction through temporality. Through present and historical examples, he suggests that “childhood and adolescence, as ambivalent categories with blurred boundaries, do and do not stick to black children and young people,” while black adults remain temporally suspended in a subject position he calls “adolescent citizenship,” in which rights and recognition are cast as premature, belated, or inappropriate because they are “out of temporal sync with a fantasy of the nation’s present” as postracial.²⁵

These contradictions are woven throughout the early twentieth-century medical and psychological discourses discussed in this section, where categories of age can work to justify the behaviors of those who occupy normative categories of identity while they simultaneously work to establish the inferiority of others. Thus, the temporality of developmentalism enables the contradictory construction of black children outside the conditions of innocence and protection thought to belong to childhood while simultaneously constructing black adults as childlike, immature, or adolescent. These hierarchical functions of categories of age can work to establish the inferiority of any nonnormative or marginalized group.

Hall imagined adolescence as a racial category that replicated the evolutionary development of humankind, one in which the proper environment, guidance, and control were necessary to reach the “higher and more completely human traits” he correlated with the norms of masculinity, whiteness, and wealth. This definition at once constructs adolescence as the developmental period for “higher and more completely human” traits at the same time as it implies the absence of those traits. Who achieves the status of the human and who does not is a matter of time: the longer the adolescence, the more time there is to develop the “higher traits” Hall imagines, but the shorter the adolescence, the more likely a person (or group of people) will reach adulthood without achieving the status of the human. Hall declares that “youth needs repose, leisure, art, legends, romance, idealization, and in a word, humanism, if it is to enter the kingdom of man well equipped for man’s highest work in the world.”²⁶ For Hall the “higher and more completely human traits” represent a biological process, an expression of genetic potential possible only through a long adolescence. Masculinity, whiteness, and wealth operate as if they are synonymous with the “higher traits” and the arrival at adulthood itself, constructing minoritized populations including the poor, women, people of color, and those who are queer, trans, neurodiverse, and/or disabled as regressive and subordinate, as not quite achieving the “more completely human traits,” according to this universalized conception of human development.

For those who occupy these norms, this developmental schema ensures their conformity for the achievement of adult status, whereas others are simply excluded. Claudia Castañeda puts it this way:

The “normal” child was not assured of being normal until the developing body had traversed childhood and become the normative adult. To be a true adult was to have passed out of development—out of the realm of the pathological (savage, female, racialized, hyper-and hypo-sexual, etc.)—and into the realm of the “normal”: to be a “civilized” man in present time. The female, the racialized, the insane, the disabled, and the poor were left behind, in childhood, while adulthood was strictly enforced as a “natural” developmental achievement reserved for the deserving few.

These constructions stem from the logic of developmentalism in nineteenth-century theories of social evolution. Castañeda explains how nineteenth-century racial science posited that white and black children had the same levels of intelligence and capability only to reassert adolescence as the moment of racial differentiation when development presumably stagnated in nonwhite bodies.²⁷ She quotes the nineteenth-century British phrenologist Robert Dunn, who wrote in 1864: “The Negro child is not, as regards the intellectual capacities, behind the white child.” However, Dunn goes on to say that the brain of the “Negro child” cannot grow after a certain point: “No sooner do they reach the fatal period of puberty than, with the closure of the sutures and the projection of the jaws, the same process takes place as in the ape. The intellectual functions remain stationary, and the individual, as well as the race is incapable of further progress.”²⁸ Childhood represents potentiality and receptivity to institutional intervention, the fantasy of directing all human potential into the evolutionary future, but adolescence, with the arrival of adultlike physical characteristics, represents the failures of this directive action, the closing of potentiality.

Within Dunn’s racist logic, white children continue to advance past puberty, but black children cannot. Biological determinism supersedes any responsibility for the social conditions black adolescents and adults might endure because of racism, extreme poverty, or lack of educational opportunity. Similarly, Hall understands most non-white, non-European people as “adolescent races.”²⁹ This use of the word “adolescent” does not designate an age category but a temporal position of development fixed in nonwhite adult bodies: “for they are the world’s children and adolescents,” Hall writes.³⁰ Whether Hall imagines adolescence as the acquirement of the “higher and more completely human traits” or as the stasis of regressive traits in “savage” populations, these opposing constructions are mutually enabled by the temporalizing functions of developmentalism in which subjects are ordered along a developmental timeline, heading toward or away from a predetermined arrival point.

Jules Gill-Peterson’s concept of “racial plasticity” in Histories of the Transgender Child illuminates these temporal functions in the history of endocrinology. Gill-Peterson argues that the early twentieth-century concept of biological plasticity worked to “bind sex to race” by interpreting the “sexed form of the internal and external body” as an identifiable characteristic of one’s racial (understood as genetic) heritage.³¹ The words “plastic” and “plasticity” appear more than sixty times in Hall’s two volumes to describe adolescence, representing a fantasy of both biological and psychological impressionability available to parents and educators to shape the future. Early twentieth-century endocrinologists likewise deployed this fantasy of control, suppressing the notion that biological plasticity might have an agency of its own by locating it in the growing body of the child. Childhood figured a docile, manageable potentiality available for manipulation by scientists and doctors despite the fact that children’s bodies grew and changed in surprising and unexpected ways under their care. However, childhood plasticity was synonymous with whiteness, symbolizing the biological potential of white children to achieve a normative, idealized human form in contrast to children of color, whose bodies were imagined as atavistic and resistant to institutional intervention. These are two opposite, but conceptually linked, ways of interpreting biological development as a linear, value-laden process either toward or away from an ideal form.

