epilogue

QUEER THEORY IN THE AGE OF
ALTERNATIVE FACTS

It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.

—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

The world we find ourselves in today is not the same world of the turn of the twentieth century, when stabilizing notions of scientific truth were under construction in new institutions negotiating for their authority to speak the truth about human beings. The defensiveness of those constructions in the early twentieth century exposes the fragility of medical and scientific discourses rather than their dominance. In 1904, the same year that G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence was published, a newspaper printed the following editorial, offhandedly dismissing the authority of emerging institutional discourses: “The psycho-pathologists claim to have discovered the anatomical cause for every intellectual and ethical defect, and there is even talk of converting bad boys into good ones by means of surgery, the cauterization of the turbinated bone and a judicious application of the knife to the pharyngeal region being suggested as effective methods of dealing with juvenile depravity. The lack of any suggested method of restricting boy’s capacity for noise, during childhood and adolescence shows that these learned psycho-pathologists have not yet sounded the depths of this profound subject.”¹ The tone is overtly sarcastic, calling into question the claims of the “psycho-pathologists” and their delusions “of converting bad boys into good ones.” The last line, rather than expressing a literal and sincere desire to silence young people, expresses a realistic skepticism about the power of institutions to know and to control people.

The British novelist Rose Macaulay includes a similarly snide remark about the scientific study of youth in a 1923 novel, doubting that the “number of years lived” somehow indicates that people share a “temperamental bond,” in which “people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance.” Thus, “the young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation.”² Here Macaulay resists the types of generalizations made by Hall and others about adolescence as an object of study. She suggests that young people are not generalizable in such a way but that they are instead as various in feeling, personality, and thought as adults. In 1929 the British philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley suggested in the London Times Literary Supplement: “We are bound to ask how far any of the abstract generalizations of science can be declared in an absolute sense more factual than that of Religion. Would it not be truer, and more conducive to the widest freethinking, to regard both as metaphorical, not as strict and literal but figurative and analogical expression of experienced reality?”³ Bradley complicates faith in scientific knowledge to direct the future and emphasizes the situatedness of all knowledge production, a position we might identify with later poststructuralist views. These examples illustrate that institutional discourses expressed the desire for authority and expertise more so than the realization of it in the early twentieth century.

Belief in the objectivity and “truth” of science was not taken for granted until the mid-twentieth century, and within a mere few decades poststructuralist theory began to expose the social constructedness of science and institutional knowledge. From this standpoint the insights of poststructuralism were not exactly new but instead in part a renewal of the epistemological complexities that by midcentury had been forgotten.⁴ We might say the same for the ways that subjectivity and identity were understood, in which previously obscured old ideas and old ways of knowing resurfaced with new functions. For example, John Dollimore explains,

Of the few central beliefs uniting the various post-structuralisms (and connecting them with post/modernism) this is one of the most important: human identity is to be seen as constituted as well as constitutive; constituted (not determined) by, for example, the pre-existing structures of language and ideology, and by the material conditions of human existence. Thus is the subject decentered, and subjectivity revealed as a kind of subjection—not the antithesis of social process but its focus.

In the early modern period also the individual was seen as constituted by and in relation to—even the effect of—a pre-existing order. To know oneself was to know that order.

Carla Freccero puts this another way: “If early modern European textuality foregrounds the status of the subject as linguistically constructed, contingent, textual, and fragmented, then early modern subjectivity has more in common with psychoanalytic and poststructuralist notions of the subject than it does with the modernity that appears in the intervening period.”⁵ The difference between post-structuralist and early modern understandings of the self has to do with the acceptance or rejection of the social order within which one is entangled. To know for the early modern is to accept one’s place. To know for poststructuralism is to question the social order and subvert it. If “knowing oneself” prior to the nineteenth century meant knowing one’s place within an established social order; in contrast, one of the most powerful mythologies of adolescence from the twentieth century is that “knowing oneself” emerges from an authentic sense of individuality that takes place before one finds one’s place in the world, concealing the social structures that script the search for identity in the first place. This is not to uphold any one time period as superior but rather to notice that all thought cycles through at various times for various purposes, and when that thought no longer serves us, we shift again. These are the necessary processes of making meaning in the world.

