chapter 1

G. STANLEY HALL AND
THE LOGIC OF DEVELOPMENTALISM

What is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?

—Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure

We can find some measure of liberation, I believe, by examining the directions we receive for reading the past and then disobeying them as brazenly as we can, flaunting them, turning them back on themselves.

—James Kincaid, Child-Loving

U.S. psychologist and educator G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924) is often referred to as the father of adolescence, and it is common practice in academic scholarship across the humanities and social sciences to mention Hall and the start of the twentieth century as a key moment in medical, psychological, legal, and educational discourse about adolescence. This moment has even been called the invention of adolescence, and Hall’s massive two-volume Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education is largely taken for granted as the point of origin for a stage of human life previously unrecognized or unacknowledged.¹ My research, however, reveals more than 700 references to adolescence in U.S. newspaper databases dated before 1900, one of the earliest dated 1769, and nearly 1,400 references in British newspaper databases.² What did the word “adolescence” mean, then, over the course of the nineteenth century? Using Hall as an anchor point, this chapter, drawing primarily on U.S. and British newspaper archives, tracks the word “adolescence” up through the nineteenth century to uncover the assumptions and beliefs about adolescence that shaped the use of this word in the past and that continue to inform our present. Social histories are not wrong to emphasize the importance of Hall’s work in the history of adolescence, but a wide survey of nineteenth-century newspapers reveals trajectories of fragmented, multipurposed conceptualizations of adolescence—trajectories that precede Hall and continue after him. The abundance of references to adolescence prior to 1900 raises the question of what specifically Hall’s work distilled and condensed and what specifically was new.

While distinctions can be made between the content of U.S. and British newspaper archives, the word “adolescence” reveals strikingly similar patterns of usage on both sides of the Atlantic.³ Newspapers provide a record of common usage—the way a word carries meaning through time—demonstrating both the tenuousness and stickiness of meaning-making.⁴ In other words, I track the word not for some essential meaning but for its usage in specific textual contexts. What does a particular use of “adolescence” indicate about the work that word does, the knowledge it conveys? This method acknowledges, above all, the performativity of knowledge. While I do not claim that adolescence is central to nineteenth-century thought, I demonstrate how a focus on adolescence allows us to see a nexus of larger shifts in the organization of the social world. In this chapter I describe a set of logics and conceptual linkages connected to categories of age, both present and historical.

One of the most frequent uses of the word “adolescence” in the first part of the nineteenth century was as a metaphor for nation and for various civic institutions, such as a city hall. In the United States, this metaphor had very positive connotations, heavily weighted with the triumphant narrative of the newly independent nation. When I searched British newspapers, I expected to see the opposite pattern of usage, assuming the British would refer to the United States as “adolescent” in a derogatory way. Surprisingly, however, the pattern was the same. Adolescence was frequently invoked as a metaphor to justify the self-governance of former colonies with references to the “rights of adolescence” and qualities such as the “strength of adolescence” and “vigorous adolescence.”⁵ In the first half of the nineteenth century, I was also surprised to find in both U.S. and British newspapers a striking pattern of positive descriptors accompanying the word “adolescence,” including the “treasures of adolescence,” “joys of adolescence,” “vigor of adolescence,” “healthy adolescence,” and “bloom of adolescence.”⁶ These examples provide a stark contrast to the negative and often condescending associations of adolescence that would become common in the twentieth century. A significant shift occurs around 1870, when we see the first negative generalizations accompanying the category of adolescence. Likewise, over the course of the nineteenth century, the use of adolescence as a metaphor for nation changed, invoked instead to justify the prolonged dependence of states and territories rather than their independence.

In this chapter I show how a larger epistemological shift over the course of the nineteenth century—the logic of developmentalism—makes the category of adolescence possible. Today the notion of development is synonymous with our conceptions of growth and learning. Valerie Walkerdine argues that developmental psychology produces the very object it claims to know: the “developing child.” She observes how the discourses of developmentalism “forget the constructed nature of consciousness,” a mechanism that “covers over exploitation and oppression, just as wealth, poverty, race and gender inequalities are understood within developmentalism as producing a lack, a backwardness.”⁷ Claudia Castañeda likewise argues that developmentalism is central to the construction of racial hierarchies, in which “the Now of the primitive was not only placed in the time of childhood, but also in the child-body: the child was seen as a bodily theater where human history could be observed to unfold in the compressed time-span of individual development.”⁸ Like Walkerdine and Castañeda, I use the term “developmentalism” to underscore the difference between development as a value-neutral description of change over time and the goal-oriented narrativizing epistemology that emerges over the course of the nineteenth century, what Maurice Mandelbaum describes as “historicism” and Michel Foucault as “historicity.”⁹ Remarkably, categories of age were not the model for developmentalism. On the contrary, as Carolyn Steedman reminds us, “‘Childhood’ was a category of dependence, a term that defined certain relationships of powerlessness, submission, and bodily inferiority or weakness, before it became descriptive of chronological age. The late nineteenth century fixed childhood, not just as a category of experience, but also a time span.”¹⁰ References to categories of age in nineteenth-century newspaper databases likewise suggest that developmentalism, as an epistemology, reconfigures notions of childhood and, later in the century, makes possible the concept of adolescence we recognize today.

What I am attempting to define is the “a priori” of adolescence, the unacknowledged and unarticulated beliefs that become the occasion for knowing “its conditions of possibility.”¹¹ Developmentalism emerges out of a temporal logic that imagines the growth of the child’s body, people as individuals, and entire nations or social groups as ordered along a pathway in time toward an ideal or normative outcome. Through a new conception of time, the stages of human life took on new significance as political metaphors that were used to maintain the inferiority of other categories of difference. At the same time the ontological categories of age, race, class, gender, and sexuality emerged as classifiable types of people placed within the temporality of developmentalism to justify existing social hierarchies. These categories function in different ways, but they can be understood as strands of the same hierarchical mechanisms that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. Developmentalism is the dominant logic through which categories of age are understood today. Indeed, our very definitions of parenting and educating seem to hinge on these ways of thinking, though not without consequence. My purpose is to understand what patterns of thought inform these logics and perpetuate them so that we might imagine more ethical possibilities for knowing and relating to one another.