Like the idea of the child as pure potentiality (the raw material of an idealized future directed by science), racial plasticity expresses an institutional and profoundly eugenic fantasy about the ability of scientists and doctors to shape the direction and form of human evolution. But only some children were perceived as embodying such genetic potential. This symbolic investment in normativity had real consequences in the practice of endocrinology, in which doctors “regarded black children as suitable experimental subjects because of presumed access and disposability, whereas white children were framed as exhibiting the potential for a normative cure or at least improved normality.” Likewise, white trans children and adolescents in the 1960s were often offered “curative” medical support while trans black children were frequently misdiagnosed as either homosexual or schizophrenic and then institutionalized or imprisoned. These differences describe two very different degrees and types of harm carried out as eugenic fantasy: black children and children of color were confined and their possibilities for life extinguished, whereas “plasticity as an abstract whiteness” was projected on white children, justifying “altering the body without consent and in nontherapeutic ways in the name of a universalizing humanity.” These effects demonstrate the vast degree to which reproductive futurism disenfranchises all children, since it is invested in an abstract futurity rather than the present or future lives of actual people, child or adult. The consequences of racial plasticity stretch into the present, where trans women of color appear almost exclusively in news reports about their murders, representing “ongoing forms of social death that reduce their personhood to the barest zero degree,” while trans children appearing in the media today are exclusively white, standing in for a normative futurity achieved through medical technology.³²

In the history of trans medicine, adolescence emerges as the limit point for plasticity’s normative potentiality by the 1970s, when “plasticity was understood to undergo an important change in form during adolescence, becoming less receptive to cultivation by medical science and more unruly in puberty before it began to recede altogether.” This is what allowed Lawrence Newman, a psychiatrist at UCLA in the 1960s, to imagine that he could prevent or cure transsexualism in childhood, but not after puberty.³³ The plasticity of the adolescent body, then, was recognized as having an agency of its own, one that the doctor might intervene in but not, ultimately, control. If the biological plasticity of the child allowed doctors to imagine they could redirect or control developmental outcomes, the stage of adolescence took on the action more like a runaway train, a time of rapid growth whose course could no longer be stopped. According to these temporal logics of developmentalism, scientists could interpret any nonnormative or marginalized group as exhibiting excessive, deviant, or pathological growth that was unresponsive to institutional control or changes in environment. The temporal order of developmentalism structures adulthood as the achievement of normativity, and thus any variation from this narrow teleology constructs adolescence as inferior or developmentally regressive.

Doris Odlum, for example, echoes Hall in her 1931 pamphlet called The Psychology of Adolescence, where she remarks on how “the actual age at which adolescence occurs shows a very marked individual, racial and climatic variation.”³⁴ She confidently explains that climate, a coded reference to racial difference, determines these developmental variations:

Those races with a highly developed civilization “adolesce,” if one may use the term, later than those which are more primitive. The peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions have a slower development than those which inhabit the more temperate zones, and these, in turn, are slower than the subtropical and tropical peoples. The more Western nations develop later than the Eastern, and the Nordic stock more slowly than the Latin. Thus the people of the British Isles have a comparatively late and long adolescence, and this is an important factor in modifying the relations between the developing child and its environment.³⁵

Like Hall, Odlum correlates a prolonged adolescence with a “highly developed civilization” and the people of the British Isles, whereas Eastern, Latin, subtropical, and tropical peoples develop more quickly and thus represent more primitive civilizations.³⁶ Odlum blurs the distinction between biological processes and the social and cultural mechanisms that structure the transition from childhood to adulthood. The social structures of “civilization” and wealth provide access to what Odlum and others perceive as normative development and thus the category of human itself. Odlum states that “adolescence marks the first real appearance of the social sense” in which “the developing human being begins to . . . appreciate its rights and duties in relation to the community.” But these “rights and duties” are functions of normativity, describing the conforming behavior of “good” citizens. And so, markedly, “with the mental defective, even with a relatively high intellectual capacity, the sense of social responsibility is more than correspondingly deficient.”³⁷ Within developmentalism Odlum overlaps figures of the primitive and the mental defective as both perpetually halted without “social sense” in the temporality of adolescence.

We see a similar logic in claims that homosexuality is caused by “arrested development,” a theory popularized by Sigmund Freud, but circulating earlier in medical and sexological discourses.³⁸ For example, a 1955 report by a committee for the British Medical Association treats concerns about prostitution and homosexuality together as coexisting deficiencies.³⁹ This is because, the report claims, “the normal development of the sexual drive passes through auto-erotic and homosexual phases in childhood and adolescence before it reaches the normal heterosexual maturity,” thus homosexuality and male prostitution represent “some immaturity of development which may be due to a variety of causes.”⁴⁰ In 1947 we see the idea of “arrested development” constructed as specifically adolescent in a paper by Dr. Albertine Winner, read at a meeting of the Section of Psychiatry at the Royal Society of Medicine: “In dealing with large numbers of Lesbians one of the most striking things is the recurrent traits of immaturity, mainly emotional, but showing themselves in many unexpected ways, that one meets in women of high intellectual or artistic development. This certainly bears out the view that the homosexual relation is an immature one, an arrest of normal sexual development at an adolescent stage.”⁴¹ Winner sees no contradiction in her assessment of the developmental discrepancy between intellect and emotion, reading high-achieving lesbian women as “immature.” This contradiction is enabled by the logic of developmentalism in which heterosexuality is synonymous with adulthood. Thus, the emotional “immaturity” Winner identifies is merely the lesbian’s unmarried status and her attachment to women rather than men. The problem, which Winner struggles to describe as a problem, is adolescent in nature and thus beyond the corrective reach of the institution. The lesbian, if we circle back to Odlum’s terminology, might have a “high intellectual capacity” but lacks a “sense of social responsibility” to marry and reproduce.

Adolescence functions to explain and hold queer phenomena within adolescence so that such phenomena pose no challenge to the norm of heterosexuality. Within a developmental logic, queer phenomena are excluded from the spectrum of adult human experience because they signify arrested development. Though Freud continued to use the phrase “arrested development” throughout his career, he attempted to recast it in later years as mere human variation, as he does in a 1935 letter to a mother about her homosexual son: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.”⁴² Despite Freud’s impulse to reserve judgment, the problem with this developmental logic remains: all change, growth, or variation is temporally located in childhood or adolescence (regardless of the age of the person) in order to avoid acknowledging variation and change in human phenomena at all ages.

