chapter 4

TOWARD AN ETHICS OF RELATIONALITY

The child has a primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected as the person she really is at any given time.

—Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself.

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

This chapter undertakes a deeply personal task—thinking through the ethical stakes of relationality through categories of age. On the one hand, this task is motivated by and for the people called children and adolescents who are mistreated and exploited without recognition within the structures of the family and society. I am interested in articulating the logics that shape this mistreatment as well as exploring ethical alternatives for being with and relating to young people. On the other hand, this task is also about imagining ethical alternatives for relationality more broadly and for the particular patterns of hierarchy and domination that have shaped social and material relations since at least the nineteenth century. One of the difficulties in conceptualizing and practicing a relational ethics with regard to young people is that varying degrees of dependency can work to eclipse perceptions of autonomy, personhood, and worthiness of respect. And yet, physical, legal, or financial dependency describes the social condition of children and adolescents today, as well as the social condition of many adults, rather than the natural condition of any particular stage of life. Projecting the condition of dependency onto the figure of the child denies the profound degree to which all relationality involves interdependency and mutual entanglement. Anna Mae Duane notes that it is our cultural and political “investment in autonomy that renders the child’s dependence and vulnerability a block to full engagement and full humanity.”¹ Thus, recognizing the interdependency and vulnerability of childhood provides the opportunity to reshape ethical considerations for all human relationships.

Karen Sánchez-Eppler makes this point another way, arguing that children may “offer a more accurate and productive model for social interaction than the ideal autonomous individual of liberalism’s rights discourse ever has.”² John Wall calls for a similar ethical restructuring through a methodology he calls “childism,” arguing that a “fuller understanding of children’s lived experiences in the world can transform basic ethical assumptions and norms, regardless of whether one is considering particular issues concerning children or not.” He explains that just as “feminism has reconstructed ethical ideas, for both women and men, around new understandings of gender, agency, voice, power, narrative, care, and relationality,” the methodology of “childism should similarly rearrange the ethical landscape around experiences such as age, temporality, growth, difference, imagination, and creativity.”³ This chapter participates in this ethical project with particular attention to the category of adolescence. Though I have shown how the logic of adolescence is one we would be well to do without, the category of adolescence persists, organizing the psychic structure of adult subjectivity while also naming persons within relational and institutional contexts. Categories of age organize the relation between self and other, urgently requiring new logics for thinking about relationality and our ethical responsibilities to one another and the world.

One strategy deployed in identity politics for the purpose of achieving social justice is to lay claim to the human, to say that those who have been oppressed and excluded are human and thus deserving of rights, dignity, and respect. This rhetorical strategy can be temporarily effective insofar as the category of human works to achieve social justice aims in specific contexts, but the exclusionary functions of the category of human itself persist, despite such efforts. Judith Butler considers this effect in relation to sex and gender, which operate “through exclusionary means, such that the human is not only produced over and against the inhuman, but through a set of foreclosures, radical erasures, that are, strictly speaking, refused the possibility of cultural articulation.”⁴ We saw how these exclusions work on the level of gender, race, class, and sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century categorizations of the criminal, homosexual, ethnic, savage, prostitute, deviant, primitive, queer, and delinquent in chapter 2.

Critical race studies, trans and queer theory, and feminist materialism approach this problem through an interrogation of the human, seeking to redefine ethical relations to bodies, world, and matter beyond the logic of the human and the subject. We might be tempted, upon recognizing the ways that children and adolescents are disenfranchised by categories of age, to argue that they are human and thus deserving of rights and respect. This strategy does not escape the exclusionary functions of the human, and it so often falls short as a rhetorical strategy because categories of age have a paradoxical relation to the construction of the human in the first place. The human is made possible by childhood while simultaneously locating the achievement of human status beyond childhood and adolescence. Thus, it is the child’s status as an “adult in the making” and “not yet that which it alone has the capacity to become” that Claudia Castañeda argues is where its “availability—and so too its value as a cultural resource—lies.”⁵ The child exists both as the definitional locus of the human—representing its values, investments, and belief systems—and as a malleable form that is not-yet-human.⁶ The adolescent sometimes shares in this figuration and at other times becomes the embodiment of degeneration, the failed-to-become human, both childhood and adolescence working together to manage and contain a range of fantasies and fears.

Rebekah Sheldon argues that the figure of the child epitomizes and reinforces the human, standing in “as a figure for life-itself” in its most durable forms, and yet it makes visible “the autonomy and vitality of the nonhuman and the nonliving” while binding “the realization of nonhuman vitality back into the charmed circle of the human.” Resisting this binding effect, Sheldon finds the potential to see the “emergent energies of posthumanity” in figurations of the child.⁷ Sheldon’s work suggests a posthuman vision of the world that the figure of the child has the potential to make visible. The usual ways of thinking about categories of age function as a trap in which we can’t imagine ethical relations to someone or something other than human, in which we can’t conceptualize agency as something other than entirely absent or belonging exclusively to an autonomous subject. But what if we remove “human” from the criteria determining who (or what) is and is not deserving of ethical consideration?

This chapter frames ethical considerations for relationality most commonly between one person and another, primarily concerned with the question of what should we as people should do and not do, but the pathway to our most ethical engagements with one another and the world requires a posthuman frame. Karen Barad writes, “What is needed is a robust account of the materialization of all bodies—‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’—including the agential contributions of all material forces (both ‘social’ and ‘natural’). This will require an understanding of the nature of the relationship between discursive practices and material phenomena; an accounting of ‘nonhuman’ as well as ‘human’ forms of agency; and an understanding of the precise causal nature of productive practices that takes account of the fullness of matter’s implication in its ongoing historicity.”⁸ Sheldon offers the increase in earthquakes caused by fracking in Oklahoma as an example of “life’s autonomous agency,” in which bedrock imagined to be passive and inert demonstrates the “responsiveness of stone.”⁹ For Sheldon a posthuman awareness invites more ethical relations to the world as well as a reckoning with the agency of matter. One of the problems with conceptualizing the agency of young people is not the fact that they have varying degrees of it—whereas adults presumably have full agency—but rather our inability to imagine forms of agency beyond the bounds of the human.

Castañeda describes what this recognition of the “agency of nature” can do for our understanding of even an infant, “a natural-cultural body, always already formed through the semiotically and materially specific processes of conception, growth, and birthing that are constitutive of its particular making.” She explains, “The newborn’s existence cannot be known fully by adults because that existence is the effect of an agency that is excessive to adult knowledge.” Like Sheldon’s example of Oklahoma’s bedrock responding to fracking with an exponential increase in earthquakes, the embodied and relational responsiveness of an infant is imagined to be inert and passive even in the presence of the radical changes infants can make to their surroundings. Castañeda writes, “To ‘theorize’ this subject is to inhabit a different mode of knowing, necessarily partial and situated, that works always in and through the fact of not knowing, of not being able to know fully. This not knowing does not entail a refusal to make claims in and to the world. Instead it establishes the existence of plural ‘real’ worlds, and also of ontic politics as the form of politics through which these pluralities become intelligible, and can be more effectively negotiated.”¹⁰ In Castañeda’s reformulation what is necessary is an understanding of nature and materiality itself as agentic, an insight drawn from feminist science studies.¹¹ This insight shifts our understanding of adult agency in addition to acknowledging that even an infant has agential capacities that should not be denied or repressed. It has never been the case that infants did not have agential capacities but rather that our ability to recognize those capacities has been routinely eclipsed by the usual ways of thinking and talking about agency and autonomy in the first place.

Exposing the functions of categories of age allows us to reconceptualize not only what a child or adolescent is but also the complexity, vibrancy, and queerness of the world that categories of age serve to manage and contain. Rather than attempting to elevate the child or adolescent to the status of the human or the autonomous liberal subject, these analytic reversals attempt to pry open childhood and adolescence to reconceptualize subjectivity itself as an ethical entanglement of meaning, matter, and world. This analysis takes as a starting point that all our ways of making meaning are radically contingent and unstable, even as we need the illusion of cohesion and stability to survive. There is no essential truth or reality that I aim to uncover, only the mechanisms of that meaning-making activity around a particular set of historically locatable logics. This is the goal of the therapeutic exercise: to see ourselves more clearly, to shift narratives that no longer serve us, to construct meaning anew.

The “Good” Child

At the start of Alfie Kohn’s self-help parenting book, Unconditional Parenting, he tells the story of riding on a plane with a small child. He noticed that when the flight was over, many other passengers praised the child’s parents with compliments like, “He was so good during the flight!” Kohn explains that, in this context, the word “good” referred to how little the child was noticed, how quiet he was, and how little trouble he was to the adults around him. Kohn reflects on this moment: “I realized that this is what many people in our society seem to want most from children: not that they are caring or creative or curious, but simply that they are well behaved. A ‘good’ child—from infancy to adolescence—is one who isn’t too much trouble to us grown-ups.” The “good” child reflects cultural assumptions about the presumed passivity and lack of agency in childhood. The child’s actions on the environment are presumed to lack purpose or direction and thus justify suppression and adult control. In the past, Kohn explains, this control was often achieved through authoritarian means—using threats, violence, and punishment, including physical violence—whereas today “good” behavior is more likely to be elicited through rewards and praise. But Kohn warns, “Do not mistake new means for new ends. The goal continues to be control.”¹²

Kohn poses the question to parents: Do we really want children who are simply obedient or compliant? And what kind of adults will these strategies produce? He describes the effects of “compulsive compliance,” in which “children’s fear of their parents leads them to do whatever they’re told—immediately and unthinkingly,” as well as the “emotional consequences of an excessive need to please and obey adults” at the cost of a secure and independent sense of self. Certainly, from the perspective of institutional projects of control, the traits of obedience and compliance have been desirable in children because they produce dutiful, productive adult citizens, adults who respect the social order and the status quo, who do what they “should.” But Kohn appeals to parents: “The critical question is what kind of people we want our children to be—and that includes whether we want them to be the kind who accept things as they are or the kind who try to make things better.” He acknowledges, “This is subversive stuff—literally.”¹³ The relational strategies Kohn proposes require adults to see children as whole people even when they are small—whole people impacted by their environment and who seek to have an impact. Children are not the whole people they will become, but whole people now.