Nineteenth-Century Newspapers

The word “adolescence” was not widely used in English prior to the mid-nineteenth century, and the earliest references in newspaper databases suggest the word’s capaciousness at this time.¹² The first reference in the archive of U.S. newspapers appears in a 1769 parody titled “The Use and Abuse of Time” with the phrase “Adolescence of Youth” employed to mock the wordiness and redundancy of philosophical writing.¹³ A similar use of the word appears in an 1811 article by a “Philologer” titled “Pompous Reflections No. 1,” which contains mock reflections on the “cogitation of man,” such as this formulation: “From his ablactation to his adolescence, with respect to ethics, he is nearly adiaphorous.”¹⁴ A joke appearing throughout the middle of the nineteenth century continues this pattern, though it addresses a person called by the name “Adolescens,” which distinguishes it from earlier uses. The humor of the joke, though, still hinges on the perceived verbosity of those who use the word: “A dabbler in literature and the fine arts, who prided himself upon his knowledge and proper use of the English language, came upon a youngster sitting upon the bank of a mill pond, angling for shiners, and thus addressed him:—‘Adolescens, art thou not endeavoring to entice the finny tribe to engulph into their denticulated mouths a barbed hook, upon whose point is affixed a dainty allurement?’ ‘No,’ said the boy, ‘I’m fishin!’”¹⁵ The joke’s introduction, with the dismissive word “dabbler” and the phrase “prided himself,” indicates that the joke is on the adult speaker and his pretentious language rather than the boy, with whom the audience is invited to identify. Likewise, the reference to the “proper use of the English language” may be ironic, expressing resistance to the normalizing attempts of grammar books circulating at this time. The joke sometimes appears without the introduction, beginning simply with the dialogue, suggesting that the introduction was not necessary for readers to get the joke. But an 1870 version changes the introduction to read somewhat more sarcastically: “A gentleman, whose learning does not appear to have sat very lightly upon him, addressed a boy whom he found fishing, in the following simple and unaffected manner.”¹⁶ This change may reflect only a version of the joke recalled from being told in person rather than from being read in print. But it is interesting that this intensification of the joke’s sarcasm corresponds with the first negative descriptors accompanying the word “adolescence” around 1870. It may have been necessary by this point to craft an introduction that guarded against its interpretation as a joke on the boy.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, a pattern of positive descriptors accompanies the word “adolescence.” An early example, reprinted from a London paper, appears in New York’s Commercial Advertiser in 1798. This article, reportedly written by a French officer of engineers regarding the art of sculpture, describes the work of the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757–1822): “This delicious abandonment—this picture of youthful pleasure—these treasures of adolescence, have a grace, beauty and delicacy, which no description can reach.”¹⁷ Similarly, an 1806 advertisement for an aromatic confidently claims to “have inspired the feeblest decrepitude with the vigor of adolescence.”¹⁸ And a political story in the Monitor from 1808 describes how two characters “seized our guns with all the gaiety and vigor of a healthy adolescence.”¹⁹ Another account from the Middlesex Gazette in 1826 describes a character who “seemed in the very prime of adolescence, having just arrived at that period when the slender and less powerful graces of youth are strengthening into and blending with the firm and muscular symmetry of full manhood.”²⁰ Another 1827 article in the Norwich Courier talks about the “enchantments of youth” and the power of memory to “restore to the autumn of age the adolescence of youth.”²¹ In the phrase the “adolescence of youth,” the word “adolescence” is used positively to describe the health, vigor, and strength of feeling belonging to youth.

Vigor and health were primarily associated with male adolescence, with maleness operating as the default and assumed point of reference in most usages. When adolescence referred to a woman or girl, the descriptions change. In 1828, for example, the Washington Whig described “the innocent face of the blooming girl, just shooting up from the first period of childhood, in to the more sedate age of adolescence.”²² The “sedate” age of adolescence contrasts starkly with contemporaneous references to strength and vigor. Similarly, an 1848 short story in the Boston Daily Atlas states, “so sad a year had taken from Joanna the almost infantile character of adolescence, which had given her so much naivete and charm.”²³ The “infantile character of adolescence” here sounds more like childhood than adolescence. As this example suggests, the characteristics attributed to girls are not strongly negative, but such usages are condescending, evidence of the hierarchical subordination of femininity to masculinity.

John Springhall notes that while the biological changes of puberty were recognized in earlier centuries, the cultural significance attached to puberty was not the same as it is today: “Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, contemporaries associated puberty with rising power and energy rather than the onset of an awkward and vulnerable stage of life which would later become known as adolescence.”²⁴ And Joseph Kett observes that it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that “young people, particularly teenage boys, ceased to be viewed as troublesome, rash, and heedless, the qualities traditionally associated with youth; instead, they increasingly were viewed as vulnerable, passive, and awkward, qualities that previously had been associated only with girls.”²⁵ Kett’s observation suggests that the changes surrounding perceptions of adolescence at the turn of the century were strongly linked to other social hierarchies, in this case gender: specifically, the feminized qualities of passivity and vulnerability used to naturalize the hierarchical relation between men and women were used later in the century to demote adolescence as a whole. It is worth noting that it is not evident what ages correspond to adolescence in these examples about girls or whether any specific age range is even intended. In nineteenth-century articles concerned with health or educational prescriptions, childhood and adolescence are often mentioned together in a single phrase, such as “infancy and adolescence,” or as part of a list that includes terms such as “manhood” and “old age.”²⁶ These uses emphasize interconnectedness and the inevitability of aging—the march of life—over discrete categories of existence with essential, defining characteristics.

For example, a short piece called “The Periods of Human Life” that appeared in at least eight U.S. newspapers and periodicals in 1825 lists fifteen stages of life divided into spans of seven years each (see fig. 1.1).²⁷ Adolescence is only the second stage listed, following childhood. In this rendering adolescence spans from ages eight to fourteen and is the “age of hopes, improvidence, curiosity, impatience.” Puberty, extending from ages fifteen to twenty-one, follows adolescence and consists of “triumphs, desires, self-love, independence, and vanity.” The majority of life stages are ascribed to adulthood, an arrangement that significantly deemphasizes what the twentieth century would later consider the “developmental years.” The fifteen stages suggest the inescapable passage of time rather than a developmental process; they neither imply a hierarchical organization nor position adulthood as an arrival point. Considering the fact that the average life expectancy was fewer than forty years in the first half of the nineteenth century, most people would not have lived to experience the majority of these stages.

“The Periods of Human Life” first circulated in papers without interpretive commentary, but in 1840 a medical doctor named E. G. Wheeler reproduced it in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal alongside his own commentary. Wheeler discusses a number of alternative organizations for human life, including six stages outlined by the “ancients” and five from the physiologist Dr. Robley Dunglison (1798–1869) with additional subcategories for infancy. About the fifteen periods of human life, which he admits is a “curious division of the age of man,” he remarks, “there may be some inaccuracies in regard to the names of the different periods in the above quotation, particularly as regards adolescence and puberty, but the passions, qualities of the mind, &c., as therein attached to the several stages of life, are principally, if not altogether, correct, as I have no doubt every observing mind will at once admit.”²⁸ Despite his claim of “inaccuracies,” Wheeler offers no correction and instead appeals to his readers’ commonsense observations to discern the “truth” of the list. The appearance of this list in a medical journal, along with its wide circulation on both sides of the Atlantic in the early nineteenth century, supports my contention that categories of age themselves were not the model or origin point for developmentalism. None of the organizations for human life discussed by Wheeler indicate a process of development but rather reflect an earlier episteme (in Foucault’s terms) of representationalism—that is, “language as the spontaneous tabula” for representing things.²⁹ Three separate organizational schemes for depicting the human life course are offered side by side and on equal footing as alternative representations of the same thing. Life is not a story or a process, according to this view, but a sequence of stages that can be represented in language with varying degrees of accuracy.

How were the stages of life understood, if not as a story of development? Prior to representationalism, Foucault explains, “The history of a living being was that being itself, within the whole semantic network that connected it to the world.”³⁰ Importantly, the shifts between epistemes is not clean but rather involves a “middle region” that is “continuous and gradual or discontinuous and piecemeal.”³¹ On this note “The Periods of Human Life” suggests these earlier epistemes in its division by seven years, based on numerology and resembling a division by the ancient Greek Solon or one corresponding to the plants (of which there are seven) that can be found in many medieval texts. We also see stages of seven years reproduced (among other organizations) in the early twentieth century along with the attempt to match them to biological phenomena and developmental theory, showing how conceptualizations from different periods can be refunctioned.³² Philippe Ariès describes popular organizations for the stages of life prior to the eighteenth century and their difference from today: “It was the inevitable, cyclical, sometimes amusing and sometimes sad continuity of the ages of life; a continuity inscribed in the general and abstract order of things rather than in real experience.” Life had clearly defined stages “corresponding to certain modes of activity, physical types, social functions and styles of dress” rather than biology, and these stages “had the same fixity as the cycle of Nature or the organization of society.”³³ The order of this organization did not come from an internal process of development but from forces perceived to be outside the human body such as God, Nature, or Divine Law. Under this pre-nineteenth-century episteme, the stages of life were not a story of development but rather evidence of the fixed and cyclical inevitability of birth and death alongside the perceived stability of hierarchical order in the social and natural world.