Eugene S. Talbot’s 1898 Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results covers all kinds of “degeneracy,” which he believes to be inheritable and detectable through physical abnormalities in childhood. Thus, Talbot writes, “This work has been written with a special intention of reaching educators and parents.” Educators and parents, Talbot hopes, should be especially watchful of children for the physical traits he describes so that they can be identified as degenerate before doing harm to themselves or society. Childhood functions as a period in which institutional control, and perhaps intervention, can take place, the period in which degeneracy is identifiable and manageable. These educators and parents are called on to be guards of the institution, its gatekeepers, its whistleblowers. Talbot includes homosexuality, trans phenomena, or mere gender nonconformity in his book under the terms “masculinism” and “feminism,” physical conditions that, for him, indicate a range of degenerate conditions.⁴³ Talbot was inspired by the work of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who rejects the idea that crime is a part of human nature and suggests that some people are born criminals, what he understands as a biological reappearance of the traits and behaviors from an earlier evolutionary stage, one replicated in childhood development.⁴⁴ Lombroso writes, “Just as the fetus shows deformities that in the adult would be considered monstrosities, so, too, does the child lack moral sense. When adults possess the following impetuous passions of children, psychiatrists call them moral madmen, and we call them born criminals.” Lombroso’s equating of the child and the criminal stems from recapitulation, as seen in Hall, suggesting at once that criminals are childlike and children are like criminals. Lombroso adds, “Anomalous and monstrous sexual tendencies, like criminal behavior, begin in childhood.”⁴⁵ Through its presumably identifiable location in childhood, criminality becomes more manageable, something that can be identified before the crime is committed, something the doctor can control. At the same time generalizing the “criminal” as a type of person requires the figure of the child, deploying developmentalism to distance and exclude the criminal from the category of human.

This developmental logic can be found not only in condemnations of criminality but also in more sympathetic depictions of “sexual delinquency.” Dr. Robert Sutherland, in a 1939 address to the National Association of Probation Officers, speaks of the “hormonic intoxication of the adolescent, during which there is a tremendous drive towards some form of sexual experience,” as a way to garner sympathy and compassion for those charged with delinquency. Here those charged with delinquency are imagined as human and deserving of sympathy, but their behavior is attributed to the “hormonic intoxication” of adolescence, escaping rational control. Sutherland uses the same dubious evolutionary arguments as Talbot and Lombroso, but he uses them in this instance to recast so-called illegal sexual behaviors as natural: “The work of anthropologists has shown that it is quite a natural thing among primitive people for children to engage experimentally.” Citing research from the Kinsey Report, Sutherland claims, “The youngster who has been indicted for sexual delinquency differs from the average youth only in degree and in the fact that he has been found out.”⁴⁶ Whereas Talbot and Lombroso evoke the temporality of childhood to distance and disavow the “criminal,” Sutherland uses it along with the evolutionary time of “primitive people” to explain and excuse the behavior of British young men who are presumably on their way to a normative adulthood.

As a normalizing and regulatory concept, adolescence continues to produce the temporal and developmental logic used to sustain social hierarchies today. When young people occupy normative categories and roles, such as middle-class whiteness, they are often imagined to be on their way to maturity and thus on their way to social recognition of their personhood and right to civic participation. Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams comments on this phenomenon with regard to Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, young white men who, even after committing mass murder, left the media and the predominantly white community of Littleton, Colorado, in disbelief: “Still their teachers and classmates continue to protest that they were good kids, good students, solid citizens. Even their probation officers (assigned after Klebold and Harris were caught burgling a car) had released them to their parents while praising them as intelligent young men with lots of promise.”⁴⁷ The strong association of masculinity, whiteness, and wealth with the potentiality of an ideal adult citizen made it difficult, impossible even, for parents, teachers, and the media to reconcile the reality of Klebold and Harris’s crimes with these positive social expectations.

However, we can see adolescence work similarly to exclude others from the benefit of the doubt extended to some white, middle-class teenagers. The temporality of categories of age enables these contradictory constructions, in which movement through time can be just as easily imagined as regression or decline as it can potentiality or promise. For example, we might look to Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager murdered by a neighborhood watch vigilante while walking home from a convenience store. Despite Martin’s youth (he had turned seventeen only weeks before) and the fact that he was doing nothing wrong when he was followed and killed by George Zimmerman, media representations following his death focused on his presumed guilt and potential for criminality. While many scholars have remarked on the exclusion of Martin and black boyhood more broadly from conceptions of childhood innocence, it is also notable that media evocations of Martin’s adolescence produced a different set of assumptions than the “promise” of white adolescence stirred by the Columbine shooters. Breslow points to how these representations “locate Martin firmly in a deviant adolescence” in order to imply “that it is understandable to not just question Martin’s foreshortened life, but also to question the grievability of his death.”⁴⁸

In these recent examples, we see the insidious echoes of nineteenth-century racial science, how white adolescence is perceived as a developmental stage on the way to the “higher and more completely human traits” (in the words of Hall), while black adolescence is constructed as developmentally stagnant, with no projected arrival point for personhood or civic participation. Depending on who is looking and what they want to see, the nonconformity, rebellion, or even criminal behavior of white, middle-class teenagers can be perceived as nonthreatening because they already represent the ideals of normalization, whereas the ordinary behaviors of young people of color can be seen as dangerous and criminal, a threat to the social order, because they are always already measured against standards of normalization implicitly defined as white, male, and middle class. These versatile functions of adolescence attest to the urgency of rethinking categories of age as developmental epistemologies complicit in the construction and maintenance of social hierarchies.

Sex Education Pamphlets

Sarah Chinn argues that the specifically “modern” concept of adolescence belonging to the twentieth century is defined by an “assumption of antagonism between adolescents and their parents,” what by the 1990s looked like a “combative relationship between the adult power structure and teenagers,” which “seemed both comfortable and convenient for all involved: older people could rest assured in their sense of superiority and confidence that this new resistance at worst opened up new market possibilities, and young people could occupy various postures of rebellion and independence through combinations of different commodities.” She explains that most social histories attribute the origin of this antagonism to “the 1920s and 1930s, with the flaming youth, the flappers, and the sexual freedom that cinemas and automobiles afforded young people of the middle classes.” And yet, she notes, historians have shown that young people from this period were “remarkably passive in relation to their parents (and, in fact, all adults).”⁴⁹ Chinn argues that the modern idea of adolescence emerged from anxieties about the behaviors of the teenage children of immigrants who “occasioned an impressive amount of hand wringing among reformers, sociologists, journalists, creative writers, educators, policy makers, and intellectuals of all persuasions.” Chinn connects these discourses with assumptions about adolescence today, arguing that “concerns that writers at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries explicitly linked to the young people of immigrant communities—the explosion of commercial sites of leisure (amusement parks, dance halls, theaters, and beer gardens, for example), a loosening of controls on premarital sexuality, rebellion against parents and other authority figures—became the defining characteristics for teen culture more generally as the twentieth century progressed.”⁵⁰

Much like the transference of racial prejudice onto categories of age by 1870 (documented in chapter 1), Chinn describes how forms of antagonism directed toward immigrant populations were mapped onto the category of adolescence more broadly during the twentieth century. In this section I show how the new ways childhood and adolescence were being defined in medical and psychological discourse in the early twentieth century contributed to this trend. The ways that immigrant teenagers were being talked about by reformers echo the ways that Hall talks about “primitives” or the “savage,” trapped in an immature and uncontrollable adolescence. The logic of adolescence unites these racial evocations with the disparaging ways that teenagers are talked about today. Categories of age are deployed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as metaphors for heredity, evolution, and the development of civilization. They functioned to maintain the presumed inferiority of categories of difference while appearing to represent universally shared stages of human life, as they continue to do today. Childhood and adolescence have distinct functions in this process, where childhood comes to represent an idealized potential available for direction and adolescence comes to represent the antagonism that Chinn describes, the limit point of social control and the embodiment of those traits deemed as needing social control in the first place.