As the epistemological ground shifts once again, we find ourselves in another moment of forgetting, in which the present is lamented as proof of our decline, a “Post-truth Era” in which facts do not seem to matter anymore. Lee McIntyre explains that “the word ‘post-truth’ is irreducibly normative,” “an expression of concern by those who care about the concept of truth and feel that it is under attack.”⁶ The Oxford English Dictionary named “post-truth” the word of the year in November 2016—the same month Donald Trump was elected president. It defines “post-truth” as “related to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”⁷ McIntyre believes that “what is striking about the idea of post-truth is not just that truth is being challenged, but that it is being challenged as a mechanism for asserting political dominance.”⁸ Between 2016 and 2018 at least six books on post-truth were published in Britain and the United States, pointing to phenomena like Brexit, Trump’s election, and climate-change denial as the sad results of people being unable to discern what is true and what is not.⁹ In January 2017 Kellyanne Conway appeared on Meet the Press and defended the spurious claims that President Trump’s inauguration had the largest attendance in history, insisting that White House press secretary Sean Spicer was not lying about attendance numbers but that he was instead providing “alternative facts.”¹⁰ Certainly, something has changed. But what, exactly? And what should be done about it?

Conway’s phrasing “alternative facts” has an unsettling resonance with queer theory, where the word “alternative” has a counterculture connotation nearly synonymous with antinormativity. Queer theory is a practice of thinking outside what is generally presented to us as thinkable or knowable. Queer, in this sense, is an epistemological alternative to the institutions and social norms that function as the “truth” about lives, bodies, and the world. The work of queer theory, as with other poststructuralist methods, has been traditionally understood as engaged in disrupting notions of truth within a culture that has believed in capital-T truth. But, in her interview on Meet the Press, Conway seemed to position herself and the White House as the agents of radical resignification against the tyranny of the so-called liberal news media. What is the value of queer theory in a world in which disrupting truth claims has become the work of an autocratic political power? Have the methods of queer theory been co-opted for evil?

Bruno Latour poses a similar question about poststructuralism, but as early as 2004, after he read in the New York Times about a Republican strategist who openly admitted that science proved the existence of climate change but stated that Republicans should “continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue” to promote special interests over protective legislation. Latour writes, “Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show the ‘lack of scientific certainty’ inherent in the construction of facts. I too make it a ‘primary issue.’ But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument—or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?”¹¹

As I discussed in my introduction, this reevaluation of critique has occurred in multiple fields of study, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling in 2003 and in Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique in 2015, for example. In the field of children’s literature, Marah Gubar, speaking about the deconstructive trends of the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, writes, “Why have so many of us working in childhood studies been content to dispose, not propose?”¹² McIntyre, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and the History of Science at Boston University and an instructor in ethics at the Harvard Extension School, feels that poststructuralist methodologies are to blame for post-truth, writing, “It is embarrassing to admit that one of the saddest roots of the post-truth phenomenon seems to have come directly out of colleges and universities.”¹³ He names Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as the cause, and he interprets Latour’s 2004 article as an admission of culpability in the politics of climate-science denial. At moments in his 2004 article, Latour appears to admit that he is to blame:

Entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to the truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?¹⁴

McIntyre agrees, writing that those who use poststructuralist methods “must accept some responsibility for undermining the idea that facts matter in the assessment of reality, and not foreseeing the damage this could cause.”¹⁵ Ironically, this is the very same argument found on conservative blogs about “postmodernism” and academia.¹⁶ McIntyre admits that a close reading of Derrida and Foucault might not legitimately support right-wing ideology, acknowledging “the irony that in a few decades the right has evolved from critiquing postmodernism—for example, Lynne Cheney’s Telling the Truth—to the current situation.” McIntyre’s solution is “respecting truth,” “to stand up for the notion of truth and learn how to fight back.”¹⁷ But I am not so sure.

Perhaps I am hesitant to embrace again a stable and objective notion of “truth” because, less than a century ago, scientists and doctors claimed that it was a “fact” that homosexuality was unnatural and pathological. They also claimed that the white European male was superior to all other human beings based on flimsy evidence like skull measurements. The problem has always been that what circulates as the “truth” is so often used to confirm existing social norms and uphold existing social hierarchies. Two examples from the twentieth century, the tobacco industry and the sugar industry, demonstrate how this happens, having been exposed as using their influence to pay for scientific research from experts that supported their interests while suppressing research that was bad for business.¹⁸ That is, only the powerful get to say what the truth is. People were deceived by these industries in much the same way that climate-science denial is motivated by special interests, but I don’t see anyone calling the 1950s the “Post-truth Era.” The type of faith in objective truth that McIntyre wants to go back to is fairly recent in origin—we can trace it back to the late nineteenth century when faith in science began to operate alongside (or in place of) the capital-T truth that was God’s Truth. This epistemological shift in the nineteenth century enjoyed a degree of acceptance and even dominance for not even half a century before poststructuralist theorists like Foucault started exposing the cultural dynamics at play in the production of scientific knowledge.