As early as 1825, we can find calls for the study of adolescence, though the method of this study is quite different from the agenda outlined by Hall almost a century later. The Newburyport Herald declares, also appealing to commonsense, that “we are all disposed to regard the age of adolescence with affection, for its beauty as well as its feebleness invites our sympathy and attachment.” It is for this reason, the Herald continues, that “we should do more, we should consider it with grave attention, study it, and in learning and improving from its simplicity, bend our best energies to its direction and encouragement.”³⁴ These assumptions about adolescence seem to align more closely with an idea of childhood “feebleness,” and the argument expressed seems to encourage a perceptiveness in caregivers that would adapt according to what is seen rather than the application of a predetermined method based on an authorized knowledge or “truth” about these stages of life. The appeal to affection, sympathy, and attachment also assumes a very positive feeling about adolescence that is quite different from the fears of degeneration expressed a century later.

In the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, adolescence was still accompanied by highly positive descriptors. In 1831, for example, a rave review of the child actor Master Burke declared how “the soul of adolescence kindles in his eyes, and breathes in all his acts,” making it “delightful to regard so singular a combination of youth, genius and renown.”³⁵ And, in 1834, a lecture reprinted in the Richmond Enquirer refers to the “luxuriance of adolescence.”³⁶ In 1840 “adolescence” is used as a complimentary term for an adult, who, despite his age, wrote an article “exhibiting all the elasticity of adolescence.”³⁷ A moral tale reprinted from the Ladies Companion in both the Salem Gazette and the Pennsylvania Inquirer in 1841 declares, “My children are now grown to adolescence—wealth and honor and goodness are theirs.”³⁸ In 1847, too, an article on the opening of an exhibition in New York reported that all ages were actively interested, including “vigorous manhood, happy adolescence, and squalling babyhood.”³⁹ In another example from 1851, the word “adolescence” is used to compliment Col. Washington Daniel Miller (1814–66), secretary of state in Texas, whose “countenance, still indicative of adolescence, and flushed with robust health, bespeaks in language plainer than words.”⁴⁰ Similarly, in 1853, a short story in the Boston Daily Atlas describes “the young and flexible strength of adolescence.”⁴¹

Alongside these positive uses, adolescence was commonly invoked as a metaphor for national independence with strongly positive connotations as well. For example, a Fourth of July commemorative speech, printed in Boston’s Daily Advertiser in 1809, casts the United States in terms of the stages of human life: “Yes, my friends, we are now the nation. As such we have arrived at that epoch when instead of looking back to with wonder upon our infancy, we may look forward with solicitude to a state of adolescence, with confidence to a state of manhood. Tho’ as a nation we are yet in the morning of life, we have already attained an elevation which enables us to discern our course to its meridian splendor.”⁴² Adolescence has a very positive association here—it is a moment of looking forward first with care and then with confidence to a state of manhood. An article in the Washington Federalist in the same year uses the words “infancy” and “adolescence” to make an argument for why the United States should not get involved in the war in Europe: “Will this country, as yet, comparatively speaking, in a state of infancy, certainly not advanced beyond a state of adolescence, be able to meet the shock of such a war?”⁴³ In contrast to the preceding example, here the reference to adolescence indicates the need for protection and caution, though it is worth noting that this is accomplished through the indeterminancy of the boundary between infancy and adolescence. In another example, an 1813 address printed in Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser uses “infancy” and “adolescence” to assert the power of the United States: “Other countries by gradual accretions of strength, by slow and painful step, had risen, through an arduous and toilsome course, to the same degree of maturity, to which we ascended with the rapidity of a single impulse: The period of their infancy and adolescence had been long precarious and exposed; America was like the infant Hercules, and in her cradle strangled the serpent anarchy.”⁴⁴ Infancy and adolescence describe the metaphorical growth of the nation. Notably, in this comparison, the United States’ adolescence is not precarious but heroic and strong.

The invocation of adolescence as a metaphor for the growth of national sentiment was quite adaptable, as we see in an article from 1815 supporting the mental advantages of reading newspapers: “And to what are we to attribute the implantation and adolescence of patriotism in our fellow-citizens, but to a knowledge of the heroic deeds of our fathers in establishing our Republic.”⁴⁵ In this case it is not exactly the nation, but U.S. patriotism that is in its adolescence, and, as such, this patriotism is described as well established and enthusiastically felt. An 1820 article in the Daily National Intelligencer celebrates the opening of the city hall in the District of Columbia using adolescence as a metaphor characterizing the population of the city: “We, of this city, are now passing from an infancy in which we were surrounded by difficulties, to an adolescence which is full of promise.”⁴⁶ The positive connotations of this metaphorical adolescence echo the positive characteristics we see in references to adolescence as a stage of life in the early nineteenth century—a stage that evokes vitality, health, and strength.

Adolescence, used as a metaphor for nation, often functioned as a narrative device used to justify or predict particular outcomes, and it is this ideological force that we see harnessed by Hall nearly a century later. Take, for instance, an 1816 campaign piece for the upcoming presidential election. The Daily National Intelligencer declared, “What citizen, then, has greatly merited the suffrage of his country by a series of public services and patriotic sacrifices from the age of adolescence to the maturity of years of wisdom? Who is he who at the age of sixteen took up arms to assert his country’s independence?”⁴⁷ The answer was James Monroe, and the narrative evoked here, the story of adolescence that would justify the choice for the future president, was reprinted in at least four U.S. newspapers in February 1816, including the Baltimore Patriot, the Essex Register, and the Vermont Republican. Usually, when we see adolescence used as evidence of one’s future greatness, it works through back-formation, like in a biography of Napoleon, for example, where the literal or metaphorical adolescence justifies the achievements of the present or recent past.⁴⁸ This example is notable because adolescence is being used to construct a future result, a story that hasn’t happened yet, a narrative arc that begins with patriotic adolescence and ends with the election of James Monroe, one that suggests to voters what they should do to make the story complete. Indeed, this campaign piece spends most of its time instructing readers how to think about voting, what questions to ask, what requirements they should have for the next president. The narrative here works to make the desired future outcome, the election of James Monroe, feel inevitable and the rightness of it indisputable. Narrative tends to construct its own inevitability, but these narratives around adolescence are not natural or inevitable; rather, the concept of adolescence begins to function here as a narrative of developmentalism, a story of self and nation, one that has intersected over time with shifting ideological investments.