In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Adolescence published in 1900, four years before Hall’s Adolescence, editor L. A. Stout’s “Words of Welcome” offered an explicit agenda of control as part of the journal’s framing lines of inquiry: “Why do so many young people choose a life for which nature manifestly does not intend for them? What can be done to correct this evil?”⁵¹ It is unclear what evil Stout is referring to in his “Words of Welcome,” but the “life for which nature manifestly does not intend” intimates concerns about homosexuality. James E. Russell expressed a similar agenda of control in the School Review in 1896, writing, “The important pedagogic consideration is the enormous accession of physical and psychical energy. What shall be done with it? This question the educator must answer.”⁵² Notably, the question of what shall be done with adolescent energy is not one to be posed to adolescents themselves, but one Russell believes the educator must answer.

The title of Louis Starr’s 1915 The Adolescent Period: Its Features and Management also indicates that management and control are the primary concern when it comes to adolescence, and his book devotes one of six chapters to “The Faults and Criminal Tendencies of Adolescents.” Starr’s emphasis on management in The Adolescent Period is typical of publications on adolescence in Britain and the United States from the late nineteenth century forward, replicating that presumed antagonism described by Chinn and constructing the problem of adolescence as one precisely about control. Likewise, a section called “Discipline, Crime, and Punishment” in T. A. A. Hunter and M. E. M. Herford’s 1961 Adolescence: The Years of Indiscretion, covers what was still at midcentury being treated as an obligatory topic in any full-length work on adolescence. Both Hall’s Adolescence and the abridged version called Youth devote a large number of pages to adolescent faults and crimes. The frequency with which chapters appear with titles such as “Adolescent Delinquency and Crime” in C. Stanford Read’s 1928 The Struggles of Male Adolescence, “Some Pathological Cases: The Juvenile Delinquent,” and “The Problem of Discipline during Adolescence” in Olive Wheeler’s 1929 Youth: The Psychology of Adolescence and Its Bearing on the Reorganization of Adolescent Education, for example, suggests that the institutionalized study of adolescence at once emerges out of and reproduces anxieties about deviance and control.

We can see these anxieties about control play out in early twentieth-century sex education campaigns in Britain and the United States. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, organizations such as the British Social Hygiene Council and the Medical Women’s Federation published and circulated dozens of pamphlets with titles such as The Approach to Womanhood, What Parents Should Tell Their Children, and Sex Education of Small Children (see fig. 2.1).⁵³ The content of these pamphlets is overtly regulatory, aimed at policing the knowledge and behavior of children and adolescents through sex education. In these pamphlets the child is imagined as docile and receptive to guidance, whereas the adolescent embodies the unbridled energies of the sexual body, just beyond the control of parents or teachers. What is surprising, however, is how often this archive of sex education pamphlets seems to be aimed at policing parents, displacing their private knowledge of sex with an institutionally sanctioned, scientific discourse about reproduction. And why? Early twentieth-century medical documents often acknowledge morality as a motivating factor for sex education, and yet these gestures appear perfunctory, only a single layer of a much more widespread, secular project of social regulation with explicitly eugenic aims. In the United States similar campaigns were conducted by organizations such as the American Social Hygiene Association, which produced posters and published educational books. While there are contextual differences between Britain and the United States, the institutional discourses I examine here emerge from a shared context of intellectual and scientific production in which experts on both sides of the Atlantic exchanged and cited similar ideas. They reveal the explicitly eugenic aims of controlling sex, a project of normalization requiring the participation of parents, teachers, and doctors.

In What Every Mother Should Tell Her Children, the author emphasizes that it is best to let the child approach the mother about the topic of reproduction, rather than the mother approach the child. But if the child fails to do so before adolescence, “it may be necessary for the mother to ask him point blank if he would not like to hear the beautiful story of birth.” This is because “he must be taught before he reaches the difficult age of adolescence, when the body is undergoing rapid changes and when the nervous system is sensitive and excitable.” Adolescence represents the uncontrollable stage in which hearing the “beautiful story of birth” could have disastrous consequences. The author emphasizes again: “I repeat that it is my opinion, and that of many well-known doctors, that all children must be told the full facts of reproduction before they reach adolescence.” The pamphlet explains in technical detail the reproductive organs and the changes in the body during puberty in a singsongy way for the mother to imitate when speaking to her children. It urges mothers to talk to their children before they might hear from anyone else, because “there is always the danger that she may hear frightening things from other sources, and so it is important for you to ‘get in first.’”⁵⁴ The primary concern is that girls will find out about the pain of childbirth and then fail in their reproductive duty to the nation. Thus, the mother is the only one whose knowledge of sex is authorized by the institution, and the control of this knowledge is considered essential.