I have yet to discover a poststructuralist theorist out there deceiving the masses for political gain. And I think it goes without saying that Trump did not read Foucault or Derrida and that Trump supporters or Brexit voters are not made up of university graduates who got the wrong idea about poststructuralist theory and now think that facts don’t matter anymore. What is so troubling about our world today is that Trump seems to be able to say anything he likes while everyone around him protests, and what he says still circulates as “truth” even when it is a “provable falsehood,” as Chuck Todd put it to Conway on Meet the Press.¹⁹ Real people are disenfranchised, imprisoned, lost, or killed because of his words. Poststructuralist theories anticipate these abuses of power by having claimed all along that institutional power determines what functions as “true” or not. And never is that insight more apparent than right now. Queer theory is not complicit in the postmodern crisis of knowledge-making. It diagnoses it. I think Kemi Adeyemi gets at this point another way in her article “Donald Trump Is the Perfect Man for the Job.” She talks about how the language used to make sense of what happened in Trump’s election frames all possible causes as the result of individual actions rather than accounting for institutional structures, preventing our recognition that “the United States was founded on a violent colonial encounter, and that the job of the president is itself emergent from and dependent on the racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia of this encounter. In other words, the president’s ‘job’ is to uphold and protect racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, as they are core virtues of the U.S. American constitution.”²⁰ Trump merely exposes this history and flaunts it without remorse or shame.

I wonder too if the term “post-truth” and its Oxford English Dictionary definition isn’t very useful for describing the epistemological norms of the present moment.²¹ As McIntyre notes, people have always been prone to confirmation bias, prone to trusting information that appeals to their emotions and personal beliefs, and this has been exploited by politicians since the beginning of politicians. Racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia run deep and are powerful motivators. Likewise, the people spreading false information—whether it is from the White House or clickbait from Russian bots—are not confused about what is true and what is not. They are purposefully attempting to manipulate people (or in the case of bots, maybe just trying to make money through clicks). Neoliberal capitalism is based on the principle of exploitation. I am wary too of the charge that all social ills of the present are caused by the internet and by social media. It isn’t the internet as a technology or how individual users isolate themselves and create echo chambers of self-validating information. The algorithms of Facebook and YouTube do this, not users themselves, pointing to a systemic problem in which echo chambers are the best method of exploiting users’ online activity. The post-truth phenomenon is caused by how capitalism exploits the internet, profiling users with an incredibly specific level of detail, how companies like Cambridge Analytica can target voters with content specifically designed to persuade them for or against particular candidates. Post-truth is not caused by individual failure to discern the truth but instead by the incredible sophistication of today’s social-manipulation technologies—an intensification of the mechanisms of power already in place before the internet was invented.

These dynamics are explained by what Rebekah Sheldon calls somatic capitalism, which has much in common with but “differs from eugenic biopolitics in its mode of address (moving from population and demography to algorithmic incitement and capacity extraction)” and which “merely deepens and intensifies the paramount biopolitical project of the twentieth century: the elicitation and management of surplus vitality.” At the heart of somatic capitalism, Sheldon finds “the literal and material conjunction of the child and capital,” “the intervention into and monetization of life-itself.”²² As such, the child is a form of capital available for exploitation rather than a latent subjectivity in need of shaping or directing, and the body is a set of capacities more so than a unified subject.²³ Importantly, “the child serves as the switch gate for somatic capitalism, giving smooth flow, shape, and circuit to several knotty problematics.” Sheldon powerfully illustrates the slide from familiar representations of the child as the future of the nation to the present neoliberal context of deregulation, environmental exploitation, and profit-driven risk: “Somatic capitalism operates above and below the level of the individual subject to amplify or diminish specific bodily capacities. It siphons vitality rather than exerting discipline, swerves and harnesses existing tendencies rather than regulating their emergence.”²⁴