As a metaphor for nation, adolescence continued to be referenced in positive expressions of national independence in both U.S. and British newspapers throughout the nineteenth century. That pattern changed in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, when it became available as a term of condescension to justify the continued dependence of states or territories. For example, an article from 1845 in the New York Herald about territory disputes in the recently annexed state of Texas makes an unflattering comparison with the state of Florida, which “became saucy” and “in the very first days of its adolescence, gets too big for its breeches.”⁴⁹ Unlike earlier examples, Florida’s metaphorical adolescence does not suggest its right to independence but rather its failure to show proper deference. Another example from 1856 in the Wisconsin Patriot argues for Congress to provide some form of law and order for new territories “at least during their adolescence.” The article states, “It seems to us a matter of indispensible [sic] necessity, that when Congress organizes a Territory, it should extend the blessings of a limited code of laws and somebody to enforce them—otherwise all would be anarchy and confusion—the people would be without law and order at least during their adolescence, or the period of intervening between their being a territorial Government, and the time they could enact and enforce their own laws.”⁵⁰ Here adolescence functions as a metaphor to indicate the need for prolonged dependence rather than a territory’s ability to self-govern.

This example, preceding the strongly negative characterizations of adolescence that would crop up in 1869 and 1870, appears the same year as two outlying examples from the same paper in which we see the word “adolescence” accompanied by somewhat idiosyncratic descriptors: the phrases “gangrene adolescence” and “effeminate adolescence” are used to criticize the state government in Wisconsin in separate articles in 1856.⁵¹ These early examples provide a clarifying contrast for the negative generalizations that appear later because the category of adolescence does not carry the weight of the insult. In other words, the descriptors “gangrene” and “effeminate” are not generalizations about adolescence itself; rather, these adjectives do the work of the critique (in this case, of the Wisconsin assembly and the Wisconsin legislature, respectively). These phrases do not imply that adolescence is characteristically gangrene or effeminate; rather, they suggest that these are the signs of a weak and inferior political body that will, metaphorically speaking, grow up inherently perverse and diseased, in contrast to the robust masculinity implied by contemporaneous references to “healthy adolescence” and “vigorous adolescence.” However, the logic of developmentalism enables these contrasting constructions, in which adolescence begins to designate a location on a developmental pathway heading toward an ideal, normative outcome or away from it.

In newspapers from the middle of the nineteenth century, evocations of adolescence as a national metaphor demonstrated significant temporal variability, sometimes representing U.S. independence in the present, other times representing the past or a future that was just ahead. In 1842 an article in the Madisonian places the United States just past adolescence: “When this system was resorted to before, we were in our adolescence: we have now grown up into the bone and sinew of manhood.”⁵² But, only a few years later in 1845, an article in the New York Herald positioned the United States as on the verge of a triumphant adolescence: “All these combined together form the annual increase in the wealth of the United States, and indicate to the world at large, that in everything that constitutes power, wealth, civilization, abundance, and national prosperity, the United States are almost in a state of adolescence.”⁵³ Later, in 1845, the New York Herald depicted the entire world as in its adolescence: “Society is constantly in a state of transition—of progress. That which many are accustomed to call the old age of the world, was but its infancy, and it is yet in the days of its adolescence.”⁵⁴ All these examples utilize adolescence as a metaphor linked to the triumphant story of U.S. independence, but there is another layer of meaning indicating the progress of human civilization as a whole. The idea of revolution by human efforts blends with the idea of an evolutionary progress that is inevitable. This layer of inevitable but unpredictable development, expressed in the idea that “society is constantly in a state of transition,” is one that we see emphasized in Hall’s Adolescence more than half a century later.

A significant shift in nineteenth-century newspapers occurs around 1870, when we begin to see some of the first negative, dismissive, and condescending references to adolescence. In 1870 we find one of the most unambiguously negative examples, printed in Pomeroy’s Democrat: “We certainly would have never intentionally accused John Q. A. of the absurdities and crudities of adolescence. It is strange how often the young prove inadequate to represent the sound sense of their progenitors.”⁵⁵ Here the words “absurdities” and “crudities” provide a stark contrast to the positive pattern of descriptors we saw earlier. This example is significant because “absurdities” and “crudities” function as negative generalizations about adolescence itself, and I didn’t find any analogous negative generalizations before this date. The word “progenitors” resonates with the language of evolutionary theory, connoting biological ancestry, not just parenting. Moreover, this quip evokes the concept of generational deterioration—the idea of children devolving into something weaker or lesser than their parents—not as a fear but as a fact. In the 1870s, in British as well as U.S. papers, the word “adolescence” began to appear with a number of negative and condescending descriptors like “feeble-minded adolescence” and “gushing adolescence.”⁵⁶ Throughout the 1860s the London Times contains phrases like “fresh and vigorous adolescence,” “the strength of adolescence,” and “healthy and vigorous adolescence,” with the first negative descriptors appearing in 1869 with the “temptations of adolescence” and, even more striking, the “perpetual state of rabid adolescence.”⁵⁷ Like the example from Pomeroy’s Democrat, these kinds of negative generalizations about the category of adolescence do not exist in the newspaper archive before this date. The positive descriptors accompanying adolescence in the first part of the nineteenth century continue past 1870 (particularly “vigorous adolescence”), but there are no earlier examples of negative generalizations comparable to the instances found in 1869 and 1870, when adolescence becomes available as a term of insult. This shift also occurs more than thirty years before the publication of Hall’s Adolescence, calling into question the ways he is positioned in social histories as the source of the negative associations we see in the twentieth century.⁵⁸ This shift also raises the question: What happened circa 1870?

Foucault names 1870 as the year “the homosexual was now a species,” meaning that particular sexual acts, which previously anyone might have participated in, began to be understood as indicative of a classifiable type of person. He writes, “The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood.” At the same time something similar happens with the category of adolescence, which is used less to describe a stage of life and—by the time we get to Hall—more to describe a generalizable type of person belonging to this stage, a particular species of human. There were all kinds of categories invented for people in the nineteenth century that were being subjected to new forms of institutional management and control. Some of these categories appear at first to be more obviously contingent on historical context—like Foucault’s tracing of the “homosexual” or Ian Hacking’s case study of the emergence of multiple personality disorder in 1875.⁵⁹ But the history of adolescence raises questions about how these new ways of classifying people impacted the social functions of seemingly more “universal” or “durable” categories like gender, age, race, or class.

Analyzing multiple categories of difference at once reveals that these forms of classification functioned primarily as new ways of maintaining existing social hierarchies. Siobhan Somerville suggests “that it was not merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies” in the period following the U.S. Civil War in 1865. Somerville’s analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses shows the mutual constitution of sexuality and race through practices that “demanded a specific kind of logic” to give “coherence to new concepts” for classifying human beings.⁶⁰ My research suggests that categories of age played a pivotal role in the “specific kind of logic” described by Somerville and that these new classifications of race, sexuality, and age relied on one another for definition. Recent scholarly work also takes up the centrality of childhood and adolescence to one or more intersections of identity, illuminating the interdependency of categories of difference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶¹ Building on this work, I want to emphasize the mutual constitution of categories of difference in the nineteenth century, including categories of age, and the necessity of understanding them as part of the same reorganizations of power whose logics inform conceptions of human difference to this day. Through the logic of developmentalism, childhood and adolescence began to function as temporal categories in which any marginalized person or group could be relocated along a developmental timeline as regressive, immature, or underdeveloped. In the next section I show how categories of age served as a way to naturalize existing social hierarchies within the logic of developmentalism and that, as a result, prejudicial descriptors were mapped back onto evocations of adolescence by 1870.