The author of this pamphlet, calling herself anonymously a “Workday Mother,” then addresses some potential objections from her imagined audience of mothers: “I expect you will say, ‘But this is perfectly simple. The difficulty arises when one has to explain the father’s part in the scheme of things.’ I agree that is not easy. . . . This may seem terribly shocking and embarrassing at first sight, but the point is this: Children who are trained early bring such a pure, unspoilt attitude of mind to the subject, they can see nothing shameful or embarrassing about it, and they will accept what you tell them in the frankest possible way.”⁵⁵ The difficulty of explaining the “father’s part” is sidestepped, emphasizing telling children in the “frankest possible way” without really telling her readers anything very frankly. The child is imagined as innocent of sexuality—“pure, unspoilt”—and receptive: “They will accept what you tell them.” All notions of sexual desire are located with the “father’s part,” denying the sexuality of all children, but especially girls, who are imagined to be passive listeners and (future) passive sexual partners despite their important childbearing and child-rearing roles. It is unclear how an awareness of these technical details—ovaries and fallopian tubes—will effectively impact the child’s later successful reproductive practices, let alone her use of pleasure. For all its emphasis on frankness, this pamphlet, like many others of its kind, leaves out any useful information about pleasure or desire. The “sensitive and excitable” nervous system of the adolescent is described as a biological force that must be contained and managed beforehand, when the child is still a child. Aside from the occasional reference to “temptations,” and perhaps the “father’s part,” there is really no acknowledgment that sex might be desirable at all. Desire is irrelevant here, perhaps even a hindrance to the institutional goals of sex itself.

In a 1935 pamphlet called How You Grow: A Book for Boys in the Medical Federation Papers, Theodore Tucker and Muriel Pout acknowledge sexual pleasure as a matter of prevention, explaining that “both girls and boys should take care that their clothing does not get tight between the thighs, as it excites nerves connected with the sex glands and starts them off working too quickly.” Girls and boys, too, should even be cautious that they do not outgrow their pajamas without noticing, so as to prevent accidental stimulation. And “those of you who roll up into a ball, like hedgehogs” also need to beware that there is enough room in the pajama bottoms. Tucker and Pout caution, if the “sex glands” should get sensitive for any reason, it is important not to touch them because “this would be unwise as if, when something makes your eye smart, you were to start rubbing that, for it will only make it worse.” Worse, indeed. Tucker and Pout explain that, luckily, what we have to do is very simple to ensure our good health, but there is one more thing they want us to remember. “That is,” they write, “the way we think about these things affects the way the sex glands work.” And so they suggest that “as a matter of fact, the less we think about them the better,” and now that “you know how they work, and how to keep them healthy, you will not have to bother yourself by wondering about them.”⁵⁶ They advise plenty of exercise, outdoor activities, and even work to keep the mind clear. And, if we happen to find people who want to talk about sex, it is only because they are very ignorant, and so we need to take great measures to stay away from them.

Doris Odlum repeats the words of caution offered by the “Workday Mother” in her 1931 pamphlet The Psychology of Adolescence. In a section on “The Teaching of Sex Knowledge,” she explains how it is essential to give the proper information about sexual functions. This information is “not charged with any real emotional significance,” since the child “feels very little more personal concern with the matter than he [sic] does with the question of where trees or rabbits come from and how they grow, or how a motor car is made.” But, for the adolescent, “the question has become intensely personal, heavily charged with emotion,” and that is why the question of sex must be dealt with simply and without shame when children are still children. Odlum regrets that few parents are equipped to do this properly, since they themselves are so full of shame or embarrassment in regard to sex. But if the parents wait until adolescence, it may be too late, since “later on great damage may be done by explanations given by the wrong person or at the wrong time or in the wrong way, and even more damage, perhaps, may be done by withholding necessary explanations.”⁵⁷

Childhood is positioned here as the moment when parental and institutional intervention is simple and effective in its goals, but adolescence is the moment when it may already be too late. Odlum puts enormous pressure on the parent to achieve the proper outcome with the teaching of sex education. She writes that “nothing is more fatal than handing an adolescent boy or girl a book dealing with the facts of life, and telling them that they will find everything that they ought to know clearly explained there.” This is because no book can “adjust itself to the needs of the person who reads it, and that is quite essential in such a matter as this,” since “some of us have all sorts of personal problems and difficulties which make us interpret things in different ways, and a mere statement of facts cannot by any means satisfy all the problems and questions, mostly of a quite personal nature, that trouble the adolescent.” The only solution is for sex information to be given in person and adjusted to the needs of the questioner. “If we fail in this,” Odlum warns, “we shall be sowing the seeds of fear and distrust, both of life and of self, and in adolescence, at the time when the sex urge is awakening, what should be the most beautiful and wonderful mystery of life is inevitably spoiled from the outset.”⁵⁸

Sex education appears here to be placed in the hands of parents—mothers, specifically—when it is really being put in the hands of institutions who aim to regulate what it is the mother says and doesn’t say, thinks and doesn’t think, about sex. The pamphlet operates under the assumption that mothers will not know what to say to their children, rendering their own experiences with sex and desire irrelevant, since the story they are to tell about sex is the story told by the psychologist, doctor, or expert. Michel Foucault writes that an “entire medico-sexual regime took hold of the family milieu.”⁵⁹ In this sense instruction is a form of control working backward onto the instructor, quite explicitly a lesson for adults as much as for the children these adults are supposed to teach. In the proliferation of literature on child and adolescent development written before and after Hall’s Adolescence, parents, teachers, and doctors are made participants in a system of cooperative watchfulness that regulates exactly how a child should develop and at which rate and in what direction. And when that child fails to meet expectations, it is not only the child who is held responsible but even more so the adults who have been charged with that child’s progress, who have, in a sense, been charged with the failure to meet these expectations themselves.

In the United States Margaret Sanger, who was an early advocate for birth control, identifies the enormous responsibility placed on mothers and uses it to make a eugenic argument for planned parenthood.⁶⁰ In her 1920 book Woman and the New Race, Sanger accepts the blame for women as the ones responsible for birthing and producing mental defectives, criminals, prostitutes—all recently developed categories of undesirables named by medical and psychological discourses:

The creators of over-population are the women, who, while wringing their hands over each fresh horror, submit anew to their task of producing the multitudes who will bring about the next tragedy of civilization.

While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively.⁶¹

The book is a polemical argument for women to take this responsibility into their own hands through voluntary motherhood, but this seemingly feminist argument is made through the eugenic project of population control. Her eugenicist arguments appear to operate rhetorically in the text as the least controversial part of the book, the most socially acceptable platform for her much more controversial claim that women should have reproductive rights.⁶² The eugenic project of “racial hygiene” provides the backdrop for the sex education campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1938, for example, the medical adviser and secretary for the Central Council for Health Education, Robert Sutherland, gave a report on “Sexual Delinquency” that was equally concerned with preventing “sexual vice” as it was concerned with figuring out how to get married people to have reproductive sex.⁶³ “Delinquency” in this context includes the failure of married people to produce children. The problem of sex was not simply one of regulating knowledge and controlling the behaviors of young people but of regulating the entire project of reproduction on a national and institutional scale through the family. The family provides the access required for the teacher, doctor, and psychologist to monitor a child’s upbringing and education. Reproduction is the first priority here, though not in a strictly moral sense, but rather in regard to producing the nation’s ideal citizens under circumstances within institutional reach.

