notes

Preface.

1. Philip Graham is a professor emeritus of child psychiatry at the Institute of Child Health in London.

2. Graham, End of Adolescence, 1.

3. Epstein, Case against Adolescence, xix.

4. See also Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society.

5. Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order, 1, 2, 3.

6. The idea that young people are reaching puberty at younger and younger ages might itself be a popular myth about adolescence, one usually deployed to disenfranchise young people through narratives of societal decline.

7. Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order, 58, 3–6.

8. Cohen, foreword to Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order, ix, xi, x, xix.

9. See Sheldon, Child to Come, 118.

Introduction.
Queer Theory and Categories of Age

1. Butler, Undoing Gender, 29.

2. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 53–59.

3. For ghosting the gay child, see Stockton, Queer Child. For scenes of social ridicule, the movie Tomboy (2011) is a recent example. There are countless examples of suicide, but one is Lost and Delirious (2001).

4. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 1, 3, 4.

5. Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 10, 1.

6. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 123–51; Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Sedgwick, Novel Gazing, 1–37; Felski, Limits of Critique; Gubar, “Risky Business”; Gubar, “Hermeneutics of Recuperation.” See also Rudd, Reading the Child.

7. This phrase is often attributed to Ricoeur’s book Freud and Philosophy but was actually coined by him much later to describe his work as a whole. See Felski, Limits of Critique, 31.

8. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 130.

9. Felski, Limits of Critique, 8.

10. Gubar, “Hermeneutics of Recuperation,” 305.

11. Felski, Limits of Critique, 5.

12. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 128, 124.

13. Barad understands “the apparatus” in scientific experimentation as crucial in shaping what becomes visible and knowable, what is able to emerge as matter within phenomena and thus is productive of reality (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 148).

14. See Foucault, History of Sexuality.

15. Freud, “Psychogenesis of a Case,” in Strachey, Standard Edition, 18:147; Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis.

16. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 135.

17. I am using the phrase “hermeneutic of the self” as an elaboration of Foucault’s conceptualization of sexuality as a hermeneutic of self (History of Sexuality).

18. This question echoes a psychoanalytic notion of childhood and adolescence as constitutive of adult subjectivity. See Rose, Case of Peter Pan; and Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul.

19. Queer theory has productively questioned this sequencing of development and identity. See Halberstam, In a Queer Time; Freeman, Time Binds; and Edelman, No Future.

20. See Hacking, Historical Ontology.

21. Sánchez-Eppler writes that her focus on childhood necessarily entails a broad and flexible range of ages, “from infancy to adolescence, treating childhood not as a specific period of years but as a set of social conditions” (Dependent States, xxi). See also Steedman, Strange Dislocations; Kincaid, Erotic Innocence; and Bernstein, Racial Innocence.

22. Gubar, “Risky Business,” 450, 451.

23. Gubar, Artful Dodgers, 31.

24. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 28–29.

25. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 5; quoted in Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 24; Kincaid, Child-Loving, 12; Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 16; quoted in Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 6.

26. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 73.

27. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 16; Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 2.

28. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, xxii.

29. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 19.

30. Edelman, No Future, 3.

31. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 5.

32. For example, Kincaid’s emphasis on discourse and the cultural mythologies that construct the “pedophile” and the “child” as figures and roles is still misunderstood in both nonacademic and academic contexts as a defense of child molesters, despite Kincaid’s clear statements about the great harm of denying our culpability in the circumstances leading to child abuse. That is, he is misunderstood as justifying or upholding the very discourse he aims to critique. Kincaid does not defend child abuse but rather describes the elaborate ways our culture avoids acknowledging the reality of it. See Erotic Innocence.

33. Edelman, No Future, 11.

34. Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 2.

35. This is referred to as representationalism, which Barad defines as “the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 46).

36. Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 7, 10.

37. In some cases the emphasis on language in critical analysis has become a totalizing view, in which, as Barad remarks, “Language has been granted too much power” (Meeting the Universe Halfway, 132). Lesnik-Oberstein’s (mis)interpretations of Rose, for example, illustrate a view of language in which no material world or bodily phenomenon is retrievable (Children’s Literature). This is an opposite trend to the one I am addressing. Scholars such as Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen Thomson, for example, find Sedgwick, Edelman, and Stockton not too distant from the matter of real lives but rather to be risking “impending collapses of post-structuralist self-reflexivity” (“What Is Queer Theory Doing?,” 37). See also Lesnik-Oberstein, “Childhood, Queer Theory, and Feminism.”

38. Prout, Future of Childhood, 2.

39. Edelman, No Future, 29, 49.

40. Giffney, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism,” in Giffney and Hird, Queering the Non/Human, 73.

41. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 163, 164.

42. Gubar, “Hermeneutics of Recuperation,” 292.

43. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, xv, xxii.

44. Gubar, “Hermeneutics of Recuperation,” 292.

45. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, xxiii, xxv.

46. See Gubar, Artful Dodgers.

47. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 212.

48. Duane, “Questioning the Autonomous Subject,” in Duane, Children’s Table, 15.

49. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, x.

50. Steedman’s historical analysis in Strange Dislocations draws heavily on psychoanalysis and cites Foucault, and she has been taken up by poststructuralist approaches to childhood in recent years; for example, see Sheldon, Child to Come; and Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child.

51. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 11.

52. Gubar, “Hermeneutics of Recuperation,” 291; Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 13.

53. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 6.

54. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 133.

55. Ibid.

56. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 2.

57. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 152.

58. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 163.

59. See Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa.

60. For an example of this phenomenon, see Libby Anne, “We Don’t ‘Do’ Teenagers,” Love, Joy, Feminism (blog), September 12, 2011, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2011/09/we-dont-do-teenagers.html.

61. Butler, Gender Trouble, xxiv.

62. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 152, 49, 55.

63. Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 2, 4.

64. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 55.

65. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 56–58. Likewise, Hacking describes “the avalanche of numbers that begins around 1820” as being “obsessed with analyse morale, namely, the statistics of deviance,” including “suicide, prostitution, drunkenness, vagrancy, madness, crime, les misérables.” This striking trend of accounting for deviance leads him to ask, “Is making up people intimately linked to control?” (Historical Ontology, 104).

66. Goldberg and Menon, “Queering History,” 1616.

67. Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 5.

68. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, x.

69. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 130.