In The Drama of the Gifted Child, the renowned psychologist and writer Alice Miller describes accomplished, ambitious, productive adults, who as children were praised for being advanced beyond their years, who toilet-trained early and easily, who competently took care of younger siblings, and who didn’t cry or complain or become a problem for parents. Miller writes, “According to prevailing attitudes, these people—the pride of their parents—should have had a strong and stable sense of self-assurance. But the case is exactly the opposite.” Such people excel at all that they do, but they report feelings of depression and emptiness as soon as the grandiosity of each new accomplishment wears off: “Then they are plagued by anxiety or deep feelings of guilt and shame. What are the reasons for such disturbances in these competent, accomplished people?”¹⁴ Perhaps many academics, like myself, see themselves in Miller’s description. Certainly, it seems that academia was designed to both soothe and perpetuate such a cycle, anxiously working toward the next rung of achievement only to find that there are more after it, that one never arrives at the end, that one is never just enough as they are.¹⁵ We might also consider the dynamics Miller describes as an adult form of “compulsive compliance,” the result of the parenting strategies of praise and rewards that Kohn criticizes in Unconditional Parenting, particularly when those strategies are most successful at eliciting “good” behavior from children.¹⁶ However, Miller also theorizes a subtler relational dynamic between parents and children. Miller finds that as children, these high-achieving adults had a primary caregiver “who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way.”¹⁷ She describes a conditional form of relational attachment that relies on the use of the child to meet the parent’s emotional needs. Though more personal, more intimate, this form of exploitation is not so different from the use of the figural child or adolescent throughout the twentieth century to stand in for society’s deepest needs or fears about itself—the promise of futurity, the limits of our control, the embodiment of a true origin, or the edge of unknowability.

Miller explains that these gifted children were able to intuit and adapt their behavior to the emotional dysregulation and projections of their primary caregivers, becoming what the parent needed at the expense of developing and inhabiting an authentic sense of self. The authentic self should be understood not as a stable or originary source of identity but rather as an ongoing narrative self-determination or state of becoming that is possible under conditions of entanglement and dependency but repressed when survival is at stake. Though few parents might go so far as to actually starve or kill their children, the threat of spanking or being sent to bed without dinner are common and still socially accepted forms of punishment. Likewise, Kohn finds that giving and withholding love as behavioral modification strategies are no less threatening to a child’s very survival than authoritarian methods. For the “gifted child” described by Miller, becoming what the parent needed “secured ‘love’ for the child—that is, his parents’ exploitation” and being needed in this way “guaranteed him a measure of existential security.”¹⁸ As adults, this skill is “then extended and perfected,” intuiting the needs of others and seeking to be “good,” successful, admired, or needed to secure love. In a moment of self-implication, she remarks that it is “no wonder they often choose to become psychotherapists later on,” dedicating their lives to intuiting the needs of others.

The depression and feelings of emptiness that result from living this way are caused by the repression of an authentic sense of self, one necessary to feel truly loved and connected to others as oneself. Miller writes, “What would have happened if I had appeared before you sad, needy, angry, furious? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me you loved, but only what I pretended to be?”¹⁹ Lindsay C. Gibson describes the emotional neglect from being raised by what she calls “emotionally immature parents,” who “may look and act perfectly normal, caring for their child’s physical health and providing meals and safety” but who are not capable of seeing their children as they are or creating an emotional connection with them: “The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn’t show on the outside. Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe. You might call it a feeling of emptiness or being alone in the world.”²⁰ What is troubling to me is that these forms of abuse described by Kohn, Miller, and Gibson are built in the very definition of a child as the fulfillment of parental or societal needs. Thus, the “good” child is not a bother to anyone, does not appear to even have a “self” to be sacrificed to others, but is imagined as there for others from the beginning.

These accounts, however, reframe the actions and personhood of children themselves against accepted societal norms. The child is recognized as intelligent, intuitive, and adaptable to the adult’s unconscious needs in sophisticated ways. But the child is not a fully independent agent either. These interactions are not reducible to simplistic power dynamics, in which adults have power and children are disempowered, but rather illustrate our entanglements in the ethics of relationality. Relating to another person should not be conditional upon someone becoming what you need them to be but rather should constitute the attempt to see and respond to who is really in front of you at any given moment. Miller writes that “the child has a primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected as the person she really is at any given time.” That is, the child is not potentiality, the not-yet-adult, or the promise of the future. For Miller the child is a person. And she understands this basic requirement to apply even to an infant, whom she sees as a being both worthy of regarding and able to respond, even in a nonverbal state of complete dependency: “This is beautifully illustrated in one of Donald Winnicott’s images: the mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother’s face and finds himself therein . . . provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, he would not find himself in his mother’s face, but rather the mother’s own projections.”²¹

As I have shown throughout the critiques in this book, this form of exploitation, the use of the child to meet adult needs, is built into the social conception of what a child is in the first place. If such a relation appears natural and justified according to the definitional bounds of what a child is, then we must reckon with the degree to which exploitation is foundational to the Western idea of childhood itself. Miller’s analysis takes us beyond a critique of the figural child as a repository for adult desire to theorize an alternative relation, one that accounts for the ethical responsibility we have to regard our entanglement with all beings and the material world alongside who or what they are in their present becomings. What this means is not that such regard will result in an objective or stable truth about others but rather that our gaze is a performative one in which the most ethical practice is to not-know until the moment of contact, to allow each encounter to shift what we think we know, and to acknowledge that the frame of our regard has the potential to change the reality of what appears before us.

Though Miller’s books envision an ethical relation between parents and children, her son, Martin, suggests that she was not able to practice this ethical relation in life. The Drama of the Gifted Child, Miller’s first book, was published nearly thirty years after the birth of her son. Shortly after Martin was born, he was given away to an acquaintance for two weeks before being taken in by his aunt, where he lived for the first six months of his life, and he was later sent away to a children’s home for two years when his sister was born, who as an infant was also sent away for a year. Martin explains that his primary attachments were to maids or nannies, who were often fired and replaced, and that his parents primarily spoke Polish to each other when he was in their presence, while he knew only German. His father was cruel, physically and sexually abusive, and his mother preoccupied, emotionally distant, and often away from home. As a young adult, she pursued a close relationship with him, but in a dysfunctional, controlling, and exploitative way that Martin acquiesced to until his late thirties. When he started to break away and establish his independence from her, she became increasingly hostile and manipulative. His book includes a letter from her during this time, illustrating abusive and dysfunctional dynamics she would have condemned in her books. In her letter she uses her theories of childhood on him but turned against him, posturing as care but figuring her son as her abuser, accusing him of becoming like his father. The narrative she constructs in this letter removes her from her role as mother and her responsibility toward him, instead condemning Martin for his feelings and scapegoating his father as the source of all his anger and pain. Martin writes, “She effectively made me feel like a monster she wanted to destroy.”²² What are we to make of this great contradiction?

I must confess that reading Miller’s letter to her son paralyzed me. The Drama of the Gifted Child holds great resonance for me on both a personal and intellectual level, as it has for many people. For this reason I was ready to be skeptical of Martin’s version of his mother, but her letter represented her by her own hand, and the gaslighting, shaming, projections, and attacks were familiar to me. For a moment I was not sure if I could write about The Drama of the Gifted Child at all anymore. Martin explains how difficult it was to betray his mother, even after her death, how his intentions for writing were his own healing and a sense of justice. Importantly, he says that he does not believe his history with his mother “negates the merits of her books and the importance of her theories.” In fact, he deploys her methods in his own work as a therapist, and her methods were used in his own process of healing in his relationship with her. He explains, “Her books, and her paintings as well, were developed in a wide, creative space where Alice Miller could be herself, free from her grievances. Unfortunately, she split off this place from her real existence.”²³ Martin believes that the cause of this splitting was dissociation from her own war trauma during the Holocaust. Martin’s evaluation of his mother grants her a degree of complex personhood and compassion that she could not extend to him or to her own mother.²⁴ In her letter to Martin, Miller describes her mother in one-sided language as all bad—“Why did I need sixty years to see how cruel, destructive, exploitative, thoroughly mendacious and loveless my mother was?”—only to then create a parallel with Martin’s father and then Martin himself.²⁵

Unprocessed trauma means that anyone else can become the symbol of that trauma, even and especially one’s own children. Staying in control of one’s children, then, becomes symbolic of preventing future trauma, preventing children from becoming what you most fear. Kohn writes that parents do not love their children unconditionally because they believe “acceptance without strings attached will just be interpreted as permission to act in a way that’s selfish, demanding, greedy, or inconsiderate,” which “is based on the deeply cynical belief that accepting kids for who they are just frees them to be bad because, well, that’s who they are.” The nineteenth-century evolutionary figurations of the child discussed in chapters 1 and 2 reflect this cynical belief, what Kohn calls a “prejudice” toward children that is not based in evidence.²⁶ For a parent with unprocessed trauma, difficulty relinquishing control, and discomfort with the emotions of others, any individuation or expression in the child risks triggering a trauma response and thus the desire to contain, control, and dominate the threat. Here we see Miller narrate these effects while projecting them onto Martin: “And in your behavior towards me, you let me experience both, as if I were little Martin and you the big boss, who distributes on a whim alternately ‘love’ and beatings on me and wishes to remain clueless.” Though she is the one replaying her trauma with her son, positioning herself as the child and her son as the “big boss,” she imagines that he is the one replaying his childhood trauma with her. She fights him as she fights her own abusers, transparently projecting her pain on to him: “I cannot and will not accept the role of victim. No longer will I allow myself to be tormented or seduced, not even by my own son.” She cannot grapple with her likeness to her mother, who “was a cruel human being,” who “destroyed the lives of her two children without any trace of a guilty conscience, while she believed herself to be loving and caring.”²⁷ She cannot tolerate the notion that, as Martin’s mother, she might play a role in his pain or have a role to play in his healing. Controlling Martin is necessary for Miller to feel a sense of control over all that was wrong in the world.