Rethinking G. Stanley Hall

In Adolescence Hall set adolescence at the forefront of evolutionary progress, claiming that this stage of human life was foundational to the progress of civilization as a whole. He made this argument through a series of developmental narratives that structured history, civilization, and human growth in correlating, linear lines of progression. These narratives offered a rationale for the surveillance and control of young people, including the measurement of their height and weight and limbs, the study of their minds and feelings, and the direction of their education and interests toward Hall’s particular vision of progress. These narratives continue to construct the illusion of control over an unpredictable future through the watchful and guided upbringing of youth. For Hall adolescence was essential to this future, at once a developmental stage of human life and a literal embodiment of the evolution of all humankind. Hall felt that the United States as a nation was in a unique developmental predicament as well, one that echoed the precarious conditions of adolescence as he imagined them. In this sense Hall deployed the stage of adolescence as a metaphor for nation, reinvigorating a metaphor that was at this point over a century old. But Hall made that metaphor literal by equating the development of individual adolescents with the development of the nation as a whole.

Hall’s interpretation of all life, civilization, and growth within a developmental narrative can be understood as part of a much larger epistemological shift that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. Mandelbaum, who describes this shift as “historicism,” defines it as “the tendency to view all of reality, and all of man’s achievements, in terms of the category of development.” He writes, “Historicism is the belief that an adequate understanding of the nature of any phenomenon, and an adequate assessment of its value, are to be gained through considering it in terms of the place which it occupied, and the role it played, within a process of development.” Importantly, this idea is about reinterpreting changes and events as implicitly leading to one another within a narrative of progress. So “historicism,” in this sense, suggests that change occurs in a specific direction, that what comes later is caused by earlier stages, and that the end result is better than the beginning.⁶² In The Order of Things, Foucault describes this epistemological shift as “historicity,” a new way of thinking that “penetrates into the heart of things” and “imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time.” Before the nineteenth century, Foucault remarks, “life itself did not exist,” only “living beings,” a distinction that illustrates a new understanding of “life itself” as a story rather than a reference to one’s present embodiedness in the world.⁶³ And time, which was previously understood as a linear chronology of events with no significance apart from those events, became abstracted into a concept of Time as a progression within which events might be interpreted.⁶⁴ This way of thinking has had particular consequences in the present, “effectively shaping the contours of a meaningful life.”⁶⁵ Elizabeth Freeman describes the ways “properly temporalized bodies” are linked “to narratives of movement and change”—that is, “teleological schemes or events or strategies for living such as marriage, accumulation of health and wealth for the future, reproduction, childrearing, and death and its attendant rituals.”⁶⁶ Within this new conception of time, the idea of “life itself” indicates a conceptual frame of development or progression within which each individual “life” takes place, a narrative within which all of its parts might be understood.

Mandelbaum’s “historicism” and Foucault’s “historicity” both refer to an interiorized conception of development that significantly impacted how categories of age were understood in the nineteenth century. Nancy Lesko notes that “adolescence and the modern temporal order were creations of the same historical period.”⁶⁷ Steedman describes how “child-figures, and more generally the idea of childhood,” began to “express the depths of historicity in individuals,” a particular “kind of configuring of the past” that “emerged at the same time as did the modern idea of history and modern conventions of historical practice.”⁶⁸ The logic of developmentalism requires this convergence of categories of age, interiorized selfhood, and narrativized history that we see in Hall’s idea of adolescence. External processes having to do with the nation, nature, or biology were connected to internal processes of subjectivity though a “new mode of relation between history and life,” what Foucault describes as “this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and power.”⁶⁹ This is a process that incorporates external events into a cause-and-effect relation, but also one obligated to locate the significance of such events within oneself, within a notion of “self” constructed as progressive and narrative.

Freeman describes it this way: “In the eyes of the state, this sequence of socioeconomically ‘productive’ moments is what it means to have a life at all. And in zones not fully reducible to the state—in, say, psychiatry, medicine, and law—having a life entails the ability to narrate it not only in these state-sanctioned terms but also in a novelistic framework: as event-centered, goal-oriented, intentional, and culminating in epiphanies or major transformations.”⁷⁰ Charles Taylor writes that the “objectification of time,” or the “new time sense,” altered “our notion of the subject: the disengaged, particular self, whose identity is constituted in memory”—that is, someone who “can only find an identity in self-narration.” He argues, “life has to be lived as story.”⁷¹ By the beginning of the twentieth century, the concept of adolescence starts to function as a key narrativizing device in this process, one that makes possible the conceptualizations of self that we understand today as the “search for identity,” a process in which one’s psychic life is organized into a before and after the arrival point of adulthood.⁷² The category of adolescence plays a key role in naturalizing these temporal logics as biological rather than ideological.

Mandelbaum writes that there were two sources for historicism, or what he calls the “developmental view”: one is late eighteenth-century Romanticism and “its tendency to view historical development on the analogy of the growth of living things” and the other is a nineteenth-century carryover of Enlightenment thinking that sought a “science of society which would be based on the discovery of laws of social development.”⁷³ These two sources were only foreshadowing historicism, he claims, whereas it was Charles Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species and the widespread acceptance of evolution that led to the dominance of historicism as a nineteenth-century epistemology. However, Steedman remarks that “we fail to recognise that much thinking about change and development was not connected to biological thought at all, but was associated with physiology.” She explains, “It was a form of evolution conceived of in terms of growth. It took as its analogy, or explanatory figure, the pattern of individual development (of a plant, an insect, an embryo, a human being). The growth model allowed those who used it to comprehend evolution as purposeful, orderly and goal directed and, perhaps, as divinely planned or ordained.”⁷⁴ Thus, it is more accurate to say that the social uses of evolutionary schemas were responsible for these problematic applications of the logics of developmentalism in that they sought to reinscribe older hierarchical conceptions of human life and of existing social order within a new epistemological framework.

We can see these dynamics at play in Hall’s belief that the human race was in a single stage of its evolution and that this stage was a “late, partial, and perhaps essentially abnormal and remedial outcrop of the great underlying life of man-soul.” He explains, “Man is not a permanent type but an organism in a very active stage of evolution toward a more permanent form.” The descriptors “abnormal” and “remedial” in this passage do not describe adolescents but the entire human race, which has veered off course and has yet to fully evolve into a “more permanent form” equivalent with adulthood. Hall thought that humankind, as a whole, was in its evolutionary adolescence: “While his bodily form is comparatively stable, his soul is in a transition stage, and all that we call progress is more and more rapid. Old moorings are constantly broken; adaptive plasticity to new environments—somatic, economic, industrial, social, moral and religious—was never so great.”⁷⁵ In one great metaphorical leap, Hall claims the development of adolescents is the key to guiding the advancement of the entire human race to the next evolutionary stage. He did not make this link by analogy only: adolescence became for him a literal embodiment of the state of civilization, both as evidence of its current distress and as singular opportunities for intervention by parents and educators. For Hall evolution was not only a biological process but also a spiritual, social, and psychological one. His extensive study of adolescence was to discover ways to accelerate and maximize human potential in all these areas over subsequent generations. The problem with Hall’s thinking is not only false equivalence but also the objectification of the adolescent, who is no longer an individual person in this figuration but the raw material with which to shape the fate of all humankind.⁷⁶

Stating that “the child and the race are each keys to the other,” Hall makes human biological development synonymous with the advancement of civilization through the theory of recapitulation, in which the embryos of more “advanced” species are said to represent the adult stages of more “primitive” species, commonly understood as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” In this way Hall’s conception of adolescence relies on a hierarchical logic of racism and social class. The theory of recapitulation, developed most extensively by Ernst Haeckel in his “Biogenetic Law” of 1866, was used throughout the nineteenth century to rank humans according to racial characteristics, with the white European male ranked above all others.⁷⁷ Hall equates “the animal, the savage, and the child-soul,” illustrating the view of racial superiority inherent in his conceptions of categories of age. This developmental logic allows him to argue that “savages, in most respects, are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size.”⁷⁸ Conceptualized as a temporal position, adolescence is not over when the body reaches physical maturity but persists as the embodiment of regressive, deviant, or pathological forms of developmental arrival in adulthood.