In an undated pamphlet titled Adolescence, published by the Mothers’ Union, marriage and childbearing are the ultimate goals of educating their members about adolescence. The pamphlet states in its conclusion that “the Mothers’ Union stands for the view that the bond should be indissoluble, or rather that marriage is less a bond than a relationship, differing from others only as being the result not of birth, but of choice.” It is perhaps surprising that the word “choice” is emphasized here, since the pamphlet goes on to describe marriage as an “obligation” in which “bride and bridegroom completely understand the responsibilities and the conditions of their new relationship to each other.” These responsibilities and conditions are to “fully learn the beauty and dignity of sex, and realize it as a solemn trust from God Himself for the happiness of men and women, and continuance of the race in the children.”⁶⁴ Any spiritual or emotional dimension of marriage is overshadowed by the evolutionary responsibility of married men and women to ensure the “continuance of the race.” Likewise, in the 1938 pamphlet called What Every Mother Should Tell Her Children circulated by the Medical Women’s Federation, the rationale for reproduction is stated directly as an obligation to the nation: “There was never a time when the country was so much in need of fine, healthy citizens, and our children must be armed with the knowledge which will protect them against the dangers and temptations they will meet as they grow older; and which will help them to make a success of marriage and parenthood.”⁶⁵ The danger against which “children must be armed” consists of any nonnormative sexual behavior, ranging from homosexuality to promiscuity to prostitution. The goal is not just reproduction but reproduction under the carefully controlled circumstances of the white, middle-class British family. The project of managing the production of “fine, healthy citizens” through the sex education of youth is an overt theme in many of these early British pamphlets, which appear to be a response to and a perpetuation of the myth of a “lost generation” of educated, upper-middle-class citizens in World War I.⁶⁶ The obligation to produce children carried with it specific assumptions about whiteness and social class within which such production should take place.

Another pamphlet from the 1930s, titled “England’s Girls and England’s Future,” rises to the level of propaganda, overtly stating its intention to “rouse the ambition of the girls of England” with its “ambitious title.” However, the direct address for this pamphlet still appears to be for the parent, rather than the girl herself, who is spoken about in the third person. Far from inspirational, the content of the pamphlet quickly turns threatening:

For if she does not realise her responsibility for that future, and accept whatever the fulfillment of that responsibility entails, she is evading the universal call to service—and service is the payment she is called to make for the great gift of life entrusted to her.

Every girl, then, is bound to realise and accept her responsibility for the future, and if she is to fulfil that responsibility she can only do so by realising that the present, her every-day life and daily actions, are all-important in shaping that future.⁶⁷

We can see here the logic of what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” in which the freedom and needs of a living, agential English girl must be sacrificed for the future, for children that do not even exist.⁶⁸ Thus, if a girl does not realize her “responsibility” to produce children for the nation, she is “evading” her “call to service” and the “payment she is called to make” for having reproductive capacities, the “great gift of life entrusted to her.” The class dimensions of this eugenic project are evident in the euphemistic reference to how “her every-day life and daily actions” have something to do with “shaping that future.” It is not enough for a girl to live her life as she wishes and then later settle down and produce citizens for the nation. Fears about “vice,” promiscuity, homosexuality, and prostitution were coded with class prejudice mapped here onto a girl’s genetic potential, as if these behaviors initiated evolutionary decline in the body of a girl. Gill-Peterson writes, “There is no meaningful, nonideological difference between so-called positive and negative eugenics, and the historical binding of race to reproduction remains largely unchallenged, which is to say unmarked and unspoken, in medical science today.”⁶⁹

Taken together these sex education pamphlets illustrate the co-constitutive relation between categories of age and categories of difference. While the figure of the child most often represented knowability, control, and the promise of science to direct the future, the adolescent stood in for the unknown, the unmanageable, and the limits of institutional control. One way we might think about the movement of this institutional discourse is through Friedrich Nietzsche’s own critique; here the child and the adolescent are the “idea” that allows for classifications of the criminal, the abnormal, the homosexual, and the prostitute to appear “known” to an institutional expertise, an expertise so well used to it that they are hardly afraid of the “idea” anymore.⁷⁰ Adolescence functions in these contexts to contain anxieties about race and class difference, queer and trans phenomena, and the instability of scientific knowledge itself. And when attempts at social control failed (as they inevitably did), the category of adolescence served as the cause of those failures, naturalizing resistance into the category itself, a mechanism used to evade the ethical limits for managing the private life and personhood of others.

Identity and Selfhood

In the prologue to Erik Erikson’s 1968 Identity: Youth and Crisis, he likens the distress experienced by soldiers returning from World War II—who “had through the exigencies of war lost a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity”—with what he understood as the disturbed behavior of adolescents, arguing that symptoms evident of a pathology in veterans were developmentally normal in adolescence: “Since then, we have recognized the same central disturbance in severely conflicted young people whose sense of confusion is due, rather, to a war within themselves, and in confused rebels and destructive delinquents who war with their society.” He concludes, “Thus, we have learned to ascribe a normative ‘identity crisis’ to the age of adolescence and young adulthood.”⁷¹ Erikson’s conception of identity cannot be reduced to mere social conformity, since he believed that a healthy self-concept resulted from the successful balance between self-determination and social expectations; however, the “confused rebels” and “destructive delinquents” he mentions are nonetheless characterized as failing to accomplish this process of normalization, as if the symptoms of trauma Erikson himself describes in adolescents are not due to traumatic experiences but rather from breakdowns in the developmental process of identity formation. Erikson’s concept of identity suggests that adolescence is a time of confusion, instability, and distress while imagining adulthood as the end result of this process, a stable arrival point of independence and self-determination. The nineteenth-century logic of developmentalism, along with its temporal mapping of selfhood as an interiority accessed through memory, makes this mid-twentieth-century notion of identity possible.⁷²