For both the categories of childhood and adolescence, we can find histories of degradation and idealization mirroring this pattern of projection. These moves toward negative or positive characterizations operate similarly as two different forms of exploitation, putting categories of age to work for those looking at children rather than for children themselves. As for childhood the nineteenth century aligned childlikeness with animality, the primitive, the savage, and the not-yet-human at the same time as figuring the child as innocence, pricelessness, potentiality, and the future. As for adolescence the twentieth century imagined the teen years as out of control, deviant, criminal, and the failed-to-become-human at the same time as it idealized youthfulness, rebellion, and freedom from adult responsibility. Neither the negative nor the positive characteristics in these lists describe categories of age from the perspective of being a child or adolescent. These contradictory characteristics emerge out of the shared function of categories of age as a hermeneutic of self, a normalizing technology, a temporal location for adult projections and disavowals. In this capacity the logic of categories of age sustains normativity and existing social hierarchies, sorting desirable and undesirable parts of self between the past, present, and future while mapping the social world onto a temporal slope toward or away from the achievement of human status. To combat these harmful effects of categories of age, the people called children and adolescents, as well as the people who live under any sign of social difference, must be understood as having complex personhood that spans the full spectrum of human experience—including desire, emotion, and will as well as the capacity to do harm, fail, or die. But this alone does not account for the ethical entanglement of human relationality.

The Drama of the Gifted Child suggests that there is a way for parents to see their children as separate from themselves, as they really are, as if such a thing exists apart from the child’s relationship to the parent in the first place. And, in one sense, I would agree that this is a simple and effective way to correct the usual ways of seeing children. However, this correction assumes a separability that is not possible in the entanglement between meaning and matter. To some degree the entanglement of Miller’s own identity and experience with her son is inevitable—and to some degree our projections are inescapable. I do not mean to suggest that Miller’s emotional abuse of her son is inevitable. However, we define and experience ourselves in relation to others, and others in relation to us, and this acknowledgment is precisely how to reframe our ethical responsibility to one another so that we can do better. Perhaps Miller might have acknowledged the ways she was like her mother through their shared history of generational trauma and, using her own method for healing, return to herself with the love and acceptance that her mother could not give her. Only then could she love Martin as he was and not as she needed him to be. What is needed is a radical acceptance of the parts of self and other that have been disavowed, a grappling with the limits of our control, and the healing of trauma, so that when parents see the full range of feeling and human experience in their children (as they inevitably will), they can see them as part of a whole—not as the resurrection of their abusers but as people who are struggling to be heard, who are capable of doing great harm, but who need love and acceptance in the whole of who they are, even imperfect, flawed, or hurting.

The “good” child described by Kohn and Miller suggests a set of relational dynamics that we do not escape even as adults who live apart from our parents. This does not mean that as children or adults we do not have autonomy, but it suggests that autonomy is not a characteristic independently located outside parental perceptions and actions. Autonomy might be better theorized as an ethical principle of relationality itself, created through the parent’s actions toward the child. It is the recognition of both autonomy and mutual entanglement that creates an ethical practice of autonomy, our obligations to one another, and the limits of our control over others. Likewise, the child’s authentic self is not somehow determined outside the perceptions of the parent but within it, made possible by the interpretive space of the parent’s regard and respect, a recognition of the entanglement of meaning, matter, and world within an ethical practice of relationality.

The “Bad” Adolescent

Alongside the social construct of the “good” child is the “bad” adolescent, these two figurations working together to contain a range of fantasies and fears. Even when teens are behaving responsibly, they can be perceived as antagonistic, as Florida state representative Elizabeth Porter demonstrated in 2018 with her disparaging comments about the survivors of the Parkland High School shooting. When these young people asked Florida lawmakers to pass stricter gun control measures, she responded, “Are there any children on this floor? Are there any children making laws? Do we allow the children to tell us to pass a law that says, ‘No homework’ or ‘You finish high school at the age of 12’ just because they want it so? No. The adults make the laws.”²⁸ Porter at once positions Parkland High School students as rebellious teens and petulant children, using the categories of both childhood and adolescence to discredit them, as if their civic participation were motivated by self-absorbed whimsy rather than legitimate concerns about safety from mass shootings. Granted, many teenagers enjoy good relationships with their parents and other adults despite these functions of adolescence as a category. But I am troubled by the ways that the category, by its very definition, is called upon to deny or erase the complex personhood of young people. Even supposedly well-meaning self-help books for parents deploy similarly dehumanizing tactics, as we see in Michael J. Bradley’s Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy! Loving Your Kid without Losing Your Mind. The book refers to “groundbreaking research that is finally proving with science what you’ve come to suspect through your pain: Your kid is crazy.” Bradley admits this is just a humorous way (to him and presumably other parents) of saying what “is now becoming accepted more and more as neurological fact,” that “adolescents are temporarily brain-damaged.”²⁹

Like the Allstate ads discussed in chapter 3 or the constructions of adolescence in nineteenth-century racial science in chapter 2, the category itself functions to encompass phenomena excluded from the presumed innocence of childhood and the presumed normativity of adulthood. Young people perceived as “good kids” within the category of adolescence appear so only through their proximity to normativity, and the arrival at adolescence is imagined to be fraught with danger even for them. This is how, year after year, we can find claims that today’s teenagers are at more risk than ever before, plagued by more drug addiction, crime, gangs, teen pregnancy, STDS, depression and anxiety, antisocial behavior, and suicide than any generation of young people in history.³⁰ Suicide represents the ultimate fear played out through the category of adolescence—the end of life itself—while at the same time unambiguously marking the absolute limits of our knowledge and control of others.

Countless studies and media reports claim that teen suicide is on the rise and that young people are taking their own lives at younger ages and in greater numbers than ever before. Take, for example, the article “Internet a ‘Lord of the Flies’: Teen Suicide Rise after Instagram, Snapchat Began” from a three-part series in the Orange County Register in 2018. The article focuses on social media as the cause for the increase in suicides, playing on parental fears of the unknown: “High school today is not your mother’s high school. It’s not even the high school that millennials experienced.”³¹ The problem is that “friendships cross school boundaries and teens know far more than even the saviest [sic] parents realize,” but simultaneously the opposite problem occurs, in which “kids are sitting home alone, disenfranchised and disconnected,” according to a Los Angeles psychologist. She states, “It’s very dark the way social currency is wielded. They watch the Kardashians and don’t know how to respond.”³²

Later the article explains that teens think they need to be perfect and put too much emphasis on getting into the right college and getting good grades, while social media creates a competitive social environment and unrealistic expectations. But also they are binging on the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why and trapped in “a victim mentality.” Another expert says teens are missing validation, and “the social media plague of staged ‘happy’ photos creates the opposite of validation.”³³ My rehearsal of this contradictory list of reasons for teen suicide illustrates how such speculations are more reflective of the fears, investments, and desires of the people making them than they are meaningful diagnoses of a social problem. Perhaps there is a social problem at the root of some teen deaths, but the generalizations made in this article reflect social fears about adolescents more broadly, framing suicide as further evidence of their inability and immaturity, blaming new media and technology as if it had more agency than young people themselves, suggesting that what young people need most is protection from themselves. The question of “why are teens killing themselves” is posed exclusively as “what is wrong with teens” and the problem framed as specifically adolescent, as if they do not share the same world and live under similar social conditions as adults today. If speculating about larger social problems, one might ask instead, “Why doesn’t life feel livable to teens?” or “What social changes would make life more livable?”

That said, what are we to make of the fact that teen suicide may not be on the rise? Or that teens take their own lives at a lower rate than any other age group besides children? Philip Graham, drawing on data from western Europe, explains that it “is extremely unusual for a child under the age of 14 to commit suicide. The official figures suggest that less than one in a million children aged 10–14 years end their own lives each year, compared to 60 times that number aged 15–19 years. By the end of the teens the rate of suicide has more or less stabilized and remains the same throughout the whole of adult life, perhaps with a slight increase in the elderly.”³⁴ In the United States, data shows the rate of suicide for children under the age of fifteen at or below 1.0 out of every 100,000 between 2000 and 2016, with a rate of 1.34 in 2017. The rate of suicide is the lowest for ages fifteen to twenty-four, at 14.46 in 2017, for example, showing a trend of steadily increasing with age until it peaks at 20.2 per 100,000 for ages forty-five to fifty-four and then decreasing for ages fifty-five to sixty-four and sixty-five to seventy-four until it peaks again to 20.1 for those over eighty-five.³⁵ Why is no attention given to the fact that teenagers are the least likely to take their own lives than any other age group?

Notice also that the age designation of fifteen to twenty-four includes a significant number of adults in with adolescents. If we split this group into two, the numbers for ages fifteen to nineteen are significantly lower than they are for the ages of twenty to twenty-four, at 11.8 per 100,000 in 2017.³⁶ The rate for ages twenty to twenty-four is 17.0, which is comparable but still lower than ages twenty-five to thirty-four at 17.53 per 100,000 in 2017 and lower than any other age group besides children and ages sixty-five to seventy-five.³⁷ Using data from 2000 to 2015, the suicide rate for ages twenty to twenty-four is consistently between 55–65 percent higher than it is for ages fifteen to nineteen.³⁸ What these numbers suggest is not that teens are more impulsive and out of control than adults but that adolescence marks the beginning of adult behavior like suicidality and that increases in the suicide rates of younger people mirror state and national trends among adults. All data on the increasing rate of suicide are based on numbers going back only to the year 2000, when suicide rates were at an all-time low since the 1970s.³⁹ And a recent study acknowledges that the “observed increase in suicide may reflect more accurate reporting, possibly due to coroners and families being more willing to label the death a suicide.”⁴⁰ Whether these trends have larger social causes or are due to more accurate reporting, any speculations about suicide should not consider teen suicide a separate epidemic somehow distinct from the suicides of adults.