As Foucault predicted, “man” is receding as the form in which knowledge production must take place. Thus, “the present formation shifts from knowledge to technē, from the human as the subject and object of knowledge to the human as a biologically vulnerable, biologically exploitable resource, from totality to systematicity.” People are no longer valuable as “whole persons” within the disciplinary mechanisms of identity and modern subjectivity, as they were in the twentieth century, but now valued as “subindividual, modular, and extractable parts” within a “new biopolitics” under neoliberal capitalism. The figure of the child serves to reincorporate this dehumanization as well as “the realization of nonhuman vitality back into the charmed circle of the human.” It is at this juncture that Sheldon finds “the child has become more available and more pervasive even as economic and legislative policies undermine the very social vitality the child supposedly indexes.” Through the figure of the child, Sheldon “points to the drag of the retreating epistēmē but also to the pull of the one approaching,” in which the dynamics of what I have called the logic of adolescence, based in the developmentalism (or historicism) that emerges over the course of the nineteenth century, are giving way to another logic for knowing and understanding ourselves and the world.²⁵

In his article from 2004, Latour does not take back the idea that knowledge is constructed (despite McIntyre’s interpretation), but he does begin to reevaluate the tools of critique and how they might be used better in a context that has changed significantly since he began his work in the 1970s. In a recent article in the New York Times, he explains, “I think we were so happy to develop all this critique because we were so sure of the authority of science. And that the authority of science would be shared because there was a common world. Even this notion of a common world we didn’t have to articulate, because it was so obvious. Now we have people who no longer share the idea that there is a common world. And that of course changes everything.”²⁶ We might understand the loss of a “common world”—another way to describe post-truth phenomena—within the context of somatic capitalism, in which a shared culture of stable and unified meanings around what constitutes reality are no longer necessary for mechanisms of power to operate effectively. Instead, the operation of multiple, even infinite, ideological planes work simultaneously to extract and maximize profits from discrete bodily capacities, like clicks or votes.

Henry Giroux describes the waning of the “social contract,” where now “the state gives minimum guarantees of security,” as people are no longer “bound together as citizens but as consumers, while the neoliberal values of self-interest, personal advancement, and economic calculation” have “rendered ornamental ‘the basic principles of and institutions of democracy.’” Giroux finds a widespread social abandonment of youth and, like Sheldon, remarks on the ways that the early twentieth-century narratives of reproductive futurism have given way to discussions of youth as an expendable resource available for profit. He writes, “Social problems become utterly privatized and removed from public consideration,” while “communal responsibility [is] derided in favor of individual happiness, largely measured through the acquisition and disposability of consumer goods.” Neoliberalism “is not only a system of economic power relations but also a political project, intent on producing new forms of subjectivity and sanctioning particular modes of conduct.” The spectacular cruelty played out in the media and in the everyday lives of actual children and adults is accomplished through “rituals” that “legitimate its norms, values, institutions, and social practices.” Giroux refers to neoliberalism as a theater of cruelty “reproduced daily through a regime of common sense” that “has become normalized—even celebrated by the dominant media—and now serves as a powerful pedagogical force that shapes our lives, memories, and daily experiences.”²⁷

While I depart from Giroux in his characterization of the past as a time when “democracy was linked to the well-being of youth,” when “how a society imagined democracy and its future was contingent on how it viewed its responsibility toward future generations,” I find his observations about the present to be quite urgent and pressing, illustrative of the epistemological “ground that is once more stirring under our feet.”²⁸ He writes, “White wealthy kids may labor under the narrow dictates of a commodity culture, but they are not incarcerated in record numbers, placed in schools that merely serve to warehouse the refuse of global capitalism, or subjected to a life of misery and impoverishment.”²⁹ In this book I have described forms of harm that take place under the guise of care, but what we have seen in recent years with the Trump administration’s policy of separating refugee families at the border—mothers and babies—and indefinitely holding children in concentration camps while the world looks on, speaks to this spectacular theater of harm that no longer requires the justification of idealizing narratives of a universalizing humanity.