Stephen Jay Gould explains that the error in Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation had to do with his conception of time as progress. There are observable similarities between ontogeny (the biological development of an individual organism) and phylogeny (the evolutionary history of a species). However, Gould points out, the relationship between the two is not one of recapitulation, which posits developmental change “all in one direction—a universal acceleration of development, pushing ancestral adult forms into the juvenile stages of descendants.” Haeckel conceptualizes time as a march toward progress, in which adult stages are universally superior to juvenile stages and in which evolution occurs forward toward improvement (though fears of degeneration are never far behind). Haeckel’s theory requires an “active mechanism that pushes previously adult features into progressively earlier stages of descendant ontogenies—that is, it requires a change of developmental timing.” Much more plausible, Gould argues, is a theory put forward by Karl Ernst von Baer, which uses the “conservative nature of heredity” to explain the similarities between ontogeny and phylogeny. So, for example, while Haeckel believes that the gill slits of human embryos were an expression of the same trait present in adult fish, von Baer believes that gill slits “represent a stage common to the early ontogeny of all vertebrates (embryonic fish also have gill slits after all).”⁷⁹ Evolution has occurred, and organisms do develop, but the development of an organism is scientifically observable and measurable only as value-neutral change over a life span. Haeckel’s error stems from conceptualizing this value-neutral change as developmental progress, in a sense imposing a teleology of progress onto a neutral process. This error remains in our notions of development today. Indeed, the word “development” now signals a value-laden notion of progress in which the end result is imagined to be better than the past or even the present.⁸⁰

The theory of recapitulation had been largely discredited in biology even by the time of Hall’s writing, a fact that he acknowledges while simultaneously making a claim for its social relevance: “Along with the sense of immense importance of further coordinating childhood and youth with the development of the race, has grown the conviction that only here can we hope to find true norms against the tendencies to precocity in home, school, church, and civilization generally, and also to establish criteria by which to both diagnose and measure arrest and retardation in the individual and the race.”⁸¹ Notions of the individual and the race, as Hall deploys them, are ideologically interdependent, conceptualized in relation to each other. For Hall childhood and adolescence are thus literal representations of the evolution of humankind, with the child being the most like the animal or the “savage,” whereas he understands the adolescent to have both strong carnal urges and the ability to reason. Hall’s use of recapitulation theory favored a long adolescence and the delay of adulthood, presumably while one “advanced” through the adult stages of inferior races, and as a result his theory privileged those who had the luxury of delaying the need to make a living: the wealthy, the educated, and the upper classes. In this view humankind is imagined to be on a pathway through time in which it moves either forward toward the advancement of civilization or backward toward animality. Like Haeckel’s “Biogenetic Law,” movement through time becomes a value-laden process of achievement and success. What these conceptual layers of bodies, lives, nations, and stories share is a narrativized view of time as progress. Hall incorporates all these layers at once within his idea of adolescence, which he uses to move between biological and social phenomena, indicating causal relationships among them.

Hall was deeply influenced by the theory of evolution and “dreamed of becoming the ‘Darwin of the Mind.’”⁸² But his understanding of evolution more closely followed that of Herbert Spencer than that of Darwin.⁸³ Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” wrote essays on evolution—what he called the “Development Hypothesis”—before the publication of Origin of the Species in 1859, incorporating social applications from the start.⁸⁴ As in Haeckel’s theory, the error in Spencer’s theory of evolution stems from his conceptualization of time as progress. True Darwinian evolution does not have a purpose, and we cannot know the causes of natural selection since they may be long gone before any changes have even shown up in the next generation. Darwin’s theory also emphasized variation, whereas previous theories had emphasized continuities among species. He writes, “During the modification of the descendants of any one species, and during the incessant struggle of all species to increase in numbers, the more diversified these descendants become, the better will be their chance of succeeding in the battle of life.” The system of nature, according to Darwin, is contingency, change, and variation. These adaptations are at odds with the evolutionary narrative justifying education that we see outlined by Hall. Indeed, Darwin implies that natural selection confounds the objectives of the older generation: “Natural selection may modify and adapt the larva of an insect to a score of contingencies wholly different from those which concern the mature insect.”⁸⁵ Castañeda puts it this way: “A developmental system of evolution lays out a specific and more predictable trajectory of change over time, while Darwinian evolution . . . is ‘creative’ precisely because its trajectory cannot be predicted.”⁸⁶ To use Darwin’s theories to justify existing social hierarchies, this value-neutral, unpredictable, and multidirectional notion of change over time had to be replaced by a fantasy of purposeful, progressive time.⁸⁷

This notion of time as progress played a central role in the construction of a racialized, primitive Other. Johannes Fabian argues that social evolutionists like Spencer could not “accept the stark meaninglessness of mere physical duration,” in which the history of humankind “occupied a negligible span on the scale of natural evolution.” They instead believed “that Time ‘accomplished’ or brought about things in the course of evolution.” To maintain their belief in Western superiority—that their present and future were the result of what capital-T “Time” accomplished—they adopted a spatial concept of time: as Fabian explains, a spatial concept of time “promoted a scheme in which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream.” Fabian identifies concepts such as civilization, evolution, and development as “temporal devices” used to uphold this hierarchical order.⁸⁸ Building on Fabian’s claims, Castañeda argues that the figure of the child was similarly used as a device of temporal distancing, “a critically important tool for constructing racial hierarchies, primarily in the United States and Britain.”⁸⁹

Developmentalism imagines that change occurs in one direction toward an eventual goal, producing a hierarchy in which earlier stages are inferior to later stages. The developmental arrival point, however, is defined as inherently normative, evoking characteristics such as whiteness, masculinity, and wealth. People or nations who do not (or cannot) arrive at the imagined end point of developmentalism are understood as failing to develop, stuck in an earlier stage or actively devolving into a lesser form. Thus, Walkerdine explains how “the very idea of development is not natural or universal, but extremely specific, and in its specificity, occludes other marginalized stories, subsumed as they are within the bigger story. The big story is a European patriarchal story, a story from the centre which describes the periphery in terms of the abnormal, difference as deficiency.”⁹⁰ Freeman notes how even today “bourgeois-liberal entities from nations to individuals are defined within a narrow chronopolitics of development at once racialized, gendered, and sexualized.” She gives the example of Western “modernity,” which has “represented its own forward movement against a slower premodernity figured as brown-skinned, feminine, and erotically perverse.”⁹¹

The role of developmentalism in the production and maintenance of racial hierarchies calls into question the ethics of deploying developmental notions of childhood and adolescence at all. Walker-dine shows how the practices of developmental psychology construct childhood as white, wealthy, and masculine in ways that bias researchers and construct girls, non-European, and nonwhite children as deficient.⁹² Queer life has also been historically represented as a state of arrested development, an idea popularized by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the late nineteenth century and later by Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth.⁹³ The logic of developmentalism thus emerges in the nineteenth century as a way to reinscribe and maintain social hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality within new ways of thinking about the natural world.