The concept of identity emerges in the mid-twentieth century as a conceptually new form for the logic of developmentalism, structuring normative categories as synonymous with the arrival at adulthood while nonnormative or marginalized categories continue to signal arrested development, as they do today. Take, for example, a 2013 article in the New Yorker by Margaret Talbot that dismissively frames trans identity as one more form of postmodern self-expression in a world where “plastic surgery, tattoos and piercings have made people more comfortable with body modification.”⁷³ Talbot bemoans the ordinariness of transitioning among adolescents, talking about trans identity as if it is just another teen trend. She writes, “for high-school seniors like Skylar—who live in prosperous suburbs, have doting parents, attend good schools, and get excellent grades while studding their transcripts with extracurricular activities—the hardest part of the college application is often the personal essay.” In the context of this wealth and privilege, Talbot all but says Skylar is lucky to be trans so that he has something to set him apart on his college application. She offhandedly acknowledges that some transgender children face challenges, like bullying, but insists that “Skylar’s more seamless story is becoming increasingly common.” In the liberal town where Skylar grew up, Talbot writes, “nobody seriously challenged his decision to change gender. Some of his peers even expressed a certain envy.”

Another mom interviewed by Talbot, given the pseudonym “Danielle,” casts doubt on her child’s desire to transition by echoing this characterization of trans identity as a trendy, easily available mode of adolescent individuation: “Danielle said that she had met many teen-agers who seemed to regard their bodies as endlessly modifiable, through piercings, or tattoos, or even workout regimens. She wondered if sexual orientation was beginning to seem boring as a form of identity; gay people were getting married, and perhaps seemed too settled.”⁷⁴ Danielle appears to insinuate that teens who come out as gay or lesbian do so only to set themselves apart from the crowd and that, if they come out as trans, they do so because they are bored with being gay or think that being gay is not “special” enough anymore. Danielle uses common assumptions about adolescence to dismiss trans phenomena as ordinary, widespread experiences of adolescent angst taken too far: “I feel like a lot of these kids, including my daughter, might be going through identity struggles, a lot of them are trying on roles.”⁷⁵ Talbot briefly acknowledges that “teen-agers who identify as transgender appear to be at higher risk for depression and suicide”; however, her wording implies that these numbers are probably misleading.⁷⁶ Danielle remarks, “a lot of these kids are sad for a variety of reasons. Maybe the gender feelings are the underlying cause, maybe not.” Conceptions of adolescence as an “identity crisis” construct adolescent self-knowledge as inherently suspect. Adolescent knowing is dismissed as whim or drama, hormonal or identity instability surrounding a new teen trend.

Gill-Peterson demonstrates that despite claims like Talbot’s, medical archives show that trans children have existed for (at least) a century. Grappling with the great harm that has been done to trans and intersex children in the name of normativity and scientific progress, she asserts the need for validating self-knowledge and “actually listening to what trans children say about themselves, grounding medical care in their desires, and abandoning binary models of transition and dysphoria that continue to confine children to developmental teleologies ending in heterosexual masculinity or femininity.”⁷⁷ Talbot uses a binary model of gender and sexuality to further invalidate Skylar, beginning with her description of Skylar’s gender presentation and dating history. Though Skylar transitioned to male, Talbot suspiciously remarks that “in his new guise, he doesn’t labor to come across as conventionally masculine. Like many ‘trans’ people of his generation, he is comfortable with some gender ambiguity, and doesn’t feel the need to be, as he puts it, a ‘macho bro.’” Talbot likewise describes a popular video made by Annette Bening and Warren Beatty’s son Stephen, who is FTM, in which he identifies “as a transman, a faggy queen, a homosexual, a queer, a nerdfighter, a writer, an artist, and a guy who needs a haircut.”⁷⁸

Halfway through the article, Talbot reveals that Skylar, like Stephen, dates boys. She describes his sexuality, however, as “all a little gauzy and theoretical.” Skylar is clear enough about his sexuality in his statements, and so this comment betrays Talbot’s struggle to recognize queer ways of being as valid. She explains, using a first-person “we” that exposes who she imagines her readers to be: “It can be hard for some of us to imagine a sexuality that is not inextricably linked to our gender.” Skylar’s decision to transition does not make sense to her since he continues to date boys; in her mind his gender and sexuality, then, must not be linked. She cannot conceive of the myriad of gender identifications that might “feel right” in their connection to the equally myriad, equally nonnormative possibilities for sexuality and desire. Skylar’s queerness troubles Talbot because his narrative does not conform to the gender binary projected in popular stories of trans children, and she deploys common assumptions about the instability of adolescence to undermine his agency and self-knowledge.

Queer possibilities for identity do not anticipate or require points of arrival, nor are arrivals understood as fixed in themselves. Such arrivals are not fixed moments of identity but identifications occurring in the ordinary movement between fluidity and fixity over time. This is not the version of postmodern fluidity referenced by Talbot, which poses as the “freedom” to choose who we are when in fact it is precisely that which is deemed desirable by normative cultural standards that has been scripted ahead of time, without our input or consent, by this neoliberal capitalist version of selfhood.⁷⁹ What we find in this version of postmodern fluidity, rather than greater acceptance of variation, are even more rigid boundaries around the normal, right, and good way to occupy the binary of man or woman. What we find are even greater imperatives to strive to occupy these standards, to occupy an ideal imagined and sold to us by someone else. This is merely another version of developmentalism deployed to maintain existing social norms. Transgender and queer theories of selfhood, on the other hand, put pressure on the developmental narrative of adolescence, speaking instead of the queer child who might grow sideways, or the reordering or rejection of developmental sequence itself, or the liberatory potential for naming the self at any point in the prescribed sequence.⁸⁰ Trans embodiment likewise reveals the possibility of reconstruction, revision, and remaking outside the developmental imperative.