70. Chinn, “‘I Was a Lesbian Child,’” in Duane, Children’s Table, 161.

Chapter 1.
G. Stanley Hall and the Logic of Developmentalism

1. For example, Springhall remarks, “The modern concept of adolescence as an autonomous age group was created almost singlehandedly in America by G. Stanley Hall (1844–1925) and his colleagues at Clark University” (Coming of Age, 28). Spacks notes, “Adolescents have always existed, but the myth of adolescence has thrived most richly since G. Stanley Hall invented it” (Adolescent Idea, 228). In a chapter titled “The Invention of the Adolescent,” Kett writes, “The era of the adolescent dawned in Europe and America in the two decades after 1900” (Rites of Passage, 215). Springhall, Spacks, and Kett do not dismiss the importance of the nineteenth century, and their books include significant historical context leading up to 1900. These older histories, however, have given way to an emphasis on the start of the twentieth century as an origin point—a key moment, for sure—but one that might be further nuanced. Neubauer, for example, claims “adolescence ‘came of age’ in the decades around 1900, not only because the term had little currency earlier, but, as I shall show, because interlocking discourses about adolescence emerged in psychoanalysis, psychology, criminal justice, pedagogy, sociology, as well as in literature” (Fin-de-Siècle Culture of Adolescence, 6). Moran writes, “At the dawn of the twentieth century, a sixty-year-old man invented adolescence” (Teaching Sex, 1). Likewise, Baxter argues, “The notion that adolescence is a twentieth-century invention is supported by the fact that the term had little currency before 1900 and made a sudden and pronounced appearance in a wide variety of discourses at the century’s beginning” (Modern Age, 3).

2. These numbers are taken from full-text searches for the word “adolescence” in Readex’s Early American Newspapers, 1690–1922, series 1–3; Gale’s British Library Newspapers; and the Times Digital Archive. As of this writing, I did not have access to Readex’s Early American Newspapers, series 4–16, collections that would dramatically increase the number of sources found in U.S. papers. Additionally, there are 667 references to “adolescence” in Gale’s Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, though some of these overlap with the references in the Readex database, so I did not combine the number of results from the two databases.

3. There is a notable overlap in the articles reprinted in British and U.S. newspapers in the nineteenth century. Because my argument is concerned with the ways language and meaning move over time, the wider the archive, the more useful it is for tracking these types of shifts in usage and meaning. Likewise, Hall’s educational and professional background span both sides of the Atlantic. There are differences in how adolescence took shape in different countries; however, “the simultaneous development in different nations of the institutions and psychology of adolescence had some common characteristics and sources” (Kett, Rites of Passage, 215).

4. Because I am interested in broad patterns of usage and meaning, a medium like newspapers serves my purpose better than novels or parenting manuals. Cordell explains, “The composition and circulation of texts among antebellum newspapers offers a model of authorship that is communal rather than individual, distributed rather than centralized” (“Reprinting,” 418). My project is different from Cordell and Smith’s at the Viral Texts Project in that I have analyzed patterns of usage and meaning for an individual word across databases of nineteenth-century newspapers, whereas the Viral Texts Project is mapping instances of whole article reprinting among multiple newspapers and periodicals to theorize which factors caused some articles to “go viral” (Cordell and Smith, “Viral Texts Project”).

5. London Times, February 14, 1862; “The United States,” London Times, May 25, 1865; “Visit of the Prince of Wales to Australia,” London Times, December 20, 1860.

6. See “For the Oracle: From Simon,” Harrisburg (Pa.) Oracle of Dauphin and Harrisburgh Advertiser, December 29, 1804; and “For the Enquirer,” Richmond (Va.) Enquirer, January 21, 1812.

7. Walkerdine, “Beyond Developmentalism?,” 453, 462.

8. Castañeda, Figurations, 13.

9. See Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 41; and Foucault, Order of Things, xxiii.

10. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, 7.

11. Foucault, Order of Things, xxii.

12. The word “adolescence” comes from Latin and appears in French in the late thirteenth century and English in the fifteenth century, meaning the “period of life between childhood and young adulthood, youth, youthfulness” (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “adolescence,” accessed September 15, 2019, http://www.oed.com). The newspaper databases together show only 9 uses of the word before 1800 and only 20–30 a year between 1800 and 1840, tripling in number in the 1840s and beyond. The word “adolescence,” however, was not frequently used in the nineteenth century. A side-by-side comparison in Gale’s Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers shows 667 references to “adolescence” compared to more than 350,000 references to “youth,” suggesting that “adolescence” was not a common term of reference for categories of age until the late nineteenth century, when it begins to appear more frequently in medical and scientific discourse.

13. “The Use and Abuse of Time,” New York Chronicle, June 29, 1769.

14. Philologer, “Pompous Reflections No. 1,” Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian, April 9, 1811. This article was reprinted as “Pompous Reflections” in the New-York Weekly Museum a few weeks later, on April 27, 1811.

15. Middletown (Conn.) Constitution, December 6, 1848. The wording varies in reprints from paper to paper, suggesting the variations of oral circulation.

16. San Antonio Express, May 20, 1870.

17. “Sculpture,” New York Commercial Advertiser, October 6, 1798.

18. “Robert Smallpiece,” advertisement, Boston Columbian Centinel, August 23, 1806.

19. “Amicable Controversy, or Politics beneath an Oak,” Washington (D.C.) Monitor, June 2, 1808.

20. “Sachem’s Head: A Story of the Seventeenth Century,” Middletown (Conn.) Middlesex Gazette, April 12, 1826.

21. “The Past,” Norwich (Conn.) Courier, September 26, 1827.

22. “Simple Annals from the ‘Remember Me,’” Bridgeton (N.J.) Washington Whig, December 27, 1828.

23. “Joanna of Lewardeen,” Boston Daily Atlas, January 14, 1848.

24. Springhall, Coming of Age, 34.

25. Kett, Rites of Passage, 6.

26. My encounters with the phrase “infancy and adolescence” were often coincidental in my reading of newspaper references to adolescence. As of this writing, the Readex and Gale newspaper databases are not very effective when searching for a phrase because of the ways the newspaper images must be tagged and coded with searchable text.

27. The earliest instance I could find of this piece appeared in the Barnstaple (U.K.) North Devon Journal in 1824, under the title “Phisiology,” and it also circulated in various papers in Ireland, Wales, and England in 1824 and 1825 as well as in later years.

28. E. G. Wheeler, “Periods of Human Life,” 396.

29. Foucault, Order of Things, xxiii.

30. Ibid., 129.

31. Foucault, Order of Things, xxi.

32. See Chamberlain, Child, 70.

33. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, 23, 25.

34. “The Periods of Human Life,” Newburyport (Ma.) Herald, April 29, 1825.

35. “Master Burke,” Baltimore Patriot, May 6, 1831. The title refers to child prodigy Joseph Burke (1818–1902), an actor and musician also known as the “Irish Roscius,” who came to the United States in 1830. He would have been thirteen years old at the time of this review.

36. “Dr. A. L. Warner’s Lecture,” Richmond (Va.) Enquirer, November 25, 1834.