In Framing Youth Mike Males documents the repeated false assertions in the media and research studies alike that suicide rates have been increasing among adolescents in the state of California, showing how suicide rates in the mid-1990s were in fact the lowest they had been since the 1960s. Males writes, “If I had to pick the weirdest, most blatant, most obtuse pack of lies top authorities tell about adolescents, it would be the unanimous insistence that California teenage suicide is skyrocketing.” Males shows how expert after expert repeatedly made the same claims alongside sensationalistic media reports, despite the fact that “by 1996, California teenage suicide and self-destruction stood at its lowest level in at least 35 years.” However, Males notes that these statistics were “not raised to point out that kids were less self-destructive, or examine why.” Why exaggerate the threat of teen suicide? Males suggests that “the original motive might have been benign: to maintain services in a time of conservative cutbacks.” He sees this “expert-fabricated epidemic” as needing an “expert-fabricated teenage psychology to explain,” in which “institutional interests were locked into one, unvarying statement about adolescents: they’re worse than ever.” To shift the blame away from parents or ineffective social policy, Males suggests that nineteenth-century theories about “innate teenage biological and psychological defects” were brought back to life.⁴¹ The threat of teenage suicide confirms the narrative that adolescents are out of control, reckless, mentally unstable, and beyond help. Certainly, the objective here still appears to be a form of social control, threatening parents with the death of their teenage children if they are not watchful enough, careful enough, or loving enough. Much like the sex education pamphlets of the early twentieth century discussed in chapter 2 or self-help books such as James Dobson’s Preparing for Adolescence and the Allstate insurance campaign for graduated driving laws in chapter 3, adolescents appear to be the object of new measures for social control while parents are being called on to participate in a system of cooperative watchfulness motivated by institutional objectives. The message to parents over and over appears to be: “You need to control teenagers, or they will die.”

The need to control teenagers and motivate them to be “good,” however, is a highly problematic undertaking with profound psychological costs, as we have seen from Kohn and Miller. The same three-part series from the Orange County Register remarks on the recent suicides of four Southern Californian teenagers in 2018 who “appeared to excel.” This strange phrasing “appeared to excel” reflects how unthinkable it is to align suicidality with success, as if the suicides of these young people retrospectively negates the fact that they did exactly as they were told, excelled at school and in extracurriculars, and were the pride of their parents—and that these were the very conditions under which their lives became unlivable. Like the sensationalistic reports Males discusses from the 1990s, this article quotes various experts asserting the increase in teenage suicide and speculates that social media and the internet are responsible for the increasing pressure felt by young people to be perfect. The article declares that “what is known is that smart, successful, gifted teens are committing suicide in increasing numbers, and if certain things don’t change—and change quickly—many more young lives will be snuffed out.” The article challenges the pressures put on kids, seeming to suggest less pressure is needed, but directs responsibility for this pressure away from parents or schools and toward causes that “are new, murky and very much 21st century.” This is because “parents might as well be on Mars when it comes to understanding the new world of their teens,” even though “many don’t even know it.”⁴² Adolescence is synonymous with the unknown, and if parents think they understand their teens, the article suggests, they are naively mistaken. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who studies generational trends, is quoted out of context: “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”⁴³

What is missing from this discussion is the acknowledgment that teens are not any more suicidal or depressed than adults. Graham writes, “Contrary to popular belief, young people in their teens, if compared to those in their twenties and thirties, are not moodier or more depressed. Rates of low self-esteem, depression, and suicidal ideas increase in the early teens and then remain stable from about the age of 14 years onwards through the rest of young adulthood and middle age. Thus, as far as mood and mood disorders are concerned, those in their teens are very like those in later adulthood, as they are in so many other aspects of life.” Graham argues that when depression, anxiety, and other forms of severe distress appear in adolescence that young people are more likely to recover “if they can actively and energetically do something” about the situation causing their distress, and this is not possible unless teens “have control over their lives.” What adolescents and adults have in common is the condition of “learned helplessness,” in which “they experience simultaneously a sense of power and an incapacity to use their new found competence,” resulting in a feeling of frustration and the potential for distress “that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.” Graham notes that all people must grapple with feelings of powerlessness at various points, but that adolescence is particularly and unnecessarily burdened with this feeling because of the ways teens are routinely “disempowered in family life, in school, and in the neighbourhood or community” to direct the course of their own lives.⁴⁴ Robert Epstein likewise argues that the infantilization of adolescents is the cause of the so-called problems of adolescence.⁴⁵ These are the very arguments made by Frank Musgrove in his sociological study of youth in Britain in 1965.⁴⁶ Graham, Epstein, and Musgrove all suggest that young people need more independence, more self-direction, and control over their own lives to offset feelings of helplessness and depression, and yet the flurry of news reports on teen suicide suggest the exact opposite, framing this issue as one about teen misuse of technology and the need for more protection and control.

The researcher Jean Twenge does see changes in the most recent generation of young people, those born between 1995 and 2012, as directly linked to technology and the invention of the iPhone and iPad. Unlike the Orange County Register, however, she reminds readers that the goal of her research “is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now.” She finds that teens are more likely to feel lonely, to get less sleep, and to report that they are unhappy than previous generations and that these trends appear to be linked to the amount time spent on “screen activities such as social media, texting, and browsing the web.”⁴⁷ At the same time her research shows that “today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been” and that they are “more comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party,” “less likely to get into a car accident,” and “less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.” Teens date less than previous generations and have lower rates of sexual activity and the all-time lowest rates of teen pregnancy. Twenge finds that they drive less and are less likely to have a driver’s license than previous generations and do not hang out with their friends unsupervised or hold paying jobs like their predecessors. She writes, “The allure of independence, so powerful in previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents.” And she finds that “across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised—18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds.” While Twenge acknowledges that “parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture,” she emphasizes that “the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever.”

The Orange County Register follows this cause-and-effect reasoning, pointing to new technology as the source of new problems. But what if we interpret Twenge’s findings in reverse? If her findings are correct, then the most recent generation of teens is the most protected, infantilized, and dependent than any generation prior. These are circumstances of control created by parenting and school cultures that have perhaps achieved the greatest success with the iPhone as a substitute for true independence. If the smartphone might be the reason “rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011,” the smartphone is just as likely the cause for the corresponding rise in teen complacency.⁴⁸ While the old myths about the “bad” adolescent continue to circulate, these myths bear little or no resemblance to the lives of the actual people called adolescents.

The Road Less Sanctioned

The emphasis on the problem of teen suicide is another way to distance and disavow the feelings and thoughts associated with the desire to end one’s own life. Suicidality is located outside the bounds of the human in adolescence or in the realm of the pathological or insane. Kate Bornstein’s teen self-help book, Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws, practices a more ethical relationality to the people called adolescents and to the phenomenon of suicide than the examples discussed earlier. The form of address in the book is explicitly relational, in which Bornstein emerges as a person speaking to another person, acknowledging the situatedness of her thoughts and perspective while taking on a posture of not-knowing when it comes to her reader. The first line of the book is “Hi, I’m Kate Bornstein.” She explains, “I wrote this book to help you stay alive because I think the world needs more kind people in it, no matter who or what they are, or do. The world is healthier because of outsiders and outlaws and freaks and queers and sinners. I fall neatly into all of those categories, so it’s no big deal to me if you do or don’t.”⁴⁹ The space opened up for the reader to be whoever they are is broadened to include queer possibilities, but this space isn’t predictive of the reader’s identity, feelings, or experiences.

Bornstein shares her own experiences but repeatedly carves out space for the reader: “But that’s my life. Your life is a different story.” The “Quick Start Guide” goes through a list of conventional recommendations for suicide prevention, such as calling a hotline or talking to a friend or therapist, all of which Bornstein advocates while acknowledging that these steps might not be enough and, for some people, could even make things worse. She writes, “If none of this has worked for you, or if any of it sounded wrong or frightening, there are some options that have not necessarily been sanctioned by therapists and medical doctors.” The alternatives in this book are referred to as “the road less sanctioned.” They are not meant as a cure but rather a set of strategies to cope with suicidal feelings when they arise as well as a schema for developing new strategies. Suicidality is not ever over in this book; in fact, Bornstein explains that “no single alternative I’ve found to killing myself has ever been enough to keep me alive for longer than a year or so. . . . Some of the methods I’ve used to stay alive have only worked for a few hours, or a few minutes.”⁵⁰ By saying this Bornstein creates an ethos of staying alive that requires effort, creativity, and times of reevaluation. Feelings of despair and hopelessness are not pathological but part of being alive, reframed as a cue to engage in this type of work. Hello, Cruel World is a life-affirming acknowledgment of the desire to die.

The problem of suicide is often talked about abstractly, as if everyone in the conversation is speaking firmly and securely from the position that suicide is unthinkable. The idea that only mentally ill people would take their own lives is a patent denial of the real struggles all people endure and that there are some conditions of life that are worse than death. I lost my brother to suicide in 2015, and, though I did not know when it would happen, his death was not a surprise. I spoke to him nearly every day in the two years before he died. I was not left with unanswered questions or regrets. He was not a teenager—he would have been thirty-two—and I mention him in this context only because he also did not fit any of the existing social narratives about suicide and mental illness. He was hardworking, responsible, and highly intelligent. At the time of his death, he had a psychiatrist, psychologist, neurologist, naturopath, and chiropractor whom he saw regularly. He had tried over fifty combinations of psych meds for severe depression, going through the alphabet twice and graphing his responses with each change to detect subtle patterns of potential improvement. He tried a number of more experimental treatments: diet changes, nutrient therapy, ECT, ketamine, and marijuana. He exercised vigorously every day for an endorphin boost. He was disciplined, systematic, and analytical. He pursued and acquired high-paying professional employment at various points in his life. He had a number of long-term romantic relationships. He did everything he possibly could to stay alive—his life was an endurance exercise. And his decision to die was not irrational or the product of distorted thinking.