Social hierarchy was not new to the nineteenth century, but the ways that hierarchy was justified and understood needed to adapt. If ideas about evolution in the nineteenth century challenged notions of an unchanging divine order (species independently created by God within a stable hierarchy), this challenge was resolved by superimposing a secular notion of time as progress onto scientific knowledge of the natural world. As metaphors for inferiority, the concepts of childhood, and later adolescence, were deployed in the nineteenth century to naturalize existing prejudice and hierarchy, in which colonial subjects were figured as “childlike” and the homosexual was positioned as “stuck” in an adolescent stage. What we see in 1870, when positive descriptors associated with adolescence turn to starkly negative ones, is the result of existing hierarchical thinking in which the intensity of prejudice, focused on race and ethnicity, crops up in evocations of age. It is important to recognize that these negative connotations are not associated with historical ideas of childhood—with the forms of condescension or paternalism we might expect to see directed at children—but instead signal a distinct kind of distancing and disavowal that echoes contemporaneous ideas about racial inferiority. This racialized conception of age is what we see in Hall at the turn of the century. Categories of age provided flexible metaphors to justify the “rightness” of social hierarchy throughout the nineteenth century: what happens around 1870 is that these categories began to absorb the prejudice of those social hierarchies to become versatile terms of denigration. This is one of the performative functions of categories of age coming out of the nineteenth century.

The Ethics of Futurity

At the very moment that negative descriptors of adolescence appeared in British and U.S. newspapers, an 1868 article titled “The Awkward Age” resisted these emerging generalizations. The article argues that awkwardness is not a biological feature of adolescence but instead a function of social hierarchy; the author insists that adolescents are awkward “because they do not know whether they are to be treated as children or adults.” Awkwardness is presumed to be a shared social experience but not an essential characteristic of adolescence: “No wonder that your son comes into the room with a confused expression of uncomfortable pain on every feature when he does not know whether he will be recognized as a gentleman, or overlooked as a little boy. . . . No wonder that your tall daughter turns red, stammers, and says foolish things on being courteously spoken to by strangers at dinner, when she is afraid that she may be sharply contradicted or interrupted, and remembers the day before yesterday she was told that children should be seen and not heard.” The problem of awkwardness is thus described as a problem having to do with the power relations between adults and children. The solution proposed is therefore to disrupt this hierarchical relation: “Suppose we make a rule that children are always to be treated, in point of courtesy, as if they were adults?”⁹⁴ In a sense this article is making the same argument I am by proposing a more ethical relationality based in a critique of the categories themselves. The article participates in an emerging discourse about adolescence—one later synthesized by Hall at the turn of the century—but it does so to undermine the logic of hierarchy contributing to the social and bodily experiences of awkwardness in adolescents. It is grappling with the performative effects of categories of age to challenge an existing discourse about adolescence.

What I am describing in this chapter are functions of the categories themselves, which are not totalizing. The performative function of adolescence to uphold social hierarchies is enacted through specific discursive practices that I am locating in the mid-nineteenth century and that continue to this day. The effects of these practices impact people differently across varying positions of identity and social privilege, and this specific mechanism—whether we call it historicism or developmentalism—is used to maintain the inferiority of other categories of difference. This raises an important question: Are some processes properly developmental, whereas others are not? Or, put another way, is the issue here a misapplication of the concept of developmentalism onto nations and races to justify projects of domination? Such a question implies that categories of age might properly occupy a developmental sequence, whereas nations and races do not. I argue, however, that developmentalism is a hierarchical logic that has no place in understanding either childhood or nations. We might be tempted to think of the stages of human life as the basis for the developmental logics arising in the nineteenth century. But this broader epistemological shift, which encompassed various and even opposing viewpoints in nineteenth-century thought, did not emerge from categories of age. Rather, I have shown that childhood and later adolescence were reinterpreted, discovered anew, through a narrativizing concept of time as progress. This developmental logic is what makes adolescence possible as a new category in the late nineteenth century.

In one sense the project of Hall’s Adolescence is motivated by a productive and useful question: What do we want the future to look like? Is the problem that we have different answers to this question, or is the problem the investment in futurity inherent in the question itself? Hall bestows teaching and parenting with monumental importance, but this importance comes at great cost, weighting parenthood with an enormous responsibility to society and displacing the relationship between parents and children for one shaped by institutional priorities. It sets in place a supreme rationalization for surveillance by parents and teachers responsible for the development of young people according to what Hall considers the “true norms” of home, school, church, and state.⁹⁵ We might understand Hall’s work as an enactment of what Foucault describes as biopower or biopolitics, in which childhood and adolescence function as sites of intensifying institutional regulation, part of a larger social and governmental project to “foster life” beginning in the eighteenth century.⁹⁶ In the biopolitical sense “life” means being alive and putting that life to use in the service of the nation’s good. It doesn’t necessarily mean having a good life or promote ethical questions about how to do so. Claire Colebrook puts it this way: “Modern bio-power can then take the form of the management of life: far from asking how we might live, what we might do, or what counts as a good life, life is now that which will ground political decisions.”⁹⁷ Biopower is not concerned with whether we feel whole or happy or spiritually enlightened. It is concerned with our functional use value as citizens. Thus, Foucault writes that a “normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life.”⁹⁸ As mechanisms of biopower, childhood and adolescence continue to function as technologies deployed as the necessary means for directing the future. As we see in Hall’s work, the fate of humankind and even “life itself” appear to be at stake in normalizing projects such as the policing of gender norms, the construction and maintenance of heterosexuality, and the affirmation of the reproductive nuclear family as the organizing principle of society.

Today the figure of the child functions as an adaptable symbol for various and even opposing political projects as part of what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” in which the child becomes synonymous with the future, “the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention,” “the logic within which the political itself must be thought.”⁹⁹ Edelman explains the adaptability of reproductive futurism, showing how opposing arguments over abortion both rely on constructions of the child as futurity: the so-called pro-life position insists that a fetus is a child who deserves a future, and the so-called pro-choice position advocates for reproductive rights for future “sons and daughters.”¹⁰⁰ Robin Bernstein further illuminates this contradictory function of the figural child in her discussion of Keith Bardwell, a justice of the peace in Louisiana who refused to marry an interracial couple in 2009.¹⁰¹ He reportedly justified his decision by saying he “didn’t want to put children in a situation they didn’t bring on themselves.”¹⁰² The couple in question did not have children, so the children he aimed to protect were hypothetical. “I do it to protect the children,” Bardwell said. “The kids are innocent and I worry about their futures.” Bernstein observes that these statements assume that “imagined children deserve protection more than living adults deserve constitutional rights.”¹⁰³ Remarkably, she notes, this investment in imaginary children went unchallenged in the public denouncements that followed, which countered his position with arguments for the potential benefits of interracial marriage for the couple’s future children. Both Bardwell and those who opposed him made a case for their position based on the image of an idealized child citizen, what Edelman describes as a “universalized subject” whose “notional freedom” is “more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself.”¹⁰⁴

The figure of the child in these arguments, like the developmental adolescence found in Hall’s work, reflects what Castañeda describes as a common “conceptualization of the child as a potentiality rather than an actuality,” our seemingly “self-evident” beliefs that the child is “an adult in the making,” “a human in incomplete form,” and “not yet that which it alone has the capacity to become.”¹⁰⁵ This problematic emphasis on futurity places the potential future of a person called a child above the present needs and desires of that person. Noreen Giffney puts it this way: “Reproductive futurism fixates on the future as fetish so the Child becomes but a means to an end; a prosthetic conduit through which access to the future can be achieved.”¹⁰⁶ This logic takes an extreme form in Bernstein’s example, in which the “needs of imagined children trumped even those of embodied children.” Bernstein explains, “Bardwell understood interracial children to ‘suffer’ and said that therefore he ‘won’t help put them through it.’ Bardwell opposed interracial marriage, then, so as to protect imagined children from becoming flesh, to protect them from life itself.”¹⁰⁷ In this example, we clearly see the child evoked as potentiality over the recognition of any actual living, embodied children. This is the ethical problem inherent in futurity. Remarkably, Bardwell’s argument for children is so far removed from the actual needs of children that it attempts to prevent them from even being born. The figural child of reproductive futurism is not a child at all, but the projection of a normalizing culture.