37. “Laugh Where We Must, Be Candid Where We Can,” New Hampshire Patriot, January 13, 1840.

38. Emma C. Embury, “Willfulness, or The Wife’s Tale,” Salem (Ma.) Gazette, June 4, 1841 and Pennsylvania Inquirer (Philadelphia), June 18, 1841.

39. “The Illumination at New York,” Baltimore Sun, May 10, 1847.

40. Texian Advocate (Victoria), May 1, 1851.

41. “The Poacher,” Boston Daily Atlas, February 15, 1853. This story was reportedly translated from the French periodical Revue des Deux Mondes.

42. Joel Barlow, “Oration, Delivered at Washington City on the 4th of July Inst,” Boston Daily Advertiser, July 14, 1809. This speech was also printed in the Richmond (Va.) Enquirer and the Philadelphia Democratic Press in July and in the New-Hampshire Patriot in August 1809.

43. “Debate on Saturday, January 28,” Washington Federalist (Georgetown), February 18, 1809. The war in question is the Peninsular War, 1808–14, between France and the allied powers of Spain, the United Kingdom, and Portugal for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars.

44. “Address from the Washington Association to the Young Men of Pennsylvania,” Philadelphia Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, August 19, 1813.

45. “From the Winchester Advertiser,” Washington (Ky.) Union, September 1, 1815.

46. “City Hall,” Washington (D.C.) Daily National Intelligencer, August 23, 1820. This article was also printed in 1820 in the New York papers the American, the Mercantile Advertiser, and the New-York Gazette; the Norwich (Conn.) Courier; the Pittsfield (Mass.) Sun; and the Providence (R.I.) Patriot.

47. “The Presidential Election,” Washington (D.C.) Daily National Intelligencer, February 6, 1816.

48. “The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte,” Washington (D.C.) Daily National Intelligencer, August 10, 1841.

49. “Our Relations with Mexico: The Prospect a Little Stormy,” New York Herald, August 14, 1845.

50. “Mr. Knowlton’s Resolutions,” Wisconsin Patriot (Madison), March 8, 1856.

51. In the newspaper databases I accessed, there were no examples of negative descriptors like this prior to 1856, and these phrases are somewhat idiosyncratic themselves. The phrase “gangrene adolescence” appears in a scathing “Rotary Biography of the Wisconsin Assembly of 1856,” Wisconsin Patriot (Madison), April 5, 1856; and the phrase “effeminate adolescence” appears in an equally scathing “Rotary Biography of the Legislature of Wisconsin of 1856,” Wisconsin Patriot (Madison), October 25, 1856, likely by the same writer: the April article was written under the pseudonym “Gov. Rotary Pump, Esq” and the October article was published anonymously.

52. “Our Relations with England,” Washington (D.C.) Madisonian, March 31, 1842.

53. “The Progress of the United States: Its Agriculture and Population,” New York Herald, February 2, 1845.

54. “The New Revolution: Its Character and Tendency,” New York Herald, April 2, 1845.

55. “Letters of Interest and Importance,” Chicago Pomeroy’s Democrat, September 21, 1870.

56. “In Hoc Signo Vinces, Another Day of Revelry,” New-Orleans Times, December 4, 1874; “Round about Town” New-Orleans Times, December 20, 1874.

57. “L’Homme Qui Rit,” London Times, October 14, 1869; London Times, December 17, 1869.

58. Baxter, for example, writes, “These [negative] attitudes were articulated and justified in the earliest full-length theoretical treatments of what would become popularly known as ‘adolescence’: G. Stanley Hall’s two-volume work . . . and Margaret Mead’s three studies. . . . Hall and Mead were also united in the rehabilitative nature of their work, which claimed to provide objective observations of adolescents, but really outlined methods to deal with members of this demographic if they got out of control” (Modern Age, 4–5).

59. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 43, 102, 43; Hacking, Historical Ontology, 99–114.

60. Somerville, Queering the Color Line, 3, 4.

61. For example, Castañeda analyzes how the child in nineteenth-century science is “used to establish hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality as ‘facts’ of the natural human body” (Figurations, 9). Similarly, Bernstein argues that “childhood figured pivotally in a set of large-scale U.S. racial projects” (Racial Innocence, 3). Lesko further describes how constructions of “white middle-class boys . . . at the turn of the 20th century similarly depended on girls, on working-class youth, and on youth of color, against whom they were defined as masculine, pure, self-disciplined, and courageous.” Thus, Lesko argues, “the modern project to develop adolescence was and is simultaneously a construction of whiteness and masculinity as central to the citizen” (Act Your Age!, 9). DeLuzio remarks, “notions of gender, race, and class figured into the scientific production of adolescence as a ‘universal,’ ‘developmental’ category that privileged maleness, whiteness, and middle-class status as its normative characteristics” (Female Adolescence, 5). And Chinn argues that the idea of modern adolescence emerged in 1900 as the result of prejudice toward immigrants and their Americanized teenage children at the turn of the century: “While early discussions of adolescents conflated their urban immigrant circumstances with their age identity, within a few decades the language used about this particular group of young people migrated to the larger class of adolescents, particularly (and ironically) the bourgeois Anglo teenagers who were previously defined in opposition to these working class kids” (Inventing Modern Adolescence, 5–6).

62. Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 41.

63. Foucault, Order of Things, xxiii, 128.

64. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 288; Moretti, Way of the World, 6–7; and Fabian, Time and the Other, 8–15.

65. Freeman, “Time Binds, or Erotohistoriography,” 58.

66. Freeman, Time Binds, 4.

67. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 91.

68. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, 12.

69. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 143. See also Steedman, Strange Dislocations, 10–11; and Taylor, Sources of the Self, 111–14. Taking her cue from Taylor, Steedman describes “the thing that happened in this period was the move from outside to inside” (Strange Dislocations, 11).

70. Freeman, Time Binds, 4–5.

71. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 288–89.

72. It was Erikson, not Hall, who popularized the idea of the “adolescent identity crisis” in Identity. For more on these narrativizing functions of adolescence and identity, see Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 135–53; and Gordon, “Turning Back.”

73. Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 47.

74. Steedman, Strange Dislocations, 50, 52.

75. Hall, Adolescence, 1:vii.

76. Gill-Peterson explains that metaphor is an essential tool for the theory and practice of science and that “metaphor illuminates the active role of language and form in the production of scientific knowledge and their entanglement with the material world.” However, children have also been dehumanized and “made into poorly fitted metaphors” to give shape to other concepts. According to Gill-Peterson, the solution is not to do away with metaphors in the construction of scientific knowledge but “to imagine different ones that would reshape the practice of science and the production of biological knowledge from the situated perspective of the long-presumed passive object” (Histories of the Transgender Child, 36–38).