We can resist the normalizing functions of developmentalism through the analytic reversal posed by Julia Kristeva, in which we understand “the adolescent, like the child,” as a “mythical figure of the imaginary that enables us to distance ourselves from some of our failings, splittings of ego, disavowals or mere desires, which it reifies into the figure of someone who has not yet grown up.” We might understand this theory as one of an individual mind, full of the peculiarities of emotion, memory, and history accessible through the figure of oneself as an adolescent, but it is also a theory of the cultural imaginary and its shared meanings and disavowals over time. We can see this psychic function played out at the turn of the twentieth century with proclamations about the “discovery” of adolescence, confirming beliefs in Western superiority and fulfilling the promise of science to direct the future. At the same time Hall and Dunn managed their fears of a racialized Other through the developmental logic of adolescence. Early twentieth-century sex education pamphlets projected uncontrollable sexual desire onto the adolescent body while constructing a fantasy that such energies might be directed toward eugenic aims. Talbot uses adolescence to contain the trans phenomena that permeate all human experience, in which adolescence serves to distance nonnormative gender feelings, expressions, and identifications as temporary, part of growing up, or a sign of adult immaturity. Reading the figure of the adolescent for patterns of disavowal and desire reveals the limits of the visible, the possible, the real, and, according to Kristeva, “allows us to see, hear, and read these subjective fluctuations.”⁸¹

Returning to Margaret Lowenfeld’s 1934 lecture on “Youth and Health” discussed in the opening of this chapter, Kristeva’s theorization provides a lens through which to deconstruct these claims about adolescence. Though Lowenfeld distances herself from the adolescent, she also imagines the adolescent in terms she might use for an adult, even one such as herself. “The adolescent has two main hungers,” she says. “The first is the hunger for knowledge, and the second the hunger for power.” In the same breath Lowenfeld offers a validation and dismissal of these desires, which are “very real to the girl and boy themselves” but “looked at very differently by the outside world.”⁸² This phrasing suggests an evasion—we do not know where Lowenfeld stands on the issue, with the girl and boy themselves or with the outside world. Ironically, the distance she constructs between herself and the adolescent is what establishes her own claim to knowledge and power, her authority to speak about adolescents in the first place, and yet she imagines them as like herself, struggling to be recognized as legitimate in a new field of expertise and in a medical field dominated by men. The distance she has constructed between herself and the adolescent is fragile, barely holding that distance at bay, threatening to dissolve. In the copy of this lecture in Lowenfeld’s papers at the Wellcome Library, these lines are typed in all capital letters, signaling the importance of these remarks, the way they might have been emphasized in the style of her delivery.

Between the lines of these projections, Lowenfeld appears to simultaneously recognize and deny that the adolescent is a person, someone who wants knowledge and power, just as she does. The solution to these hungers further reveals how the figure of the adolescent in her lecture is reflective of her own subjective fluctuations, as she suggests that they learn about science and medicine, how to become doctors and researchers. She confidently declares that the “science of health” offers the “satisfaction we need.” She explains, “There is nothing so delightful at times as to talk to children on the microbe-hunters, to give them the life stories of Pasteur and Koch, and the men who cleaned the Panama Canal from yellow fever, and the men who pursued and destroyed the sleeping sickness germ in Africa. There is enough material in all that for sheer adventure and excitement and heroism, far better than anything in the cinema. The facts stand for themselves. They carry the feeling that there is in this progress of science.”⁸³ Lowenfeld names the hungers of the adolescent in such a way that they mirror her own desires and thus give her the knowledge and power to grant these desires, to bring full circle the fulfillment of her own hungers. Thus, it is her participation in the “science of health” that carries this feeling—her feeling—in the progress of science. Despite her sympathetic portrayal of young people, Lowenfeld must stop short of acknowledging that, by her own description, adolescents are much like adults. The authority of this emerging discourse requires that adolescents function as an object of study and not the source of self-knowledge. Lowenfeld cannot deny the validity of this discourse without reevaluating the importance of her role in the lives of her patients, a role that was still under tenuous construction in 1934. She must distance the adolescent as a queer creature, an unknown, a perpetual object of scientific study, because she cannot give over to adolescents themselves the power to say who they are without also calling into question the social need for her institutional authority. The active construction of her authority depends on her hunger for knowledge, her hunger for power, suggesting her projection of desire in these constructions. And yet, Lowenfeld cannot be reduced to the operations of an institutional discourse but is caught in a complex system of institutional authority and expertise in which she is negotiating for her own voice, her own desires, her own power as a person. However, in these systemic relations the adolescent of Lowenfeld’s discourse is not a person but a figure conjured from memory and experience to fulfill her own needs.

Doris Odlum, on the other hand, more successfully deploys a conception of adolescence much like Kristeva’s to deconstruct the category entirely, at the end of her 1931 pamphlet, The Psychology of Adolescence. At first she cautions parents about attempting to reproduce images of themselves in their children: “Are we so successful and happy in the conduct of our lives that we wish their lives to be a replica of our own? Even if children could see and experience life second-hand through adults, would this even be good for them?” Odlum goes one step further, reversing the logic of developmentalism to shift adolescence into the temporal space of adulthood, unraveling both categories at once: “Are we, in fact, much more than adolescents ourselves? Is it even doubtful whether anybody can be said to be wholly grown up, if by that we mean that we have struck a perfectly satisfactory balance between the primitive urges of our nature and the requirements of reality, so that we are harmoniously functioning organisms, balanced to withstand stresses from without or assailings from within; beings whose judgment is not clouded by emotion, whose orientation is firmly established in relation to our fellows and the life here, and to the infinite and the hereafter.”⁸⁴ In this moment Odlum grapples with the degree to which the expectations she has just established for adolescents—the requirements for achieving a “normal” maturity—are impossible even for adults, even for someone such as herself. The struggles that Odlum has just outlined as belonging to adolescence are in fact the very struggles that belong to adulthood, the very struggles of life itself.

As Odlum acknowledges, adolescent struggles are human struggles, and they require human solutions. Can there be institutional practices of care and knowledge-making that are not driven by hierarchy and control? Thinking of identity as an active and ongoing process of self-determination might support such an ethical relationality between institutional expertise and human subjects, if such a concept were to extend to children and adolescents in the first place. However, identity more often constructs childhood as a blank space shielded by innocence and adolescence as an unpredictable and unknowable instability before self-determination is imagined as possible. The temporal slide enabled by developmentalism only retroactively attributes the process of successful identity formation in adolescence once a normative adulthood is achieved. During adolescence any act of self-determination can be interpreted as temporary, experimental, misguided, or disordered. And in adulthood marginalized identities continue to be interpreted as underdevelopment or immaturity. A queer conception of identity, however, would not be predictive, would not anticipate or wish for certain outcomes. It would emphasize nonlinear movement to conceptualize growth outside developmental narratives of progress. If the actual, phenomenological world is itself queer already, and it is our language that defines, stabilizes, constructs, shapes, and biases it, then we might attend more fully to the queerness and variation of the world we live in, the queerness of the human body, and the queerness of identity, human development, and growth.