I think Sedgwick anticipates this present moment when she writes, “Why bother exposing the ruses of power in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system? In the United States and internationally, while there is plenty of hidden violence that requires exposure there is also, and increasingly, an ethos where forms of violence that are hypervisible from the start may be offered as an exemplary spectacle rather than remain to be unveiled as a scandalous secret.” Along these same lines, she remarks, “I’m a lot less worried about being pathologized by my therapist than about my vanishing mental health coverage—and that’s given the great good luck of having health insurance at all.” Like Latour’s comment from the New York Times, she notes that the work of critique “is a far different act from what such exposures would have been in the 1960s,” when the solidity of these institutions, the “common world” Latour refers to, could be taken for granted.³⁰ It is worth continuing to think through what has changed and how our tools might be put to the best use in the present context. Latour describes how the Enlightenment used a “very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact, which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions,” but by the mid-twentieth century “matters of fact” required the “same debunking impetus” and have now left us temporarily in “some sort of darkness.” At this critical moment Latour asks, “Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality?” Toward this end Latour proposes that “the critic is not one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of naïve believers, but the one who offers participants arenas in which to gather.”³¹ Likewise, what Haraway calls “staying with the trouble,” the practices Sedgwick puts forward as “reparative reading,” or what Karen Barad calls the “ethics of entanglement”—these are all gestures toward grounded, ethically oriented, creative, and constructive practices coming out of poststructuralist theory.³²

The project of this book participates in a similar shift in the fields of childhood studies and children’s literature, away from critique and toward questions of ethics regarding children and categories of age, both present and historical. Marah Gubar’s “kinship model” of childhood, John Wall’s Ethics in Light of Childhood, and Jules Gill-Peterson’s “ethical aperture of relation” toward trans children are all suggestive of the types of constructive, imaginative, and world-making work that comes after deconstruction.³³ The chapters collected in Anna Mae Duane’s Children’s Table, as well as the articles in recent special issues such as WSQ’s “Child” and GLQ’s “The Child Now” also speak to the growing importance and recognition of this methodological work.³⁴ The Children’s Literature Association Annual Conference in 2019 themed “Activism and Empathy” featured many papers with explicitly ethical stakes and goals. In many ways our field has never been far from ethical concerns in the first place. At its heart this is a shift away from the exclusive focus on cultural ideas about the child in the work of scholars like Jacqueline Rose and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein and toward scholarly approaches that consider the lives, texts, and matter of actual children.³⁵ However, the turn toward ethics in the field does not represent a pre-Rose orientation toward texts and culture or a return to simplistic questions that reconstruct a passive Other, like, “Is this book good for children?” In fact, I do not see the ethical turn as a departure from Rose or poststructuralist theory so much as an elaboration of the stakes of deconstruction and critical analysis, work that fields like feminism, critical race studies, and queer theory have brought to the center of their intellectual practices since their inception. After all, what is the purpose of rethinking the category child if not to imagine a better world, a better way of seeing and relating to the people called children?

My aim has been to put pressure on institutional knowledge of adolescence, to unravel its categorizations and certainties, but I acknowledge also that there are fields of study that require generalizations, require the reiteration and stabilization of categories as part of their disciplinary practices. This leaves us with a question: Can we build on institutional knowledge without requiring this displacement of authority away from young people themselves? This is a fundamental relation of dominance in the act of constructing knowledge about others, and this is the ethical problem with early twentieth-century categories of age and the categories of difference produced by institutional discourses during this time. Can the institution function, with all its benefits, without requiring the sacrifice of self and other to its management and control?

These questions require us to grapple with queer theory’s role both outside and within institutional contexts to conceptualize a transformative, radical resistance. Queer theory’s antinormative methods are necessary not only for questioning existing power structures but also for creating a more ethical world. And this means being able to do both deconstructive and constructive work. Queer knowing is not arbitrary, not a version of relativism or so flimsy as to change with each passing moment. Queer epistemologies, for example, allow for a profound recognition of what is real about the body and about desire even when the cultural norms of gender and sexuality or the limits of language make such recognition seem unthinkable or impossible. And such forms of knowledge can be based on feeling, on forms of knowing that necessarily exist beyond the grasp of language, which is why I am so hesitant to accept the definition of post-truth or its diagnosis of our present. The value of queer theory is not in its ability to seize power and rule the world. It is about survival when the conditions of survival seem impossible, unthinkable. It is about a pathway through trauma and violence. It’s not about lies or truth; it’s about being able to move one’s subjectivity out and away with new tools, new words, and new concepts, as the old ones are taken away, absorbed into the system, normalized, or weaponized. It is about the ability to imagine systemic and institutional alternatives beyond our present logics of individualism and capitalist exploitation. The logic of adolescence emerges out of and naturalizes these features of late modernity while obscuring ethical alternatives as unthinkable or unknowable. We must imagine adolescence otherwise if we are to both live and work through what is to come.