77. Hall, Adolescence, 1:viii. On Haeckel’s law, see his Generelle morphologie der organismen.

78. Hall, Adolescence, 1:vii, 2:649.

79. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, 2, 3, 4, 3.

80. Many scholars have made this observation. See Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason, 44; and Walkerdine, “Beyond Developmentalism?,” 455.

81. Hall, Adolescence, 1:viii.

82. Moran, Teaching Sex, 15.

83. Fabian writes, “A failure to distinguish between Darwin’s and Spencer’s views of evolution is responsible for a great deal of equivocal back-and-forth tracking between biological and sociocultural applications. On the other hand, an admixture of the two cannot simply be dismissed as an error. It stems from a tradition of equivocation fostered by Spencer himself and perhaps by Darwin in his later stages” (Time and the Other, 11).

84. Herbert Spencer, “The Development Hypothesis,” Corning, (N.Y.) Leader, March 20, 1852. Castañeda writes, “Spencer’s voluminous writings employed a version of evolution that used individual development as the basis for human evolution, and narrated both as a progressive story” (Figurations, 20–21).

85. Darwin, On the Origin of the Species, in Wilson, From So Simple a Beginning, 532, 505.

86. Castañeda, Figurations, 20.

87. Fabian, Time and the Other, 12.

88. Ibid., 14–15, 17.

89. Castañeda, Figurations, 22.

90. Walkerdine, “Beyond Developmentalism?,” 455.

91. Freeman, “Time Binds, or Erotohistoriography,” 57.

92. See Walkerdine, “Beyond Developmentalism?,” 457–61.

93. See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis; and Freud, “Psychogenesis of a Case,” in Strachey, Standard Edition, 18:145–72. The construction of queer lives and identities as immature continues in homophobic therapeutic practices today. See Sedgwick, Tendencies, 154–64.

94. “The Awkward Age,” Cultivator and Country Gentleman, June 11, 1868, 429. This article contains a header indicating that it was reprinted from the newspaper the Independent.

95. Hall, Adolescence, 1:viii.

96. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 138.

97. Colebrook, “On Not Becoming Man,” in Alaimo and Heckman, Material Feminisms, 66.

98. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 144.

99. Edelman, No Future, 2–3. What Edelman identifies as a symptom of contemporary political thought has its roots in the biopolitics of the emerging institutions of medicine, psychology, and education in the late nineteenth century.

100. Edelman, No Future, 3.

101. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 1.

102. Don Ellzey, “jp Refuses to Marry Couple,” Hammond (La.) Daily Star, October 15, 2009, quoted in Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 1.

103. Associated Press, “Landrieu: Keith Bardwell Should Be Dismissed for Denying Marriage Licenses to Interracial Couples,” Huffington Post, October 16, 2009, quoted in Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 1.

104. Edelman, No Future, 11.

105. Castañeda, Figurations, 1.

106. Giffney, “Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism,” in Giffney and Hird, Queering the Non/Human, 72.

107. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 2.

108. Baxter writes, “Urbanization, industrialization, and the various social reforms that accompanied these changes in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century had the effect of making teens a more conspicuous presence” (Modern Age, 44). John R. Gillis writes, “The problems of the adolescent were gaining public attention by 1900 because an increasingly larger minority of the population was finding itself in the demographic and economic situation that produced this new phase of life” (Youth and History, 118). Springhall writes, “Historical trends in modern British society were also conspiring to bring recognition to adolescence as a clearly demarcated group with its own peculiar problems” (Coming of Age, 26–27).

109. Colebrook, “On Not Becoming Man,” in Alaimo and Heckman, Material Feminisms, 57. Colebrook is not writing specifically about the child but about the idea of potentiality in materialist politics more broadly.

110. Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 182.

111. See Stockton, Queer Child.

112. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 127, 49.

113. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 148.

114. Ibid., 149.

Chapter 2. Temporality, Selfhood, and the Politics of Difference

1. Margaret Lowenfeld, “Youth and Health” (lecture delivered to the British Red Cross Society, London, July 22, 1934), folder 10, box 5, Margaret Lowenfeld, Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, London.

2. This argument is elaborated further for the second half of the twentieth century in chapter 3.

3. Yoder, [Untitled], 16.

4. “Dr. Hall’s ‘Adolescence’ Considered One of the Most Important in Years,” Philadelphia Enquirer, July 22, 1904.

5. Castañeda remarks on how the version of childhood described in this context is specifically Western, one that is “constituted in and for the West, or for European, Western, or modern culture” (Figurations, 16). What this means is that the figure of the child described here is not just culturally and historically located in the West, but one formulated historically and culturally to support the West’s narratives about its own superiority.

6. Upham, Transactions and Proceedings, 113.

7. “Majestic Maturity,” advertisement for Bradfield’s Female Regulator, Macon Telegraph, November 19, 1897.

8. Walkerdine, “Beyond Developmentalism?,” 452.

9. Hall, Adolescence, 1:v.

10. These epistemological concerns reemerge a mere sixty years later in poststructuralist theory and science studies (see epilogue).

11. Hall, Adolescence, 1:vii.

12. Fabian, Time and the Other, 1.

13. Hall, Adolescence, 1:viii.

14. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 168.

15. Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 10.

16. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 20.

17. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 4.

18. See Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. In an unpublished dissertation titled “Making Children Normal,” Huang documents the corresponding, but seemingly opposite, trend to count, measure, and sort children in statistics at the turn of the century: “Zelizer’s excellent analysis has inspired many of the questions that I have brought to this work. Yet, on the surface, our conclusions do not necessarily agree. . . . If we assume that we are both right, there is an interesting irony, that society began to esteem children as precious while objectifying them as future resources. Both scenarios led to the conclusion that the nation should pay attention to children and their development. Some reformers at the time made use of both points of view (following heart-rending stories about child suffering with arguments about wasting precious resources). It seems that they did not see a contradiction” (25). I think Huang’s observation is correct: these two seemingly opposite trends are enabled by the objectification of children. The idealization of a priceless child is the same impulse as the view that children are raw material for the making of the future.

19. “Seeks National Measure,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 30, 1904.

20. “Ask Mercy for Texas Cattle,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 14, 1903.

21. Stockton, Queer Child, 30, 32. Stockton notes that innocence can be conferred to a child of color, but only through a narrative of abuse: “Evidently, this equal-opportunity innocence for the underprivileged, which requires their being brutalized, is worthy of our sight” (33).