The homework his psychologist gave him shortly before his death, which he published online, demonstrated his high degree of self-awareness but also some of the grandiosity described by Miller in The Drama of the Gifted Child.⁵¹ On one level he rejected most social standards for success while on another level strove endlessly to meet his own standards for excellence, finding his value in a version of being “good.” He did not feel seen or known for who he really was. He suffered from what he called a hallucination of loneliness, what he considered a form of psychosis, a craving for human connection that he could not experience, except only briefly, even when he sought out the presence of other people. Though he considered this emotional experience to be an illusion—and in one sense he was right about that—he was also describing with uncanny accuracy the effects explained by Miller, Gibson, and Kohn on a child who must censor and deny the authentic self for a version that pleases others in order to survive.

Kohn explains that praise is a form of conditional love, one that communicates to the child that “what we’re accepting conditionally isn’t just a particular characteristic or behavior,” so “the child comes to see her ‘whole self’ as good only when she pleases the parent.” Gibson writes, “All they have is a gut feeling of emptiness, which is how a child experiences loneliness. . . . When the children of emotionally immature parents grow up, the core emptiness remains, even if they have a superficially normal adult life.” The lack of emotional connection described by Gibson is a feature of the “false self” created by the child to become acceptable to a distant or emotionally dysregulated parent. As Alice Miller describes, “He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it. Understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. A process of emptying, impoverishment, and crippling of his potential actually took place. The integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in him was cut off.”⁵²

Bornstein writes about the conditions leading to her first suicidal feelings as “a boy who didn’t want to be a boy” in the 1950s: “I worked real hard at being a boy. It was something I was conscious of doing all the time. I watched other boys and did what they did. I did what all the ads and movies and school textbooks told me that boys do.”⁵³ While Bornstein’s experience might at first glance appear to exclusively belong to queer and trans childhoods, I want to highlight the normalizing functions of categories of age, and adolescence specifically, to produce particular types of identities and behaviors within a developmental logic, what it means to “grow up.” The advice given by Dobson, for example in the conservative teen self-help book Preparing for Adolescence, echoes Bornstein’s experience. Learning about what is masculine and what is feminine is positioned as something that all adolescents must do. Dobson writes,

Maybe you too will have to answer some questions about your sexual identity between now and adulthood. If so, the easiest way to learn how to play the role of your particular sex, whether it be a man or a woman, is to watch an adult whom you respect. Try to be like him or her. This is called identifying with another person. If it’s your mother or your teacher or another adult of your sex, watch and learn how he or she acts. Quietly observe how he walks and talks, and gradually, you will find that it will become natural for you to be something like your model, even though you’re a unique individual. This process comes under the heading of the search for identity, and it is an important part of growing up.

In this passage the trans phenomena Dobson describes—the sense that one’s gendered behavior or identifications do not line up with one’s assigned sex—is talked about as an ordinary part of adolescence, as the “search for identity” and an “important part of growing up.” Likewise, trans phenomena and queer desire are collapsed, both contained by adolescence. Dobson describes adolescence as “stressful” and “threatening” to displace the perceived threat of queer and trans phenomena, or any version of social nonconformity, onto this stage of supposed instability and transition in which personal, therapeutic, or educational intervention appears to be appropriate and developmentally necessary.⁵⁴

Dobson is encouraging young people to make an effort to conform, normalizing such efforts, while simultaneously constructing adolescence as the time when queer or trans phenomena are to be expected. Adolescence bears the ideological weight of all transitory and contingent moments of self-making so that adulthood can represent a final arrival at selfhood. In this sense adolescence itself works as a regulatory and disciplinary tool for both adults and adolescents. The view of adolescence as a time of instability and transition justifies perceptions that young people are rebellious, hormonal, or confused, descriptions that imply that they are not agents of their own actions, desires, or identities. What Dobson advises, however, is that children fashion themselves in a way that is socially acceptable and pleasing to adults. Bornstein explains the cost of this process: “The more I tried to be a boy or a girl, the less I seemed to measure up to either, and the less I wanted to stay alive. It finally got to the point where it just didn’t seem worth it anymore.” Notably, Bornstein describes her efforts to conform in the same terms that Kohn, Gibson, and Miller describe for a child trying to be “good”: “I watched for what to do right. I needed other people to validate my effort to be real. It was important that they saw me as one of them. I don’t think I ever pulled it off. Their kind of realness seemed always to be out of reach.”⁵⁵ The issue for Bornstein is not that there is an originary self to be found behind or underneath the self she had fashioned for others, but that such self-fashioning occurred under compulsory conditions in which family relationships, friendships, social success, and her very survival were at stake. Adolescence structures these compulsory conditions not only for gender and sexuality but for all forms of normativity.

One of the high-achieving Southern Californian teenagers mentioned by the Orange County Register left a series of suicide letters, published by the paper in 2018. I originally found Patrick Turner’s letters for personal reasons rather than in the course of my research for this book, and, like my brother, Patrick and his notes defy the usual narratives around suicide. By all accounts Patrick was a good kid who played sports, got good grades, and was well liked—more than two thousand people attended his funeral. In one letter he writes, “The ongoing stress put on at CDM [Corona del Mar High School] has been inescapable. Putting this much pressure on me has caused me to do what I do.” He then details a number of scenarios in which teachers assigned grades for material that they did not teach, said that material not covered in class would be on a final exam, and assigned homework and then left the students to their own devices. These teaching scenarios are unfair, for sure, but mostly mundane. He mentions one teacher (not by name) who was mean, “who made every day I had with this teacher something I dreaded.”⁵⁶ What exactly was the nature of the “pressure” that he refers to in his letters? Certainly, it was not the problem of too much work, nor was it comparing oneself to others or the feeling of being left out supposedly exacerbated by social media.

The actions of these teachers are devastating only if one feels that one must be “good,” must follow the rules, and get good grades to survive. Patrick writes, “I want you to know that my parents were not the reason for this. My parents actually don’t put almost any stress on me at all. It is purely the school.”⁵⁷ Reading this, it is difficult for me not to think, Well, then, fuck the school. My own capacity to idealize the teen rebel—a figure not based in my own experiences but from being an avid reader of young adult literature—makes this queer response possible for me. What I struggle with the most while reading Patrick’s letters is his seeming acceptance of the standards of success—the version of being “good”—that made his life feel unlivable. He writes in a letter to his family, “Do not use this as an excuse to slow down, keep going.” To his brothers he adds, “I hope you get that job at Indiana and kill it at whatever you end up doing,” and “I hope you have the time of your life wherever you end up going to school.” To his sister he writes, “I hope you kick ass on the East Coast.”⁵⁸ In another letter to friends, he thanks all the teachers who made him feel valued, and he affectionately tells his coaches to “keep winning championships and kicking ass.”⁵⁹ Why not encourage others to reject the oppressive forms of success and normativity that led him to this point in the first place?

Patrick was a success according to the standards of achievement established by his community, but his letter exposes the emptiness of this success and the troubling consequences of rewards and praise described by Kohn. Patrick writes, “So much pressure is put on kids to do good, and a lot of kids make mistakes. One slip up makes a kid feel like the smallest person in the world. You are looked at as a loser if you don’t go to college or get a certain GPA or test score. All anyone talks about is how great their kid is. It’s all about how great I am. It’s never about the kid who maybe does not play a sport, have a 4.0+ GPA, but displays great character.” What this letter describes is the feeling of erasure and isolation resulting from this form of recognition: “It’s all about how great I am.” Like Miller’s “gifted child,” the grandiosity of being “great” quickly wears off, only to be replaced by feelings of emptiness, the consequence of not being seen in the wholeness of who we are. Patrick writes, “Nobody seems to understand, they only see people on the outside.”⁶⁰ Ann Cvetkovich theorizes “depression as a cultural and social phenomenon” with the objective “to depathologize negative feelings.” She sees the feelings associated with depression as an effect of neoliberal capitalism, explaining that “depression, or alternative accounts of what gets called depression, is thus a way to describe neoliberalism and globalization, or the current state of political economy, in affective terms.”⁶¹ Kohn likewise indicts neoliberal capitalism in his critique of conditional parenting, how “we are taught that good things must always be earned, never given away” and thus how “the laws of the marketplace—supply and demand, tit for tat—have assumed the status of universal and absolute principles” in which “every human interaction, even among family members” is viewed “as a kind of economic transaction.”⁶²

Within the logic of the marketplace, the child must give the parent, the school, and the institution what it wants to earn safety, care, and love. Henry Giroux describes the psychic consequences of neoliberalism another way, echoing the very terms outlined in Patrick’s letter: “Within this narrow individualism in which all that matters is one’s ability to compete and ‘win’ as defined by the ideologies, values, materials, social relations, and practices of commerce, it becomes difficult for young people to imagine a future in which the self becomes more than a self-promoting commodity and a symbol of commodification.”⁶³ Cvetkovich and Giroux describe an institutionalized form of relation that mirrors the parental relation described by Kohn and Miller. Audre Lorde explains, “The principle horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principle horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment.”⁶⁴ Neoliberalism creates a society that expects its citizens to ignore and deny the signs of overwork, to dedicate themselves to work without meaning or purpose, to think of their value primarily in terms of labor and professional success. The great irony of writing these words in an academic book for tenure does not escape me. Perhaps I need to imagine that Patrick could have rejected the pressures and standards of Corona del Mar and entertained queerer possibilities for a meaningful life. Even now I am not sure if I could do the same. If the pressures of tenure made my life feel unlivable, could I imagine doing something else? Could I walk away from this book and not feel that my life was over? Perhaps the question is not why do some people decide to take their own lives, but how do any of us survive?

The institutional and medical protocols for a suicidal person with a plan, or for someone following a suicide attempt, are designed entirely around restraint and control. The premise behind this idea is that suicidality is a state of insanity, hopefully temporary, in which people need to be protected from themselves. Bornstein says that “people who don’t see any way of changing themselves or the world spend a lot of time wishing they were dead.” The key, she suggests, is the ability to take that control back: “It came down to this: should I kill myself or should I make myself a life worth living? And it wasn’t so much the question that kept me alive or even my answer. What kept me alive was the notion that it was me who was asking the question.” What kind of life is worse than death for one person might not be the same as it is for another, and that is precisely the limit of our knowledge and control over others. Bornstein’s approach to suicide prevention does not involve “reasons not to kill yourself” but a set of strategies to cope with suicidal feelings when they arise, ranging from easy and safe to difficult and dangerous, including options like “keep moving” and “ask for help” as well as “tell a lie,” “make a deal with the devil,” “take drugs,” and “starve yourself.”⁶⁵ Each of the alternatives is accompanied with a rating scale for difficulty, safety, and effectiveness (see figs. 4.1 and 4.2).

The fact that the book contains controversial alternatives like cutting, illegal drugs, and anorexia might seem counterintuitive. But it is important not to mistake these alternatives as recommendations or even endorsements of these activities. They are instead a profound acknowledgment and acceptance of the fullest range of feelings and experiences any person might have. Bornstein seems to say, over and over, there is nothing that her readers have thought or done that is too bad or scary or illegal for her. The sections on cutting, drugs, and anorexia serve as an acknowledgment of these possibilities as well as a guide for thinking through the decision to do or not to do any of them, including questions the readers should first ask themselves, warnings about the consequences of these choices, and alternatives to these alternatives. The fear that teenagers will be corrupted by the presence of these controversial alternatives in the book assumes that if you give teenagers an inch, they will jump off the (literal or metaphorical) cliff. This fear reflects again what Kohn calls the “deeply cynical belief” that if young people are given the freedom to be who they are, they will choose to be bad, “because, well, that’s who they are.”⁶⁶

Conversely, giving control over to teenagers creates circumstances in which they can be competent, capable of good, and empowered to do the right thing, at the same time as recognizing that they are equally capable of harm and bear the weight of their decisions. The familiar social conceptions of the “good” child and the “bad” adolescent constrain opportunities for young people to be in and act on the world as themselves, serving to simplify and disavow the moral ambiguity of all human potential and to deny our ethical entanglement with one another and the world. Wall writes, “The ability for even a child to construct his own world is ethically ambiguous. It is not simply corrupted by outside society or expressive of innate evil. It includes the possibility for most of the horrors of which only humanity seems capable” and is a “testament to moral life’s simultaneous fallibility and potential for redemption.”⁶⁷ Rather than disavow this complexity in herself and her reader, Bornstein speaks from the position of someone who has done it all and does not judge, someone who is validating the capacity of her readers to do great harm while encouraging them to make conscious choices with the awareness that the consequences of those choices are their own. Bornstein’s approach to suicide prevention is about giving over control, not restricting it.

Sexual Autonomy

In the preceding chapters I have demonstrated the ways in which categories of age work to problematically disempower children and adolescents. At first glance it might seem that the problem is one of power: adults have the power, and children and adolescents don’t have it. And yet, attempts to grant power to children and adolescents—whether to acknowledge their power or to give them power—take us only so far. James Kincaid argues that power, as a conceptual frame, is limited when it comes to analyses of categories of age: “The question is not the redistribution of power but its adequacy in the first place, its limitations as a tool for understanding and for living.” For example, if children and adolescents are considered powerful, adults might conclude they are justified in using their power in the usual ways, since the playing field is equal. Certainly, this way of thinking does not address the problems of coercion or exploitation. But if children and adolescents are not considered powerful, then adults might see this status as the justification—obligation, even—to protect them. It is one thing to protect a small child from the stove or the stairs, temporary protections put in place up to the point that one learns to climb stairs and even to safely avoid a hot stove, inevitably through a process of making mistakes involving falls or burns, which are necessary for learning these life skills. It is another thing to attempt to protect children and adolescents from their own preferences and desires. Kincaid puts it this way: “Isn’t there a danger of the very protections becoming coercive? Isn’t it possible that the need to protect can run amok?”⁶⁸ We have seen examples of this in Anne of Green Gables, where Anne is forbidden her reading of “lurid mysteries” or when G. Stanley Hall warns against “too wide reading” and exposure to “alien ideas.”⁶⁹ We have seen the disabling effects of “protection” implied through Twenge’s analysis of today’s teenagers as the least independent of any previous generation. While I do not think we can or that we should do away with power as a theory for understanding social relations, power is only one apparatus through which to understand the politics of difference and the institutional mechanisms that shape our lives. As a single frame, power makes some things visible while obscuring others.

In 2015 a North Carolina teen was prosecuted for having nude photos of himself and his girlfriend, both sixteen at the time, on his phone. The photos were taken consensually and shared only between the couple, what might have been considered legal “sexting” if they had been over eighteen years of age. But because of a quirk in North Carolina law, both teens were charged as adults for child endangerment under child pornography laws, even though the “child” in question was the same person as the “adult” being charged: “Each was therefore simultaneously the adult perpetrator who is considered a predator and the minor victim who needs protecting by the law.”⁷⁰ Both teens took plea deals to avoid conviction and lifelong registration as sex offenders. Like the justice of the peace in Louisiana who refused to marry an interracial couple—“I do it to protect the children,” he said—the power of the law operated here to protect a “child” who did not exist.⁷¹ The hypocrisy of these legal actions illustrates the ways childhood and adolescence function as temporal rather than simply ontological categories, in which developmental time can be shifted in the present embodiment of a person to achieve particular ends. These North Carolina teens were punished as adults under the law for failing to protect themselves as children, a temporal slide used to deny them their rights as people in the present. Kincaid describes the cultural mechanisms at work: “Adolescents are stuffed back into childhood when it serves our purposes, as it often does when we are talking of molestation or crime. Victims of crime as old as eighteen or nineteen can be thought of as children, whereas perpetrators as young as six can be thought of and treated as adults.” We do not often see these logics enacted simultaneously in one person. Power, Kincaid says, “allows us to overlook both contradictions and cruelties in our logic, in our family structure, and in our social system at large.”⁷² Power, as a conceptual frame, suggests that ethical considerations involve only more or less action on the part of adults. In this model all power originates from adults. As adults under the law, the North Carolina teens have the power to exploit children. But, under the law as children, they can only be exploited. According to this logic, they cannot simply be children who wanted to take nude photos of themselves and share them with each other. They cannot be the owners of their own bodies or the agents of their own desires. However, it is clear that reversing the adult-child dynamic under the terms of power does not clarify matters. It does not make any more sense to see children as the “real” predators and adults as victims. We need another way of conceptualizing sexual autonomy through the ethics of relationality.

Bornstein sees gender and sexuality as essential to the project of imagining, and thus making possible, a livable life. Queer possibility is a reason to stay alive. She writes,

Try this: Imagine the world as a place where anyone can safely and even joyfully express themselves the way they’ve always wanted to. Nothing about the bodies they were born with or what they choose to do with those bodies—how they dress them, or decorate, or trim, or augment them—would get people laughed at, or targeted, or in any way deprived of their rights. Can you imagine a world like that?

Stay with that image for a moment and envision yourself as the kind of person who lives happily and contentedly in that world. What gives you pleasure? What are the components of your identity that allow for that pleasure? How many components of that envisioned identity can you put in place in your real life in order to achieve real pleasure?

The self-making she advocates is not the individualism of neoliberal capitalism but a conscious enactment of ethical relationality: “Everyone consciously or unconsciously changes who they are in response to their environment or to some relationship that they are negotiating in any given moment. Every life form does that.” She frames this capacity in terms of survival and as a skill that can be practiced and honed but explains that “the less consciously we evolve our identities—who we are and how we’re seen in the world—the better the chances that one day we’re going to wake up and not know where we are or how we got there.”⁷³ Consciousness is Bornstein’s cure for the demands of normativity that make so many lives feel unlivable. Her suggestion should not be mistaken as an anything-goes form of relativism but rather the exposure of normativity as a false system of value for whose life is worth living. Bornstein substitutes the oppressive constraints of normativity with an alternate principle for ethical relationality: “DON’T BE MEAN. Anything else goes, anything at all.” Our entanglement with others and our environments is unavoidable, and so what matters most is that we consciously choose, and that we feel we are allowed to consciously choose, our identities. Bornstein practices and elaborates an ethics of relationality for her reader that acknowledges the entanglement of meaning, matter, and world.

To see this ethical relationality practiced in another context, I want to turn to Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth’s 2015 sex education comic book, aimed at seven to ten year olds, called Sex Is a Funny Word. Children’s books written for the purposes of sex education are frequently conservative in approach, aiming to stabilize and control sexual knowledge while guarding sex and reproduction within narratives that produce and maintain heterosexuality. As discussed in chapter 2, the social project of sex education in the early twentieth century began as an explicit means of state control and regulation, a way of harnessing sex and reproduction for state purposes. Desire and consent were obscured by a preoccupation with controlling sexual behavior and directing it toward particular ends that created a coercive relation to sex, whether it manifested in the direction of heterosexuality, abstinence, or marital obligation. Sex Is a Funny Word engages with sexuality education in a different way, one that emphasizes the reader’s own process of inquiry and discovery and opens up queer possibilities for gender and sexuality. This book might be read as an enactment of Jen Gilbert’s suggestion to “imagine sex education as a place of questions rather than answers.”⁷⁴ In the author’s note by Silverberg, he writes, “Most books about sex are full of answers. Answers can be helpful and reassuring, but they also tell us what to think and even how to think instead of encouraging us to think for ourselves and to honor our own knowledge and experience.”⁷⁵

Like Bornstein’s Hello, Cruel World, this book emphasizes questions, ending each chapter with questions for the reader to think about and talk about with someone they trust. The pedagogical structure of teacher-student is disrupted by the comic book formatting, featuring four child characters shown engaging with the book’s content in different ways. The questions at the end of each chapter come from these characters rather than the seemingly “objective” and factual text of the book itself. The book contains information about the word “sex,” the human body, gendered ways of being, and touch, including masturbation and body autonomy. This information is layered with comic book scenes featuring the four characters interacting with the material, with one another, and with other people in their lives. This layering effectively exposes the information as subject to context, relationships, and individual engagement rather than as rule or law. The book emphasizes the characters’ questions and process of inquiry rather than its own answers, modeling for readers the process of discovering and being present with gender and sexuality rather than arriving at, controlling, or directing it.

On the first page of the book, we learn about each of the four characters, including their ages, favorite foods, and likes and dislikes that include lists such as “candy, math, swimming” and “climbing on things, music, shy people.”⁷⁶ These lists suggest a process of identity formation and self-understanding that exceeds the bounds of gender identity or is based on alternative logics altogether. Cat Fitzpatrick explains that the book “holds itself open to diversity by always being particular. The four characters aren’t blank every-kid stand-ins—they are distinct and weird people who do things like collect antique cell-phones or develop opinions about climate change.”⁷⁷ This particularity continues throughout as we get to know the characters and see them interact with the information of the book. There is a student in a wheelchair as well as one wearing a hijab. The book depicts skin tones and hair color as a rainbow rather than in earth tones, acknowledging that we live in a world in which race is significant, but avoiding visually referencing racial or ethnic stereotypes. There isn’t even a discernible norm, which works to imagine a world in which a multitude of differences coexist. The book is attempting to represent diversity as a lived experience of particularity, what it means to be different from others (which we inevitably are) as well as exist alongside others who are different from us. It does not represent existing standards of value to affirm them or push against them. It represents a set of ethical practices, ways of being in relation to gender, sexuality, and bodies.

One of the characters, whose name is Zai, does not immediately appear to be male or female, judging by the illustrations and Zai’s dialogue. However, the great diversity of the other characters in terms of race, ethnicity, ability, and gendered expression creates the effect of incorporating Zai’s androgyny as not especially noticeable or notable to a reader. Early in the book Zai is shown with a question mark thought bubble while watching two girls say to another child: “You can’t wear pink! You’re a boy!” The question mark does not indicate anxiety or concern but rather Zai’s puzzlement at why anyone would make such a rule. In a subsequent frame we see Zai shopping with a parental figure, holding a shirt on a hanger and insisting confidently, “But, Mom, I like the color pink!”⁷⁸ These frames suggest that Zai’s sex was assigned male at birth but that the social meaning of this assignment doesn’t necessarily fit Zai’s self-conceptions. Sex Is a Funny Word practices what Jules Gill-Peterson calls an “ethical aperture of relation,” one in which adults see “trans children’s growth and flourishing as ends in themselves” and where we understand “what it means to wish that there be trans children, that to grow trans and live a trans childhood is not merely a possibility but a happy and desirable one.”⁷⁹ Trans phenomena are represented in the book as a process of inquiry without a predictive outcome, just like any of the characters’ processes of learning about themselves.

On the title page of the chapter “Boys, Girls, All of Us,” Zai is shown asking, “Only boys and girls? What about the rest of us?” This chapter explains that babies are called boys or girls when they are born, even though there are more than two kinds of bodies. One of the characters, Omar, asks the reader, “What did they call you when you were born?” while Zai asks, “Why do you think people want to know if a baby is a boy or a girl?” On a subsequent page the text explains, “As we grow into being a kid and then an adult, we get to figure out who we are and what words fit best. Most boys grow up to be men, and most girls grow up to be women. But there are many ways to be a boy or a girl. And there are many ways to grow up and become an adult. For most of us, words like boy and girl, or man and woman, feel okay, and they fit. For some of us, they don’t.” If developmental sequence—the very idea of growing up—implies the arrival at a normatively gendered adulthood, this book disrupts developmental sequence by representing growing up as a process of change and of contingent learning about oneself: “Growing up can mean learning about your outside, what your body can and can’t do. Growing up can also mean learning about your inside: the stories, memories, and feelings that make you who you are.”⁸⁰ This distinction between inside and outside doesn’t privilege one or the other as the stable or originary source of gender but rather creates the space for trans phenomena to be experienced and explored not as a bodily contradiction but as an embodied understanding of the relationship between inside and outside, one that all people must explore and negotiate.

Sex Is a Funny Word does not deal directly with sex acts (though a book for older readers that does is in the works), but it has profound implications for thinking about what it might mean to practice and pass along a concept of sexual ethics to children. Michael Warner contrasts his conception of sexual ethics to what he calls “moralism,” a false morality based on judging others, feeling superior, and controlling others: “Most people cannot quite rid themselves of the sense that controlling the sex of others, far from being unethical, is where morality begins.” We might hear an echo of Kohn’s argument that the dominant cultural paradigm of “good” parenting constitutes the control of children—one might say it is the point at which good parenting is presumed to begin. Warner says that our “culture has thousands of ways for people to govern the sex of others—and not just harmful or coercive sex, like rape, but the most personal dimensions of pleasure, identity, and practice.” He asks, “Shouldn’t it be possible to allow everyone sexual autonomy, in a way consistent with everyone else’s sexual autonomy?” Importantly, this is not a call for relativism—“some shame may be well deserved,” he says—but rather “the goal of sexual ethics would be to constrain coercion rather than shut down sexual variance.”⁸¹ Autonomy is evoked as an ethical value here, a relational practice negotiated between oneself and others, rather than as a definitional fact or a belief in the separateness of the autonomous liberal subject. Warner’s conception of autonomy is a relational one, an attempt, as Butler puts it, “to redescribe autonomy in terms of relationality.”⁸² Sexual ethics are relational ethics. One of the things Sex Is a Funny Word does is create a safe and legitimized space for the sexual autonomy of children, for every person to acknowledge, explore, and accept the most personal dimensions of their “pleasure, identity, and practice” as they go through the process of discovering and experiencing them.⁸³ The structure of the book emphasizes that this work belongs to child readers themselves rather than to adult authority figures, subverting notions of childhood innocence and suggesting an alternate relationality among the generations. Rather than enacting mentorship that is an investment in the future becomings of its readers, the role of the book (and thus adults) is to crack open the potentiality of the present for readers who are here now. Denying the sexuality of children, as the notion of childhood innocence suggests we do, or attempting to control sexuality through shame or to obscure sexual knowledge through exclusion or isolation—these are unethical practices that close down possibilities for a livable life.

Gender and sexuality are relational ways of being oneself and being with others. Bornstein writes, “Sexuality is more than who we’re attracted to. It is more than what we like to do in bed. It is a social identity. It is the way we experience the world around us in a positive, life-affirming way.” Queer possibilities for being are not formed in isolation or even valuable in isolation but rather conceptualized as life-sustaining vehicles for connection with others. This principle is explained through another imaginative exercise the reader is invited by Bornstein to undertake:

Imagine sweet sex with a really great person or persons, and it’s making both or all of you feel great. . . . Think about every kind of sex you can think of . . . even if some people say it’s not right for you to think about it.

Can you imagine being the kind of person who has that kind of sweet sex and relationship? If you can imagine it, you are completely capable of taking steps to realize it. It’s a matter of trusting someone enough to let them know who you really are. Trust yourself first.⁸⁴

Bornstein’s self-reflexivity and vulnerability elsewhere in the text suggest that this exercise is one that she has used for her own survival, and she shares with the reader her own process of negotiating a trans identity in relation to desire and cultural prohibition. Identity is theorized as a conscious process of becoming that enables the feeling of connection to others as we truly are.

There are similarities between Bornstein’s exercise and a moment in Sex Is a Funny Word: “Part of being a kid is learning what you like, what you don’t like, and who you are. That’s part of being a grown-up, too. We never stop learning or changing.”⁸⁵ The emphasis on self-knowledge and discovery is described in relation to process and change rather than identity formation or points of arrival, resembling what Gilbert describes as a “cautious theory of development in sex education” that is “grounded in psychoanalysis and the interpretive possibilities that are opened up when a good life is measured not by one’s proximity to norms but by one’s capacity to love and work.”⁸⁶ Likewise, Bornstein’s notion of being “who you really are” is not essentialist or stable. She writes, “Keep in mind that the you that makes life worth living today probably won’t be the same you that makes life worth living this time next year.” Bornstein accounts for the usefulness of identities while theorizing their subjective function as moving one through life: “Identities aren’t mean to be permanent. They’re like cars: they take us from one place to another. We work, travel, and seek adventure in them until they break down beyond repair. At that point, living well means finding a new model that better suits us for a new moment.”⁸⁷ Transition here is not the movement from one stable identity to another but the very condition of inhabiting multiple identities that take us where we want to go. We might hear an echo of Bornstein’s exercise in Butler’s articulation of the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy: “The struggle to survive is not really separable from the cultural life of fantasy, and the foreclosure of fantasy—through censorship, degradation, or other means—is one strategy for providing for the social death of persons.” Butler explains that fantasy exposes the definitional limit of what can be considered “real” and possible. “Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings elsewhere home.”⁸⁸ Essential for the survival of queer and trans young people, and for all of us constrained by normative definitions of success and growth, Bornstein’s exercise is an open invitation, a process of being and becoming that transgresses the bounds of what language and culture deem real or possible.

Ethical Entanglement

Graham argues that “the evidence strongly suggests that the best outcomes for children’s personalities occur when parents begin by carefully observing the way their children feel and behave in different circumstances when they are infants and toddlers, responding to them as individuals.” And then “if they then go on to consult them and respect their views in the primary school years, and move to sharing decision-making with them when they reach their teens, the chances that their children will enter adulthood in good mental health are further increased.”⁸⁹ As I have argued earlier, this relational dynamic does not consist of a separable autonomous parent and an autonomous child acting alongside each other but is created through the acknowledgment of our ethical entanglement with one another. Attempts to theorize child agency in childhood studies have led to a number of thorny problems, summarized by Marah Gubar this way: “If we as scholars want to claim that children have agency, then, we must concede that the kind of agency they have is not synonymous with autonomy.” Gubar suggests that acknowledging the differences between children and adults, as well as the limited capacities of children, means that “adult paternalism toward children” is not “ipso facto oppressive” and that, unlike other oppressed groups, “some form of paternalism is not only justified but ethically required.” On the one hand, Gubar is right to recognize that dependency, and indeed relationality itself, is a form of ethical entanglement. On the other hand, this formulation reinscribes an adult-child hierarchy of power relations that makes thinking about ethics difficult or impossible except under authoritarian terms like “paternalism.” Gubar worries, too, that such an acknowledgment reinscribes what she calls a “difference model” of childhood that “too easily produces prejudice and injustice, condescension and dehumanization.” Instead, she proposes a “kinship model” which “highlights likeness and relatedness” at the same time as “it also makes room for difference and variation,” inviting us “to regard all human beings, regardless of age, as full subjects.”⁹⁰ Like Gubar, I think that regarding children as more like adults than different from them is key to shifting the harmful effects of categories of age. But this involves a rethinking of the opposition between “child” and “adult” along with their attendant assumptions about autonomy, agency, and subjectivity.

What Bornstein and books like Sex Is a Funny Word enact is a relationality that redefines the concept of agency through imagining the child or adolescent reader as not as a passive recipient of information or a fully independent agent but rather an embodied person with an ethical obligation to oneself and others, enmeshed in discourse and capable of moving in and through it in creative, unpredictable, and unknown ways. Wall describes a child who, “like us all, belongs to a complex circle of interdependent relations which she is both shaped by and shapes for herself.” Wall contends that “babies in particular show that each of us is and has been shaped by many layers of surrounding persons, communities, and histories.”⁹¹ Castañeda, grappling with the challenge to subjectivity posed by the infant, asks, “Must a subject be able to represent itself in order to be a subject? Must agency take the form of self-representation?” To ask these questions necessitates a rethinking of agency itself: “What kind of agency?” Castañeda aims to “re-theorize the subject in terms that do not make use of the child as the adult’s pre-subjective other,” which means contending with and accepting unknowing as the “condition of knowledge itself.” She explains, “The theory I am imagining suggests that subjects cannot be known in advance. Instead, knowing comes to apprehend the singularity of all subjects, the complexity of their histories, and the modes of their subjection as these change over time and place.”⁹² This theory takes as a given the unknowability of ourselves and others while establishing relational encounters as the place in which a contingent, contextual knowing might take place.

Barad also theorizes subjectivity as inherently relational: “Subjectivity is not a matter of individuality but a relation of responsibility to the other. Crucially, then, the ethical subject is not the disembodied rational subject of traditional ethics but rather an embodied sensibility, which responds to its proximal relationship to the other through a mode of wonderment that is antecedent to consciousness.” Likewise, for Barad, agency is relational, realized through the actions of bodies in proximal relation to one another: “It is enactment, not something that someone or something has. It cannot be designated as an attribute of subjects or objects (as they do not preexist as such). It is not an attribute whatsoever. Agency is “doing” or “being” in its intra-activity.”⁹³ Thus, the agency of children is not located in their intentionality, as if the autonomous liberal subject extends to childhood, but rather in the desires, emotions, and physicality of our connective and relational interactions with the world and others. The idea that an adult “has” agency is a myth; it is a belief in the autonomous human subject and the separability of individuals, self, and world. As Gubar demonstrates, the attempt to include children in this myth of privilege, to claim they have this type of agency or that they are autonomous actors in the world, inadequately addresses the questions of ethics and social justice at stake in the treatment of the people called children. What is needed to fully engage these ethical questions is a relational understanding of subjectivity and agency that nuances and resituates the agential capacities of both adults and children.

Normative conceptions of subjectivity privilege the idea of rational consciousness as a prerequisite for ethical action. This idea figures the adult as an interiorized consciousness rather than an embodied being and conversely figures the child in opposition to consciousness or as preconsciousness. If subjectivity is always relational, then it is less important to establish the difference between adults and children than it is to understand the ethics of all relationality, or what Barad refers to as the entanglement of materiality: “We (but not only ‘we humans’) are always already responsible to the others with whom or which we are entangled, not through conscious intent but through the various ontological entanglements that materiality entails.”⁹⁴ Barad is writing about the world—all of nature, matter, the universe—and theorizing a posthuman agency that accounts for the ethical relationships that can occur, those including humans and those relationships that might not involve humans at all. But we might also hear a version of Barad’s ethical entanglement in Bornstein’s “don’t be mean” or in Warner’s conception of sexual autonomy. I find Barad’s theory particularly useful for rethinking categories of age because it makes the varying capacities of children and young people irrelevant to their recognition as agents. And it brings ethical considerations to the forefront, whether we are speaking about infants, children, adolescents, atoms, stone, or planets. If the child epitomizes the ideal of the human at the very same time as actual children are excluded from the privileges of the human, then a humanist understanding of agency will continually perpetuate these exclusionary functions. Children are granted the privileges of the human only at the moment they cease to be children. Castañeda’s retheorization of subjectivity also accounts for the preverbal state of infancy in terms that further illuminate the ethics of relationality implied by Alice Miller’s contention that even an infant has a “primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected as the person she really is at any given time”:

An infant is not simply the raw natural material of the future adult subject it will become but rather an entity that is the effect of the agency of nature and the discursive matrix through which it is formed and reformed. The infant “is” a subject and has subjectivity that is particular to this interaction, such that everything from culturally specific birthing practices to particular modes of embodiment, including racialization, gendering, sexualization, and so on, are constitutive of this entity as an infant. What might be called the absence of language here, or rather the presence of particular modes of embodied communication that do not include language per se, does not constitute this entity as presubjective in this formulation, and as such it cannot be occupied by adult fantasies or desires. Instead, this entity’s existence, and its embodiment are the ground of its subjectivity, where “subjectivity” signifies embodied experience.⁹⁵

Like the infant, an adult’s subjectivity is similarly embodied, contextual, and relational. The example of an infant does not introduce a special kind of subjectivity but rather makes visible the instability and unknowability of all encounters—all entanglements—of matter and meaning.

Barad explains, “agential separability is not individuation.” What this means is that ethics is “not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part.” When Barad speaks of the “relationalities of becoming,” this involves the relationality between one person and another, such as a child and an adult, but it refers to a much larger acknowledgment of performativity, the ways that beingness and reality itself become visible in specific, contextual ways. This reformulation of agency and meaning-making within performativity, far from the oppressive discourse of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, instead brings to light our ethical responsibilities to one another and to the world in the construction of meaning. The sense of ourselves as “adult” depends on the construction of the “child” as separate from adulthood: their meanings and very existence are enmeshed. Barad uses the example of “able-bodied” and “disabled,” in which the privileged status of able-bodiedness “is not a natural state of being but a specific form of embodiment that is co-constituted through the boundary-making practices that distinguish ‘able-bodied’ from ‘disabled.’” She proposes, “How different ethics looks from the vantage point of constitutive entanglements. What would it mean to acknowledge that ‘able-bodied’ depend on the ‘disabled’ for their very existence? What would it mean to take on that responsibility? What would it mean to deny one’s responsibility to the other once there is a recognition that one’s very embodiment is integrally entangled with the other?”⁹⁶ This ethical acknowledgment of relationality that produces “adult” and “child” as interdependent categories would make adult projections of desire more conscious and more visible, because it destabilizes the capacities of these categories to produce this reality in the first place. Rather than adult and child producing the illusion of knowledge about the other, they would instead illuminate the challenge they pose to each other.

Butler works through some of these questions with regard to the performativity of gender, describing the entanglements of matter and meaning that gender itself exposes when we look at its role in the production of the real. Butler suggests that the work of queer theory to underscore the instability of gender also has the potential for achieving this ethical awareness and thus a less oppressive social world. The work of queer theory

is precisely to underscore the value of being beside oneself, of being a porous boundary, given over to others, finding oneself in a trajectory of desire in which one is taken out of oneself, and resituated irreversibly in a field of others in which one is not the presumptive center. The particular sociality that belongs to bodily life, to sexual life, and to becoming gendered (which is always, to a certain extent, becoming gendered for others) establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others and a sense of disorientation for the first-person, that is, the perspective of the ego. As bodies, we are always for something more than, and other than, ourselves.⁹⁷

Both Butler and Barad move away from conceptions of the autonomous liberal subject, emphasizing instead the interdependency of our existence. What Butler describes is the condition of being an adult or an infant, and the “porous boundary, given over to others” that both experience in relation to each other, to becoming gendered, to being in the world. Butler’s theory of performativity highlights the production of reality in these relational processes. Barad writes, “The nature of the production of bodily boundaries is not merely experiential, or merely epistemological, but ontological—what is at issue and at stake is a matter of the nature of reality, not merely a matter of human experience or human understandings of the world.”⁹⁸ What this means is not that adults and children or children and adolescents or mothers and infants are somehow all the same but rather that recognizing their separateness also means grappling with their entanglement, what Butler describes as a “field of ethical enmeshment,” within which the child and the adolescent must be allowed to matter as themselves at any given moment. This mattering is not an interpretive act but a performative one, productive of the real.

In my introduction I made the statement, at the risk of stating the obvious, that we cannot control other people. In the context of my work exposing institutional projects of control, this claim might be read as a comment on the ineffectiveness or incompleteness of such projects, their inability to shape the future toward their particular aims. And this interpretation is not wrong—there will always be a queer outside to the regulatory mechanisms of any institution. What I really want to say, though, is not that we cannot control other people but that we should not. The attempt to control others, however one justifies it, is unethical. But the ethical responsibility to allow others control over themselves does not leave us only with a form of relativism in which anything goes or in which we allow ourselves to be exploited or abused. Butler explains that the fact “that we cannot predict or control what permutations of the human might arise does not mean that we must value all possible permutations of the human; it does not mean that we cannot struggle for the realization of certain values, democratic and nonviolent, international and antiracist.” But she argues that an ethical relationality is one in which we must grapple with the limits of our own perspectives and positionality and “enter into a collective work in which one’s own status as a subject must, for democratic reasons, become disoriented, exposed to what it does not know.”⁹⁹ The ethics of relationality asks the question of how to be with the earth, the environment, children, other people, or animals rather than how to dominate or control them. An ethical relation requires that we become aware of how norms are shaping or constraining the imagined outcome of any encounter and let go of predetermination. An ethical relationality involves acting within the world to create the possibility for all to be who or what they are in the present moment of their becoming.