Social histories of adolescence focus on the material changes in the late nineteenth century under which a population of young people became newly recognizable as a specific group. New legislation excluded young people from the workforce, and educational reforms extended the age required for compulsory schooling in both Britain and the United States. These changes significantly changed the legal agency and status of the people called adolescents in the late nineteenth century. The material changes that resulted are sometimes understood as the reason for the increased visibility of young people, which in turn led to their availability as objects of study in emerging twentieth-century discourses, and I do not disagree.¹⁰⁸ And yet, it is ironic that the very social changes leading to the increased visibility of a segment of the population correspond with the emergence of new ways of thinking about them that directly contribute to their continued erasure. The conditions of this new recognition—the proliferation of institutional discourses harnessing childhood and adolescence as potentiality at the turn of the twentieth century—render adolescents unintelligible as actual people just as they are. At a moment when we might say adolescents were first discovered or seen, the actuality of young people was being eclipsed by narratives of evolutionary progress and a symbolic investment in futurity.

Seeing a young person for their potentiality necessitates a refusal of their actuality—who they are in the present—and, consequently, a denial of their agential possibilities. The logic of reproductive futurism decides for children whom or what they should be. Developmental models, both biological and educational, suggest that the changes inherent in growth justify this erasure, since the present of childhood and adolescence is fleeting. The raw material or matter of the child body “as potentiality, is on its way to actualization, and that actuality is determined in advance as what matter ought to be.”¹⁰⁹ But the idea that adulthood is somehow more stable or continuous, that adulthood is the arrival point of this process of change, is itself a fantasy. Within this logic educational or parental expectations for the future are given permission to eclipse the present as anything other than the opportunity—the obligation—to shape that future in the right direction. It is precisely this “determining in advance” that poses an ethical problem. This model does not distinguish between ethical and unethical mentor relationships, between the parent who just wants happiness for their child’s future and the one who has already decided for that child how they will achieve such happiness. All forms of investment in the future are understood as “teaching” or “parenting” or “development” itself. Like notions of time or history as a progressive story, the life of the child becomes a narrative for the adult to find meaning, to accomplish something.

How might the logic of developmentalism be resisted? In the past decade, queer theorists have devoted critical attention to the idea of “queer time” as a location of political agency: as Jack Halberstam describes it, “the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence—early adulthood—marriage—reproduction—child rearing—retirement—death, the embrace of a late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility.”¹¹⁰ Halberstam’s model is about resisting a developmental logic for how different parts of life are to be valued, embracing instead the full range of human existence at any age. Similarly, Kathryn Bond Stockton explores the profound need for cultural representations of “growing sideways” for queer children who avoid or delay the normative, developmental arrival point of heterosexuality.¹¹¹ Likewise, Edelman’s No Future can be understood within this frame, rejecting futurity altogether in favor of the queer jouissance of the death drive. José Esteban Muñoz elaborates yet another alternative, retheorizing futurity as queerness, as a “site of infinite and immutable potentiality.” Unlike the common conceptualization of the child as potentiality (which is a form of objectification), Muñoz describes a practice of queer temporality in which potentiality is always located in the present, in the right now.¹¹² This practice requires a queer understanding of potentiality as infinite and immutable—that is, an understanding that potentiality never arrives at a normative future, never takes shape as an institutional vision, but manifests in radical aesthetic deployments only as potentiality. We might say that the child is conceptualized as potentiality in part to manage and control the radical promise of potentiality that Muñoz articulates. The figure of the child is used to construct a comforting narrative where only the figural child embodies potentiality, thus containing all the promise and all the risk in a presumably manageable and controllable form. Muñoz’s retheorization gestures toward the possibility of a more ethical engagement with futurity than what we see in Hall. When it comes to categories of age, we might ask how our investment in growth and futurity can be located in the present, in the doing, in the being and becoming of each present moment. We might ask how futurity can function as unlimited possibility, even when those possibilities might include failure, harm, or death. Can the notion of fostering “life itself” ever be conceived of as open-ended rather than as a social obligation to health, growth, development, and productivity?

In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes the queer temporality of her friendships with three other people, one fifteen years her senior, two fifteen years younger, all academics with much in common with one another. She writes, “In a ‘normal’ generational narrative, our identifications with each other would be aligned with an expectation that in another fifteen years, I’d be situated comparably to where my sixty-year-old friend is, while my thirty-year-old friends would be situated comparably to where I am.”¹¹³ The “generational narrative” she describes is one of developmentalism, in which years correspond to universalized arrival points. The ways that developmentalism instructs us to relate and identify with one another invites a deeply problematic relationality. Age differences, in this logic, imply a normative life sequence that these identifications function to regulate and reproduce. It is not the idea of childhood or adolescence but the compulsory dimensions of adulthood that are reproduced, such as the obligation to be a productive member of the labor force, the pressure to be and stay married, or the social expectation that one should have children. These experiences of being in the world are problematically naturalized by age, as if there were some quality or shared consciousness in being forty-five years old that is shared by all. The developmental logic of generational difference invites projection rather than compassionate understanding. Someday, you will be where I am. Predictive and directional. Or the dismissive, I have been where you are.

Of course, Sedgwick’s friendships fail to occupy this generational logic because she, at only forty-five, is living with advanced breast cancer while her sixty-year-old friend is healthy. Of their two thirty-year-old friends, one is living with advanced cancer and another with HIV. In this queer temporality that fails to participate in the normative sequencing of aging, Sedgwick considers other ways of characterizing their connections with one another. “On this scene,” she writes, “an older person doesn’t love a younger person as someone who will someday be where she is now, or vice versa.” Though her analysis suggests that their friendships depart from the norm only because three of the four are facing shortened lifespans, I want to suggest that her alternative characterization describes a more ethical relationality for age difference than what a developmental model invites: “It is one another immediately, one another as the present fullness of a becoming whose arc may extend no further, whom we each must learn best to apprehend, fulfill, and bear company.”¹¹⁴ This relationality, which Sedgwick describes in coping with the imminence of death, might be used to more ethically account for the rapid biological changes unique to childhood and adolescence or for the inevitable shifts in identity and selfhood anyone might experience over a lifetime. Biological changes are often used to dismiss adolescent experiences and perspectives, as if young people could not possibly know themselves in the midst of such instability or unfinishedness. But what if these changes served instead to remind us of our ethical obligation to see and accept young people in the immediacy of who they are, in each moment, without projecting or anticipating a developmental arc? This ethical relation asks to be contingently learned and known again and again: how best to be with one another in the present moment of becoming, whatever that might look like.