22. Breslow, “Adolescent Citizenship,” 475.

23. Ibid., 474.

24. Rollo, “Color of Childhood,” 310.

25. Breslow, “Adolescent Citizenship,” 474, 489.

26. Hall, Adolescence, 1:xiii, 1:xvii.

27. Castañeda, Figurations, 41–42, 37.

28. Quoted in Castañeda, Figurations, 38.

29. The title of chapter 18 of Hall’s Adolescence is “Ethnic Psychology and Pedagogy, or Adolescent Races and Their Treatment” (2:648–748).

30. Hall, Adolescence, 2:748.

31. Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 52.

32. Ibid., 79, 121, 1.

33. Ibid., 182, 183.

34. Doris M. Odlum, The Psychology of Adolescence (reprinted from Mother and Child, March–April 1931), pamphlet, 1931, folder 4, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, London, 1. Odlum was an English psychiatrist who specialized in childhood and adolescence. She founded psychiatric divisions at two British hospitals in the 1920s and 1930s and was a founding member of the British Medical Association.

35. Ibid.

36. I did a Google search to find out if people still believe that temperature impacts the timing of puberty, and it seems that this is not a claim made about humans or different ethnic groups any longer. However, the underlying racist belief that non-European people are biologically hypersexualized remains today. In my search I noticed a similar obsession with early puberty (and its negative alignment with people of color, poverty, processed food, environmental toxins, etc.) that resembled the discourses of the early twentieth century, taking for granted that earlier puberty is unequivocally bad and somehow representative of the decline of civilization. While it seems quite obvious that better nutrition and lack of environmental stress could result in earlier puberty (whereas hunger and stress might delay it), I could not find any articles willing to entertain this alignment of a positive cause with earlier puberty. Likewise, I found an archaeological study suggesting that medieval skeletons show the age of onset for puberty to have remained unchanged in the present. See a summary here: Mary Lewis, “Children Aren’t Starting Puberty Younger, Medieval Skeletons Reveal,” Conversation, February 12, 2018, http://theconversation.com/children-arent-starting-puberty-younger-medieval-skeletons-reveal-91095.

37. Odlum, Psychology of Adolescence, 2.

38. For more on the “arrested development” of the “grown homosexual,” see Stockton, Queer Child, 22–25.

39. It is telling that, even now, the Wellcome Library’s special collections paired the terms “Homosexuality” and “Prostitution” on archive folders, as if these two were conceptually linked in much the same way as the folders I encountered labeled “Children and Adolescents.” In many of these archival documents, outward behaviors such as cross-dressing and prostitution were considered identifying characteristics for male homosexuals.

40. Homosexuality and Prostitution (London: British Medical Association, 1955), pamphlet, folder N.11/4, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, 11.

41. Albertine L. Winner, Homosexuality in Women (reprinted from Medical Press 217 (September 3, 1947), pamphlet, folder N.11/9, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, 3–4.

42. Freud, “Letter from Freud,” 787.

43. Eugene Talbot, Degeneracy, viii, 40.

44. The English translation of Lombroso’s Criminal Man was not published until 1911. Eugene Talbot’s citations of Lombroso would have been from the German translation, Der Verbrecher in Anthropologischer, Aerztlicher und Juristischer Beziehung, published in Hamburg by Richter in 1887. The editors of a more recent scholarly translation with multiple editions of the original works remark that Lombroso’s theory included sociological causes and humanitarian efforts at rehabilitation for occasional criminals, efforts that more dubious works like Talbot’s do not account for. See Gibson and Rafter, introduction to Lombroso, Criminal Man, 2.

45. Lombroso, Criminal Man, 188, 192.

46. Robert Sutherland, “Sexual Delinquency” (address to the Thirty-Sixth National Conference of the National Association of Probation Officers, 1939), folder N.11/8, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, 3, 1, 2.

47. Patricia J. Williams, “The Auguries of Innocence,” Nation, May 24, 1999, 9.

48. Breslow, “Adolescent Citizenship,” 484, 485.

49. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 1–2, 3. Research suggests that this observation holds true for adolescents of the 1990s, the first decade of the 2000s, and today. See Males, Framing Youth; Graham, End of Adolescence; and Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

50. Chinn, Inventing Modern Adolescence, 4.

51. Stout, “Words of Welcome,” 16.

52. Russell, “What Constitutes a Secondary School,” 529.

53. The Approach to Womanhood (London: Central Council for Health Education, 1947), pamphlet, folder N.3/1, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation; Mary Scharlieb, What Parents Should Tell Their Children (London: British Social Hygiene Council, 1933), pamphlet, folder N.2/6, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation; Basil Hood, Sex Education of Small Children (London: British Social Hygiene Council, 1937), pamphlet, folder N.2/2, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation.

54. Workday Mother, What Every Mother Should Tell Her Children (reprinted from Ladies Companion), pamphlet, 1938, folder N.2/13, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, 5, 16, 14–15.

55. Ibid., 15.

56. Theodore F. Tucker and Muriel Pout, How You Grow: A Book for Boys (London: Alliance of Honour, 1935), pamphlet, folder N.5/4, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, 32, 33, 34.

57. Odlum, Psychology of Adolescence, 8.

58. Ibid., 9.

59. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 42.

60. This is not only a strategy of the sex education pamphlets but a common assumption in early twentieth-century medical, psychological, and educational discourse. Take, for example, Starr’s Adolescent Period, which declares unequivocally, “Parents and teachers are in a marked degree responsible for the faults of children” (139).

61. Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 4.

62. Marie Stopes, who is considered one of Britain’s most prominent early activists for reproductive rights, was an ardent fan of Hitler and reportedly wrote her own son out of her will for marrying a woman who was near-sighted—an apparently unforgivable genetic flaw that would prevent him from doing his reproductive duty to the nation and the race. The copy of Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race held at the Wellcome Library was donated from Stopes’s personal collection and still contains her original purchase receipt.

63. Sutherland, “Sexual Delinquency,” 6.

64. Adolescence (London: Mothers’ Union, n.d.), pamphlet, folder N.2/1, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, 16.

65. Workday Mother, What Every Mother Should Tell, 3.

66. While it is true that the upper and middle classes lost a greater proportion of their young men than the working classes, historians have shown that casualties during World War I did not significantly impact Britain’s population. See Winter, Great War.

67. Mary Buchan Douie, England’s Girls and England’s Future (London: British Social Hygiene Council, 1932), pamphlet, folder N.3/3, box 106, Medical Women’s Federation, 3, 4.

68. See Edelman, No Future.

69. Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 55.

70. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 301.

71. Erikson, Identity, 17.

72. Medovoi observes that “the very concept of ‘identity’ as it is commonly understood today was a new one in the 1950s.” He argues that Erikson was instrumental in constructing identity as the “normative psychic achievement of selfhood” for the first time in his book Childhood and Society and that he was also the first to link identity to race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality (Rebels, 1, 6).

73. Margaret Talbot, “About a Boy.”

74. Ibid.

75. Quoted in Margaret Talbot, “About a Boy.”

76. Margaret Talbot, “About a Boy.”

77. Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 198.

78. Quoted in Margaret Talbot, “About a Boy.”

79. See Halberstam, In a Queer Time, 18–21.

80. See Stockton, Queer Child; Halberstam, In a Queer Time; and Born-stein, Hello, Cruel World.

81. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 135.

82. Lowenfeld, “Youth and Health.”

83. Ibid.

84. Odlum, Psychology of Adolescence, 30.

Chapter 3. Perverse Reading and the Adolescent Reader

1. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 3.

2. Hurley, “Perversions of Children’s Literature,” 118, 120.

3. Kidd, “Queer Theory’s Child,” 186.

4. This oppositional relation to adulthood is what leads Stockton to argue that all children are queer. See Queer Child.

5. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8.

6. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, 24, 22.

7. Ibid., 25.

8. West, “J. D. Salinger,” in Jones, Censorship, 2131.

9. Chelton and Clendenning, “Rave Reviews,” 224–28.

10. West, “J. D. Salinger,” in Jones, Censorship, 2131.

11. MacLeod, “Censorship History,” 10; Foerstel, Banned in the USA, 212.

12. Pavonetti, “Speaking from the NCBLA,” 33.

13. This perspective builds on Butler’s observation in Undoing Gender about the fraught relation between discourse and self: “If I have any agency, it is opened up by the fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That my agency is riven with paradox does not mean that it is impossible. It means that paradox is the condition of its possibility” (Undoing Gender, 3).

14. The Bell Jar was first published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in Britain, presumably because the autobiographical elements were expected to upset the family. The novel was not published in the United States under Plath’s name until 1971, nearly a decade after her death.

15. Rose, Haunting of Sylvia Plath, 75. I have provided Rose’s book for this citation, who attributes this quote to some of Aurelia’s notes in the Plath Archive; however, Aurelia Plath can be seen making a similar statement on film in the PBS documentary Voices and Visions: Sylvia Plath.

16. Plath, Bell Jar, 138–39.

17. Carlsen, Books and the Teen-Age Reader, 1. I use Carlsen here as one example of an institutional delineation of adolescence. However, definitions like this one appear frequently in writing about adolescents and reading from the past thirty years. Carlsen implies that this understanding has been around “for centuries,” but I would trace it back only to the late nineteenth century and to Hall’s emphasis on the “plasticity” of adolescence discussed later in this chapter (1).

18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.

19. Gubar has also linked abjection with adolescence using Kristeva, problematizing the “child empowerment” themes in children’s novels with miniature characters who find themselves “in positions of utter abjection” (“Species Trouble,” 99).

20. While Kristeva’s work might be said to belong to psychoanalysis and feminist theory more significantly than queer theory, her formulation of abjection has been foundational to queer theory’s understandings of gay male subjectivity. See, for example, Bersani, Homos; and Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?

21. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 135.

22. Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 10.

23. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.

24. Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?, 70, 69, 70.

25. Kristevea, New Maladies of the Soul, 135.

26. Take, for example, Donelson and Nilsen’s section, titled “Understanding Young Adults,” in Literature for Today’s Young Adults; Carlsen’s chapter “The Teenager’s World,” in Books and the Teen-Age Reader; Cline and McBride’s chapter “The Young Adult,” in Guide to Literature; Probst’s section “The Secondary School Literature Student,” in Adolescent Literature; and Cart’s extensive discussion of definitions of “young adult” and “adolescent” in the first chapter of From Romance to Realism.

27. Aronson, Beyond the Pale, 99.

28. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 193.

29. Ibid., 193, 194.

30. Hall, Adolescence, 2:476–77, 2:478, 2:477.

31. Ibid., 2:478.

32. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 194.

33. Hall, Adolescence, 2:478.

34. Trites, Disturbing the Universe, x.

35. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 81–85, 86–87.

36. Oates, Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, 7.

37. Portman, King Dork, 98.

38. We need not look very far in popular culture to see this repeating trope of a child who cannot be heard or believed—Spielberg’s Elliot in E.T. (1982), whose claims about his relationship to his “alien” are ignored, or Bird’s Hogarth in Iron Giant, who tried to tell his town the Iron Giant is not there to harm them. In both cases and in many others, these plots take for granted that children and adolescents are not listened to, their voices considered irrelevant or silenced because they are deemed irrational, fantastical, or strange.

39. Portman, King Dork, 99.

40. Hall, Adolescence, 2:454, 1:xv, 1:82, 1:310.

41. I refer to The Story of a Bad Boy as a children’s novel because a separate category for “adolescent novel” would not have been culturally legible until the early twentieth century. Like Little Women, The Story of a Bad Boy blurs conceptions of childhood and adolescence, both novels a part of the cultural context that produced Hall’s Adolescence at the turn of the twentieth century.

42. Aldrich, Story of a Bad Boy, 246, 247.

43. Hall, Adolescence, 2:478.

44. Aldrich, Story of a Bad Boy, 248.

45. Hall, Adolescence, 2:478.

46. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139, 136.

47. Hacking reports that “suicide was made the property of medics only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and a major fight it was. It was generally allowed that there was the noble suicide, the suicide of honor or of the state, but all the rest had to be regarded as part of the new medicine of insanity.” And, with this shift of property, suicides and their methods and “causes” were meticulously documented in the nineteenth century in the name of science, the classification of suicide aimed at its prevention and control (Historical Ontology, 108). This is a part of the same institutional shift that Foucault describes in History of Sexuality.

48. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 137.

49. Hall, Adolescence, 1:viii.

50. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 138.

51. Plath, Bell Jar, 94.

52. Preparing for Adolescence went through many subsequent editions, the most recent edition published in 2006 with the claim “over one million copies sold” printed on the cover.

53. Dobson, Preparing for Adolescence, 8, 9.

54. Ibid., 14–15.

55. Ibid., 15, 16.

56. Hall, Adolescence, 2:478; Edelman, No Future.

57. Graduated licensing laws exist in all states, but with different requirements. The most common of them is the requirement of a learner’s permit, though some states have subsequent requirements before someone under eighteen can acquire a full driver’s license.

58. Allstate Insurance, “Last Year, Nearly 5,000 Teens Died in Car Crashes,” advertisement, Newsweek, October 12, 2009.

59. Allstate Insurance, “Two Out of Three Teens Admit to Texting While Driving,” advertisement, Newsweek, December 7, 2009.

60. Allstate Insurance, “Last Year, Nearly 5,000 Teens.”

61. Allstate Insurance, “Why Do Most 16-Year-Olds Drive Like They’re Missing a Part of Their Brain?,” advertisement, New Yorker, March 2, 2009.

62. For example, this 2016 study demonstrates “that PFC also supports hierarchical rule learning during infancy, challenging the current dogma that PFC is an underdeveloped brain system until adolescence.” See Werchan et al., “Role of Prefrontal Cortex,” 10314.

63. Allstate Insurance, “Last Year, Nearly 5,000 Teens.”

64. Allstate Insurance, “Most 16-Year-Olds.”

65. North Carolina Graduated Driver, 2–3, 6.

66. Dobson, Preparing for Adolescence, 41–42, 46, 61.

67. Hall, Adolescence, 2:478.

68. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 36–37.

69. Butler, Undoing Gender, 29.

70. Rose, Case of Peter Pan, 141.

71. Butler, Undoing Gender, 19.

72. Frank, America, 1.

73. Ibid.

74. Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, 136, 143, 137.

Chapter 4. Toward an Ethics of Relationality

1. Duane, “Questioning the Autonomous Subject,” in Duane, Children’s Table, 16.

2. Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States, xxv.

3. Wall, “Childism,” in Duane, Children’s Table, 69.

4. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 8.

5. Castañeda, Figurations, 1.

6. Abundant comparisons of children to animals in the nineteenth century and in present-day parenting books illustrate this logic.

7. Sheldon, Child to Come, 17, 5, 21. See also Morgenstern, Wild Child.

8. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 66.

9. Sheldon, Child to Come, viii.

10. Castañeda, Figurations, 168, 170.

11. See Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; and Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

12. Kohn, Unconditional Parenting, 2.

13. Ibid., 6, 8.

14. Alice Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child, 5.

15. See Cvetkovich, Depression.

16. Kohn, Unconditional Parenting, 6.

17. Alice Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child, 7.

18. Ibid., 8.

19. Ibid., 8, 14.

20. Gibson, Adult Children, 7.

21. Ibid., 6, 27.

22. Martin Miller, True “Drama,” 115–19, 19.

23. Ibid., 18.

24. Martin reports that he and his mother were estranged for the last two decades of her life and that their written communications before her suicide (after a terminal cancer diagnosis) in 2010 were strained (Martin Miller, True “Drama,” 21–23).

25. Quoted in Martin Miller, True “Drama,” 5.

26. Kohn, Unconditional Parenting, 16, 223.

27. Quoted in Martin Miller, True “Drama,” 8, 6.

28. A. J. Willingham, “Florida Lawmaker Insults Parkland Activists, Saying ‘Adults Make the Laws,’” CNN, March 9, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/09/politics/elizabeth-porter-parkland-florida-speech-trnd/index.html.

29. Michael Bradley, Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy!, xv.

30. See Males, Framing Youth, 1–2.

31. David Whitting, “Internet a ‘Lord of the Flies’: Teen Suicide Rise after Instagram, Snapchat Began,” Orange County Register, March 21, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/21/teen-suicide-can-be-reduced-if-parents-educators-change-social-media-culture/.

32. Quoted in Whitting, “Internet a ‘Lord of the Flies.’”

33. Whitting, “Internet a ‘Lord of the Flies.’”

34. Graham, End of Adolescence, 75.

35. “Suicide Statistics,” American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, accessed July 15, 2019, https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/.

36. Oren Miron et al., “Suicide Rates among Adolescents and Young Adults in the United States, 2000–2017,” JAMA Network, June 18, 2019, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2735809?guestAccessKey=04de2fe2-1b68-4ad8-9afb-e5196b877b2b&utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_content=tfl&utm_term=061819.

37. “Suicide Statistics” and Miron et al., “Suicide Rates.”

38. These numbers were calculated with a combination of U.S. Census data found at “Explore Data,” United States Census Bureau, accessed August 12, 2019, https://www.census.gov/data.html; and the number of suicides by age reported on “Number of Youth Suicides, by Age Group,” Kidsdata. org, accessed August 12, 2019, https://www.kidsdata.org/topic/211/suicides-age/trend#fmt=123&loc=2,1&tf=13,84&ch=1309,446,1308&pdist=7.

39. See McKeown, Cuffe, and Schulz, “U.S. Suicide Rates by Age.”

40. Miron et al., “Suicide Rates.”

41. Males, Framing Youth, 224, 228, 229, 231.

42. David Whitting, “New Pressures for Perfection Contribute to Rise in Teen Suicide,” Orange County Register, March 16, 2018, https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/16/new-pressures-for-perfection-contribute-to-rise-in-teen-suicide/.

43. Quoted in Whitting, “New Pressures for Perfection.”

44. Graham, End of Adolescence, 69, 76, 77, 78.

45. See Epstein, Teen 2.0.

46. See Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order.

47. Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

48. Twenge’s data on the relationship between reports of unhappiness and screen time is compelling, but I am suspicious of the implication that the smartphone or screen time is responsible for the rise in teen suicide rates since 2011. Even Twenge acknowledges that the “teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, before smartphones existed.” (“Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”)

49. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 17.

50. Ibid., 27, 83–87.

51. Nonoptimalrobot, “Refractory Depression in Therapy Part 1,” WordPress (blog), November 14, 2014, https://recklessink.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/treatment-resistant-depression-in-therapy-assignment-1/.

52. Kohn, Unconditional Parenting, 40; Gibson, Adult Children, 8; Miller, Drama of the Gifted Child, 12.

53. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 23.

54. Dobson, Preparing for Adolescence, 139, 5.

55. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 26, 23–24.

56. Quoted in David Whitting, “This 16-Year-Old’s Suicide Letters Are a Cry for Help and a National Call for Change,” Orange County Register, March 19, 2018. https://www.ocregister.com/2018/03/19/this-16-year-olds-suicide-letters-are-a-cry-for-help-and-a-national-call-for-change/.

57. Ibid.

58. A copy of this third letter addressed only to family can be found at Joe Imbriano, “The Tragic Suicide Death of Corona Del Mar High School’s Patrick Turner,” Fullerton Informer (blog), accessed August 12, 2019, https://thefullertoninformer.com/the-tragic-suicide-death-of-corona-del-mar-high-schools-patrick-turner/.

59. Quoted in Whitting, “This 16-Year-Old’s Suicide.”

60. Ibid.

61. Cvetkovich, Depression, 1, 2, 11.

62. Kohn, Unconditional Parenting, 17.

63. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 17.

64. Lorde, Sister Outsider, 55.

65. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 26–27, 17, 100–106.

66. Kohn, Unconditional Parenting, 16.

67. Wall, Ethics in Light of Childhood, 6.

68. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 25, 29.

69. See chapter 3; Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 193; and Hall, Adolescence, 2:478.

70. Joanna Walters, “Teen Prosecuted as Adult for Having Naked Images—of Himself—on Phone,” Guardian U.S., September 20, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/20/teen-prosecuted-naked-images-himself-phone-selfies.

71. See chapter 1. This example can be found in Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 1.

72. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, 18–19; Kincaid, Child-Loving, 27.

73. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 27–28, 24, 25.

74. Gilbert, “Literature as Sex Education,” 234.

75. Silverberg and Smyth, Sex Is a Funny Word.

76. Ibid., 4.

77. Cat Fitzpatrick, “Feministing Reads: ‘Sex Is a Funny Word’ and the Aesthetics of Inclusivity,” Feministing, August 17, 2015, http://feministing.com/2015/08/17/feministing-reads-sex-is-a-funny-word-and-the-aesthetics-of-inclusivity/.

78. Silverberg and Smyth, Sex Is a Funny Word, 20, 21.

79. Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 206–7.

80. Silverberg and Smyth, Sex Is a Funny Word, 72, 79, 83, 38.

81. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 1, 5.

82. Butler, Undoing Gender, 19.

83. Warner, Trouble with Normal, 1.

84. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 29.

85. Silverberg and Smyth, Sex Is a Funny Word, 85.

86. Gilbert, Sexuality in School, 28, 29.

87. Bornstein, Hello, Cruel World, 29, 32.

88. Butler, Undoing Gender, 28, 29.

89. Graham, End of Adolescence, 1–2.

90. Gubar, “Hermeneutics of Recuperation,” 293, 295, 296, 297, 300.

91. Wall, Ethics in Light of Childhood, 5.

92. Castañeda, Figurations, 149, 168, 170.

93. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 391, 178.

94. Ibid., 393.

95. Castañeda, Figurations, 171.

96. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 393, 158.

97. Butler, Undoing Gender, 25.

98. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 160.

99. Butler, Undoing Gender, 36.

Epilogue. Queer Theory in the Age of Alternative Facts

1. Macon (Ga.) Telegraph, May 10, 1904.

2. Macaulay, Told by an Idiot, 305.

3. F. H. Bradley, “Free Thought,” review of History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, by J. M. Robertson, London Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 1929. I encountered this book review in the papers of Dr. Frederick Parkes Weber at the Wellcome Library. Weber was a physician in London in the early twentieth century, and in his commonplace book he collected “some notes and writings related to the gradual evolution of the mind and the sense of responsibility in childhood and youth, especially from the rational education point of view,” which he connected to Hall’s Adolescence in his commentary. See “Life, Death, Immortality, Free Will, Etc, 1913,” 1903–41, folder PP/FPW/C1, box 168, Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, London.

4. It is worth remembering here Hall’s impassioned and defensive dismissal of the “captivity to epistemology” and the “present lust for theories of the nature of knowledge,” which have “become a veritable and multiform psychosis” (Hall, Adolescence, 1:v). See chapter 2.

5. Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, 280; Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern, 1.

6. McIntyre, Post-truth, 6.

7. “Word of the Year 2016,” Oxford Languages, accessed February 8, 2020, https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016.

8. McIntyre, Post-truth, xiv.

9. See McIntyre, Post-truth; Kakutani, Death of Truth; D’Ancona, Post Truth; Levitin, Weaponized Lies; Keyes, Post-truth Era; and Ball, Post-truth. See also a book from 2004 that predates this trend: Davis, Post-truth.

10. “Conway: Press Secretary Gave ‘Alternative Facts,’” NBC News, Meet the Press video, 3.39, January 22, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-thepress/video/conway-press-secretary-gave-alternative-facts-860142147643.

11. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out?,” 226, 227.

12. Gubar, “Hermeneutics of Recuperation,” 293.

13. McIntyre, Post-truth, 123.

14. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out?,” 227.

15. McIntyre, Post-truth, 127.

16. For example, according to the Fuel Project blog, a platform whose mission is to “spread the gospel,” the problem is that “we rejected the Hard Right Conservative virtues, and decided to pursue the Soft Left Liberal virtues instead. This is the simple reason why we now live in a post-truth society. As our culture becomes more Liberal—increasingly driven by the heart than the head—we increasingly are shaped by emotion rather than objective facts. Indeed, we increasingly hate the truth for its divisive nature. We call it ‘hate speech.’ We call people who speak it, ‘bigots.’” It will come as no surprise that this article goes on to claim that the “truths” people don’t want to hear are that “transgenderism is a psychiatric disorder,” homosexuality “is an unnatural and unhealthy perversion,” and “Islam is a dangerous ideology.” See “What a ‘Post-truth’ Society Actually Means: The War on Truth,” Fuel Project (blog), July 11, 2017, http://thefuelproject.org/blog/2017/7/11/what-a-post-truth-society-actually-means-1. The Federalist makes similar moves in a more secular framework, talking about the “postmodern ‘cult of nondiscrimination’” and political correctness, suggesting that postmodernism is “nihilism in the presumption that all truth is relative, morality is subjective, and therefore all of our individually preferred ‘narratives’ that give our lives meaning are equally true and worthy of validation”—the implication being that they definitely are not. A few paragraphs later the blog states that the problem with postmodernism isn’t that it values everything equally but that it craps on everything equally; it’s “an anti-culture that measures success insofar as it deconstructs anything that other people value.” And this is what supposedly gave us Trump, who merely exposed the hypocrisy and phoniness of all “Liberals.” See David Ernst, “Donald Trump Is the First President to Turn Postmodernism against Itself,” Federalist, January 23, 2017, https://thefederalist.com/2017/01/23/donald-trump-first-president-turn-postmodernism/.

17. McIntyre, Post-truth, 127, 11, 154.

18. See McIntyre, Post-truth.

19. “Conway.”

20. Adeyemi, “Donald Trump,” 59–60.

21. See also Baggini, Short History of Truth.

22. Sheldon, Child to Come, 133, 118.

23. See also Gill-Peterson, “Value of the Future.”

24. Sheldon, Child to Come, 20, 118.

25. Ibid., 21, 18, 5, 117, 20.

26. Quoted in Ava Kofman, “Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science,” New York Times Magazine, October 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-post-truth-philosopher-science.html.

27. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 2, 7–8.

28. Ibid., 12; Foucault, Order of Things, xxiv.

29. Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society, 24.

30. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 140, 141, 143; Latour, quoted in Kofman, “Bruno Latour.”

31. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out?,” 232, 246.

32. See Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; and Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

33. Gubar, “Risky Business,” 450; Wall, Ethics in Light of Childhood; Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child, 203.

34. Duane, Children’s Table; Chinn and Duane, “Child”; Gill-Peterson, Sheldon, and Stockton, “Child Now.”

35. See Rose, Case of Peter Pan; and Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature.