chapter 3

PERVERSE READING AND THE
ADOLESCENT READER

I stayed at my desk reading some lugubrious volume—usually The Mysteries of Udolpho, by the amiable Mrs. Radcliffe. A translation of The Sorrows of Werther fell into my hands at this period, and if I could have committed suicide without killing myself, I should certainly have done so.

—Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy

It was a very good book. I’m quite illiterate, but I read quite a lot.

—J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Illiterate reading. Words that leave no impression. Ideation of suicide without dying. These are some of the queer consequences depicted in fictional representations of adolescent reading. Scenes of reading appear with frequency in fictional texts, and the collection of scenes I assemble here reveal patterns of uncertainty, nonconformity, and risk. These diverse representations of self and text illuminate tensions surrounding adolescent reading and interpretation, tensions that surface questions of agency, identity, and power. They surface unexpected readerly acts, strategies of interpretation, and constructions of self. These scenes of reading also expose the problem of reading itself, the troubling relation between reader and text that reveals our uncertainties about what happens in these unobservable and unsettling acts of interpretation. The act of reading itself cannot mean one thing, and in these pages it moves between notions of the known and unknown. In this chapter I bring together a range of specific, located instantiations of the “adolescent reader” to expose the logics and assumptions that underpin deployments of adolescence as a concept over the course of the twentieth century. The discourse around the topic of adolescent reading points to the social functions of adolescence as a category, whereas fictional representations provide an opportunity to theorize adolescence differently. I use fictional scenes of adolescent reading from late nineteenth-century children’s literature, twentieth-century classics, and contemporary young adult fiction as a way to begin unraveling the logic of adolescence. I do not find meanings inherent in fictional texts themselves but rather make meanings at these rich and interpretively supple sites of theorization.

Making meanings that resist accepted forms of knowledge is part of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “perverse reading.”¹ Nat Hurley explains, “Reading perversely has been central to the work of queer theory, and I would suggest that we can do more with perversion in our theorizations of young people and their texts than we have yet dreamed of.” She argues that perverse reading “can thus take us an even greater distance toward thinking impossible things and for refusing the demands of normativity in our theorizing young people and their texts.”² Perverse reading acknowledges the unstable relation between reader and text to make room for queer possibilities. Reading fiction perversely allows me to illuminate that which otherwise would not be visible or articulable. Kenneth Kidd suggests that “if queer theory is to function as theory, it needs also to theorize (not just interpret) children’s literature and children’s literature studies.” He asks, “What if we were to think of children’s literature not simply as a field of literature but also as a theoretical site in its own right?”³ In the spirit of this suggestion, the fictional scenes I draw from provide a launch point, becoming the occasion for theory. They demonstrate how adolescence functions as a performative category enmeshed with conceptions of childhood and adulthood. I use closely related queer and psychoanalytic schemas to elucidate adolescence as a hermeneutic of self, an interpretive framework shaping subjectivity. I overlap representational layers of world, self, and text in order to stretch the limits of the real and unreal, the possible and impossible, the normal and perverse ways of making sense of our experiences and ourselves.

At first glance adolescence appears to be a queer category, positioned interminably outside adulthood.⁴ While some identity categories (such as “woman” or “adult”) offer the illusion of stability, adolescence is conceptualized as unstable, as transitional, as a time when heterosexuality is practiced but not yet achieved. Adolescence functions as a temporary state of being that one is expected to move through and eventually leave behind. This very instability is part of what produces anxieties about adolescence. Adolescence appears to be queer in that it is often linked with rebellion—and we might consider both “queer” and “rebel” to describe those who act against accepted norms. But these connections suggest that adolescence is queer only in the sense that, like childhood, it serves to contain queer phenomena. We need only to conjure up an image of James Dean, leaning nonchalantly against the wall on the set of Rebel without a Cause, to recognize that adolescence also functions as an idealized state (see fig. 3.1). In this sense adolescence can be conceptualized as normal and universal even as it represents distance from normativity. If we take James Dean as our representative example, however, we face the troubling fact that this idealization of adolescence does not signify the livability of adolescent lives but instead recapitulates risk and death.

Theoretically speaking, the conceptual relation between queer and identity is one of negation. If identity describes kinds of social legibility, discursive forms that both represent and produce subjects, then queer describes that which is rendered invisible, impossible, unthinkable, or unreal. As a theoretical term, “queer” is useful for its ability to describe what language often renders indescribable. Sedgwick writes, “That’s one of the things that ‘queer’ can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning where the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”⁵ The term “queer,” then, suggests a richness and complexity of experience that exists in excess of language, in the profound failure of language to be the material world and our experiences of it. And yet, as language fails to be who we are, it also stands in for us, calls us into being. Adolescence calls us into being, structuring subjectivity, instructing us as to which of our feelings belong to the past and which to our future, which of them we should disavow and which we should own. Adolescence sustains cultural beliefs about what childhood was and what adulthood should be, submerging queer ways of being while maintaining social norms. The fictional representations I examine serve to expose these functions of adolescence as contingent and open to fracture.

Bad Readers, Good Readers

Who is the adolescent reader? How is this category imagined to be different from the child reader, whose instruction and delight the children’s book industry has made its object? Certainly, the adolescent reader presents contradictions that the child reader presumably does not when professionals are speaking about them as separate groups. But the adolescent reader is not simply a “reader” either, the term under which an adult reader might be considered. One might argue that there is no “adult” reader, only a reader imagined by adults who are writers, publishers, librarians, and literary critics. The adults are active, the reader a passive construct. But “adolescent” serves as a qualifier of some kind, denoting another kind of reader, a special kind of reader with specific needs, habits, and challenges. The adolescent reader does not conform to the passive relation often assumed by the term “reader.” The adolescent reader is described as a kind of mystery, an unknown, undefined and indefinable.

I begin with J. D. Salinger’s 1951 The Catcher in the Rye, a book that has an expansive cultural history beyond the text of its pages. The novel was published before the designation “young adult literature” existed and yet significantly influenced the genre as it took shape in the sixties and seventies. At the time of its publication, the book was read by young people and a good many adults too. In the novel Holden Caulfield is simultaneously a certain and an uncertain reader, a reader who both does and does not choose the book he is going to read. He tells us, “The book I was reading was this book I took out of the library by mistake. They gave me the wrong book, and I didn’t notice it till I got back to my room. They gave me Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen.” He never tells us what book he intended to get at the library. Instead, he says, “I thought it was going to stink, but it didn’t. It was a very good book. I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot.” He doesn’t say why Out of Africa is a good book but rather undermines his claim to have read it at all. Holden resists categorization here, talking about his reading only a short while after making a confession of his unreliability as a narrator: “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life,” he announces.⁶ What are we to make of Holden’s claim of illiterate reading? What do these confessions mean?

His contradictory account of illiterate reading, on the one hand, is a mockery of the impressionability of youth, an account that both confounds and conforms to the imaginary dilemma of the adolescent reader, a reader caught between what is assumed to be the simple reading of childhood and the full agency of adulthood. This binary opposition between childhood and adulthood, between object and agent, describes two oversimplified versions of subjectivity, with adolescence messily straddling the two. Holden claims, “I put on my new hat and sat down and started reading that book Out of Africa. I’d read it already, but I wanted to read certain parts over again.”⁷ We do not know what Holden is doing with this book, why he is reading it again, what happens when he reads. He is at once a dutiful reader with the book the librarian has given him, which is a classic, Out of Africa; and he is an arbitrary reader who reads even though he has the wrong book, even though he reads certain parts over, even though he is quite illiterate. This uncertainty, which oozes from the gaps and excesses of meaning in his account of reading, is what I want to link to the panic surrounding Catcher in the mid-fifties.

Published as a novel for adults, Catcher quickly gained widespread recognition as a best seller and critical attention as a “modern masterpiece.”⁸ While the novel had been frequently taught on college campuses as contemporary literature, it wasn’t until the mid-fifties that a number of high school English teachers began to use Catcher in some advanced English courses in an attempt to expose high school students “to high-quality contemporary writing.”⁹ Once the novel made it into the hands of nonadult readers, however, it began to cause censorship scandals. Usually these protests cited Holden Caulfield’s foul language and sexual innuendo, but, in a number of instances, the book was challenged because of concerns it would make students “susceptible to Marxist indoctrination.”¹⁰ Censorship and scandal did not slow circulation. By 1961 Catcher was recommended reading for many high school students while simultaneously one of the most frequently challenged or censored books.¹¹ Linda M. Pavonetti, a professor of education who writes about young adult reading, recalls one of her classmates from advanced English being expelled from school for writing a report on Catcher during her senior year of high school in the mid-1960s.¹² Such events indicate a deep conflict and profound anxiety among parents, teachers, and school administrators about adolescent readers, about what they should read and how they should read it. Questions about the content of the book are questions about what might be done with it, how it might impress readers, how it might lead them to act out its imaginary refusals and misbehaviors. The adolescent reader imagined by censors is a contradiction: a good reader, someone who will read cover to cover with full understanding, but also a very literal reader, someone who will take Holden as a role model and at his word regardless of the ironies that unfold line by line. In this sense the adolescent reader is a passive reader, someone deeply susceptible to indoctrination. The reader imagined by censors is at once a fantasy and a nightmare—someone without agency, someone who can be overpowered by a book and thus someone who can be overpowered by them.

One concept necessary for maintaining the social division between childhood and adulthood is agency—it is agency that distinguishes the child from the adult. The child’s agency is usually assumed to be limited, even as children are given free reign of themselves in the protected spaces of the backyard or among playmates, whereas the adult’s agency is assumed to be full agency, regardless of the ways in which adults are constrained by outside circumstances like the necessity of making a living. Agency, in this sense, describes a mental capacity, where the child is not fully aware of their choices and actions, but, presumably, the adult is. The logic of adolescence, as seen in the objections to young people reading Catcher in the Rye, casts the adolescent in a more ambiguous space, one that more closely resembles the various and contradictory ways agency is ever possible within the constraints of language and culture.¹³ Any available course of action is already defined within a social and institutional context as positive or negative participation in family, school, and state. However, because the adolescent is granted limited authority in these social institutions, the consequences for nonparticipation or negative participation appear to be—though this is not necessarily the case—less severe than they are for an adult; that is, for some adolescents, the consequences of nonparticipation do not always come to bear on one’s ability to live, work, feed oneself, and so on. This creates the contradictory and temporary condition of subjugation to and freedom from the institutions of family, school, and state. The adolescent is both bound to these institutions and under very little obligation to them until the future moment when they are expected to “grow up.” This condition feeds the contradictory mythology of adolescence as something to loathe and to long for, idealizing the adolescent rebel while blaming the ills of society on wayward youth; it is a space of both disempowerment and freedom at the same time.

While this contradictory space is assumed to belong to adolescence, and therefore to be a temporary fluctuation of agency, I want to emphasize the ways that agency is always unstable, fluctuating, and contradictory. The idea of adolescence as a turbulent, unstable, transitional state allows for this ambiguity. The adolescent might at once be understood as unable (like the child) and also as unwilling (like the adult) to use their own agency and judgment. Censors deploy both of these conceptualizations, sometimes simultaneously. Of course, social and cultural contexts determine how adolescent choices are viewed. The perception of Catcher as dangerous reading is specific to the fears and expectations circulating in the United States in the 1950s, but the logic of adolescence deployed by censors persists to this day.

We can find echoes of the unpredictable adolescent reader in another midcentury novel that, like Catcher in the Rye, has a cultural life of its own, considered both a classic and an adolescent classic, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.¹⁴ Its status as an adolescent novel is a contradictory description in itself, signaling both a dismissive or devaluing gesture and a positive investment in reclaiming this example of “classic literature” for adolescent reading. The narrator, Esther Greenwood, is in college, having just earned a summer internship working at a New York magazine. The novel dramatizes Esther’s perceptions as she suffers a mental breakdown, beginning in New York and then later at home, where she attempts suicide. While Esther could be considered just past adolescence, her postadolescent status does not prevent the cultural inscription of the novel as adolescent. It is significant that Plath’s mother, Aurelia, has publicly stated how hurt she was by The Bell Jar’s “raging adolescent voice.”¹⁵ This description is a way for Aurelia to distance herself from what she saw as the “cruel” depiction of the narrator’s mother, but it also exposes her simultaneous identification with and disavowal of the mother figure in the novel. Her comments illustrate one of the ways adolescence can function as a distancing mechanism. Whatever the views expressed in the novel—whether they are Esther’s alienation from her mother or her disdain for social conventions—such perspectives are held at a distance by thinking of Esther and the novel itself as “adolescent.”

Like Catcher, Plath’s The Bell Jar depicts scenes of reading that disturb and disorient the relation between reader and text. Esther Greenwood has decided to read Finnegans Wake over the summer and finish her honors thesis. This odd book is depicted as much as an object as it is a text, the words physical, the sounds like shapes: “I crawled between the mattress and the padded bedstead and let the mattress fall across me like a tombstone. The thick book made an unpleasant dent in my stomach.” Esther keeps the book with her, pressed into her stomach, as the mattress rests heavy on top of her. She is practicing, eerily, to bury herself in the crawlspace of her mother’s house. Her attempt at suicide overlaps with her attempt at reading, the language of these two activities dangerously intertwined:

My eyes sank through an alphabet soup of letters to the long word in the middle of the page.

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonneronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnshkawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

I counted the letters. There were exactly a hundred of them. I thought that must be important.

Why should there be a hundred letters?

Haltingly, I tried the word aloud.

It sounded like a heavy wooden object falling downstairs, boomp boomp boomp, step after step. Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

Her eyes sink, the words and the object of the book fall downstairs, the words and images flee past, leaving no impression. In this scene Esther is fixated on one of the one-hundred-letter words invented by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. This feature of the text, among others in Joyce’s novel, can be said to intentionally disrupt reading practices. Indeed, Esther seems to be drawn to the book’s most disruptive moments, reading aloud the one-hundred-letter word in the middle of the page: “I thought this must be important. Why should there be a hundred letters?”¹⁶ She thumbs the pages like a flipbook with no coherent images, no legible words. Esther is reading Finnegans Wake, but not in the ways expected of her by her college thesis director. She is an accomplished student, someone who has won a college scholarship and a magazine prize. But Esther’s reading is difficult to account for, even as she narrates it for us. This difficulty might lead one to categorize Esther as a bad reader, maybe even as someone who can’t read because she is losing her mind. Her bad reading, however, suggests her complicated negotiation of agency, her ability to choose what she does with Finnegans Wake, to take it with her where she is going, no matter how strange, how dark, or how unknown.

The Nowhere Period

G. Robert Carlsen opens his 1980 edition of Books and the Teen-Age Reader: A Guide for Teachers, Librarians, and Parents with a description of adolescence as a state of limbo: “In between there is what has been called for centuries a ‘nowhere’ period, a troubled, unformed time of being no longer a child and yet not fully mature.”¹⁷ The word “nowhere” weighs heavily in Carlsen’s description. The kind of person that Carlsen describes, here the adolescent, the kind of person that exists “nowhere,” is a kind of person who exists always outside of somewhere, defined against the definable location of adulthood, always arriving but never to arrive. What kind of reading is possible in this “nowhere” period? What kind of meaning can be made in a “troubled, unformed time”? Perhaps it is Holden Caulfield’s illiterate reading of Out of Africa. Perhaps it is the complete separation of text and meaning that occurs as Esther Greenwood flips through the pages of Finnegans Wake. I do not consider these examples failures or aberrations of reading, but places where reading self, world, and text is radically called into question, making visible the very instability of subjectivity and meaning itself. In queer theory such disruption is not understood as a problem to be overcome, as Carlsen seems to suggest, but as an opportunity to open possibilities for knowing and being, possibilities vital to the material conditions of queer lives and arguably of adolescent lives as well. In The Bell Jar one might read Esther’s disruptions of thinking and sanity as failures, but these disruptions provide the narrative space for her to resist and critique the expectations of compulsory heterosexuality: marriage and motherhood. Likewise, in Catcher in the Rye, Holden resists the norms of success and masculinity as he flunks out of another private prep school.

The concept of adolescence functions to distance queer possibilities from adulthood, serving both as a location for desire and as a mechanism for disavowal that distances the queer, the unknown, the anomalous, the abject. This understanding of adolescence relies on two overlapping conceptualizations from Julia Kristeva: abjection from Powers of Horror and the theorization of adolescence in New Maladies of the Soul. Kristeva explains abjection as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”¹⁸ Already these terms echo stereotypes about adolescents: the endless search for identity, rebellion within systems, disrespect for elders and social order, in-betweenness.¹⁹ In queer theory abjection is closely related to understandings of queer as that which falls outside of accepted definitions and realities, and it has been theorized as both a queer subjectivity and a social condition of queerness.²⁰ Carlsen’s “nowhere” period and “troubled, unformed time” resemble a state of abjection as Kristeva describes it. As a concept and a stage of life, adolescence serves as a mechanism for keeping the abject separate from adulthood and adult subjectivity, as we see in configurations like Carlsen’s. This is consistent with Kristeva’s view of adolescence as a “mythical figure of the imaginary that enables us to distance ourselves from some of our failings, splittings of the ego, disavowals, or mere desires, which it reifies into the figure of someone who has not yet grown up.”²¹ Like Rose’s assertion that “there is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one which the category itself sets in place,” the adolescent, like the child, is functioning as a repository for adult desire.²² The affinity of these two assertions, of course, comes out of Rose’s and Kristeva’s shared investments in psychoanalysis. Kristeva evokes both the child and the adolescent as mythical figures, but it is worth examining how adolescence functions in excess of childhood, and abjection provides a lens to begin that work.

Kristeva defines abjection as that which can be neither subject nor object but that which is radically denied or cast out. In the psychoanalytic vocabulary of self and other, the adult is figured as a subject, the self that experiences the world, and the child is figured as object, that which is accessible only through recollections that take the past self as its object. The adolescent is left to function as the abject, the self that is nowhere, in-between, neither subject nor object. While Kristeva notes that the adolescent could also function as a recollected self, like childhood, Carlsen’s description constructs another meaning. The “troubled, unformed time” he describes does not evoke memories of childhood but “nowhere,” a state of complete abjection. This choice of words signals a disruption of identity, meaning, and even the progression of time itself. Reading Kristeva’s account of abjection next to Carlsen’s description of adolescence, we can align the function of the abject with the function of the adolescent as a cultural figure. Kristeva writes, “If the object” (which we might read here as the recollected child), “through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning” (as something we can name, fix, understand), “what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”²³ Childhood becomes the location we turn to for simplicity, fantasy, and innocence in our desire for meaning. But it is the disruption of meaning that causes abjection, and so this disruption is radically expelled and relocated outside of what we consider ourselves in to a stage we call adolescence. We say that adolescents are confused, unstable, hormonal, rebellious, or uncertain in order to distance these qualities in ourselves. This explains why adolescence might be simultaneously identified with what is lesser, Othered, or trivial and yet also weighted with projections of desire and longing.

This formulation of abjection is not only psychoanalytic but also social and phenomenological, according to David Halperin, “an effect of the play of social power.” Halperin considers abjection to be a necessary negotiation for queer survival. Though he is writing specifically about gay male subjectivity, he gestures briefly to the applicability of abjection to other groups: “Indeed, even to recognize oneself as being named, described, and summed up by the clinical term homosexual (or faggot or queer) is to come to self-awareness and to a recognition of social condemnation at the very same instant. Abjection therefore has a particularly precise and powerful relevance to gay men as well as to other despised social groups, who have a heightened, and intimate, experience of its social operations.” I do not intend to claim that all adolescents are “despised” but instead to point to adolescence as a location for the despised, a container for what is unknown, strange, or queer and also a place where queerness is imagined to be extinguishable. Abjection is one way to describe the negotiation required when one is interpellated as queer, as adolescent, as Other, against that which is good, right, normal, adult, human. It means that one must refashion the terms of dismissal and disgust as a way of surviving, casting them out and bringing them home again with new meaning. Halperin believes that “the concept of abjection presents [this] struggle in a dialectical, dynamic fashion as an ongoing battle for meaning” rather than as static, one-way, or one-dimensional.²⁴ And, in this dialectic, the possibilities for redefining and reinterpreting the self allow for livable possibilities outside of normativity, outside of the intelligible choices.

Using a psychoanalytic schema suggests the ways adolescence might function on an individual level and on a collective level as part of cultural mythology. The performative functions of adolescence allow us “to see, hear, and read these subjective fluctuations” in both conceptions of the self and the social.²⁵ These fluctuations do not belong to the stage of adolescence, but to all of us. And the people called adolescents are people who must also grapple with the functions of this category in their negotiations of self and world. If the adolescent, for the adult person, stands in for the parts of self that disrupt identity, meaning, and stability—that is, disrupt adulthood and thus must be cast out—then what happens is that the people called adolescents are interpellated as lacking characteristics supposedly belonging to adulthood, characteristics such as autonomy and a stable sense of self. I want to suggest that none of these characteristics belong to either adolescence or adulthood but that these ways of knowing and being are endlessly entangled, existing in relation to one another, continually moving in and out of one another, always somewhere and nowhere at once.

Returning to Carlsen, we can see how this theorization works in constructions of the “adolescent reader.” Books and the Teen-Age Reader aims to describe and quantify a particular kind of reader. But who is the adolescent reader? This is an unanswerable question, but one that illustrates the dynamics at play. For Carlsen the adolescent reader represents a problem that must be solved. Many critical works from the past thirty years in the field of young adult literature begin with a chapter that sets out to explain the young adult or adolescent reader.²⁶ The recurrence of these discussions demonstrates both the ongoing gesture to define and classify the adolescent and the inability to do so. We cannot know the adolescent reader, and to claim such knowledge would be an inevitably essentializing move. These gestures indicate a desire for meaning, the desire to stabilize definitions of adolescence so that the proper reading materials and environments can be provided, so that good readers can be made out of adolescents. For those teachers, librarians, editors, and publishers whose work depends on knowing something about the adolescent reader, this question is not only one of theoretical importance but one of practical implication as well. And yet, as we see in Carlen’s description and others, the adolescent often stands in for the unknown. The difficulty lies not in lack of research or effort or uniformity in this field of study but in the fact that the adolescent reader is an idea, and, as an idea, it is a fluid and unstable subject position only temporarily occupied by an ever-shifting set of subjects who get called adolescents and readers at certain times, in certain spaces, and not others.

Marc Aronson illustrates my point in an observation he makes in Beyond the Pale, writing about his experiences at the Chicago Midway Airport, where a boy avidly reading a fishing book would paradoxically be considered a nonreader in his field of work: “The most avid reader of all, though, was tucked away in the back, where he could concentrate. This was a boy who looked to be eleven or twelve, and he was studying his book with a concentration I saw nowhere else. His book was How to Catch Yellow-Fin Tuna. Ironically, from the point of view of the children’s and young adult world, because of what he was reading, that boy passionately learning from those dense, printed pages, is a non-reader.”²⁷ Aronson sees the boy’s exclusion from the category “reader” to be a problem with the publishing world, a world that must better understand the needs of boy readers. Aronson is right to point to the disjoint between the category of “reader” constructed in discussions of children’s and young adult publishing and the actual reading practices of young people. However, I want to suggest that this category of “reader” was never meant to describe actual readers but instead created to represent an ideal reader. This imagined reader, like the fantasy of censors whose children are reading Catcher in the Rye, is continually sought after and advocated for but always just beyond the grasp of the institutions intended to care for them. The trouble occurs when this ideological construction is not recognized as ideology but allowed to function as a reference to the reality of adolescent readers. Because this construction cannot refer to actual readers, who are too contingent in their adolescentness and readerness to be summarized by a stable and unified set of characteristics, the category of “adolescent reader” functions as a signifier used to prop up and justify a whole host of adult projections and desires.

Our Whole Future Life

Kristeva’s formulations of abjection and adolescence reveal the ways projections can occur in the direction of the past, in recollections of a younger self or in generalizations about youth. These functions of adolescence also play a key role in the logics of reproductive futurism, in which projections occur instead in the direction of the future. What Edelman calls “reproductive futurism” must be understood as part of the historical phenomenon (discussed in chapter 1) in which categories of age began to be harnessed as the necessary and logical means for directing the future. Whereas the figure of the child is often synonymous with an idealized future, the adolescent comes to represent the ruin we are headed for without institutional intervention. Thus, adolescence and childhood have overlapping but separate functions as sites of intense institutional control. While Edelman is most concerned with how the figure of the child is used against queer adults, the logic of reproductive futurism is also used against the people called children and adolescents. When the logic of reproductive futurism is used on children—as an explanation for why they should take a bath, go to school, become a Christian, do chores, or read a book—their lives appear to hang in the balance. These arguments are ominous in the mouths of parents and teachers who are in positions of power to withhold a child’s material comforts, food, shelter, approval, and love—in a word, his or her future.

The logic of reproductive futurism is apparent in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 children’s classic Anne of Green Gables, published only a few years after G. Stanley Hall’s exhaustive two-volume work, Adolescence. Both Hall’s Adolescence and a turn-of-the-century novel like Anne of Green Gables are particularly relevant for this analysis, emerging out of the post-Darwinian politics of the late nineteenth century, when distinctions between childhood and adolescence were under construction, both symbolically being harnessed as futurity. Anne of Green Gables chronicles the mishaps of a precocious, red-haired hero who, despite her best intentions, continually struggles to achieve what is expected of her. Late in the novel Anne reports to her guardian, Marilla, what she learned at school that day about how she should be thinking of the future: “Miss Stacy took all us girls who are in our teens down to the brook last Wednesday, and talked to us about it. She said we couldn’t be too careful what habits we formed and what ideals we acquired in our teens, because by the time we were twenty our characters would be developed and the foundation laid for our whole future life.” The words “our whole future life” seem to reverberate, getting fainter and fainter with each repetition, as if this ideal “whole future life” were getting further and further away as each moment passes. Anne Shirley is already different from her peers. Adopted by a bachelor brother and spinster sister, she is always just beyond the grasp of the dignity and privilege afforded her best friend, Diana. Anne recounts for Marilla the advice of her teacher: “And she said if the foundation was shaky we could never build anything really worth while on it. Diana and I talked the matter over coming home from school. We felt extremely solemn.”²⁸ Indeed, feeling the weight of responsibility for the whole future could be a solemn moment for a person of any age. But what are these habits we must form? What ideals must we acquire? How are we to know which are the right ones? “Habits” and “ideals” take on an amorphous quality. The reasoning of reproductive futurism is adaptable to any purpose, any set of instructions, anything imposed on us “for our own good.” Reproductive futurism forecloses the need to know why we are doing what we are doing, forecloses the possibility of deciding for ourselves, forecloses the possibility of offering our consent. The future is too important, too urgent, too critical to risk figuring it out ourselves.

Anne, the well-intentioned but flawed child, student, and adopted daughter, repeats the lesson of the day: “And we decided that we would try to be very careful indeed and form respectable habits and learn all we could and be as sensible as possible, so that by the time we were twenty our characters would be properly developed.” The scenes of reading in Anne of Green Gables dramatize the conflict between Anne’s good intentions—her desire to conform—and the possibilities foreclosed for her reading and, arguably, her life. In another account of her day, Anne declares to Marilla: “I never read any book now unless either Miss Stacy or Mrs. Allan thinks it is a proper book for a girl thirteen and three-quarters to read. Miss Stacy made me promise that.” This promise, declared near the end of the novel, arrives belatedly. Anne’s speech throughout the book is punctuated by literary references, serving both to undermine this declaration and to highlight the breadth of her reading, her desire for aesthetic pleasures. “She found me reading a book one day called The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall. It was one Ruby Gillis had lent me, and, oh, Marilla, it was so fascinating and creepy. It just curdled the blood in my veins.” One can hear the impassioned Anne describing this perverse reading, relishing the lurid mystery’s effects on her body and her spirit. “But Miss Stacy said it was a very silly, unwholesome book, and she asked me not to read any more of it or any like it, but it was agonizing to give back that book without knowing how it turned out. But my love for Miss Stacy stood the test and I did.” This act of love serves to normalize Anne, to curb her appetite for lurid mysteries, to normalize her desire by making it conform to the “proper book” of Miss Stacy’s choosing. This act of love forecloses possibilities, forecloses pleasure for Anne. Her achievement of self-control does not come without its irony: “It’s really wonderful, Marilla, what you can do when you’re truly anxious to please a certain person.”²⁹

Hall’s Adolescence is also deeply anxious about the corrupting and stunting influences of reading. Hall cites a number of statistical surveys on reading interests and habits during childhood and adolescence. This research is specifically concerned with reading outside of school, reading habits presumed to reflect the individual interests, choices, and vices of young people. Among others Hall gives details from two separate studies, one by E. A. Kirkpatrick and one by E. G. Lancaster, who both report a “reading craze” among youth. Hall notes that Lancaster, in particular, believes that “parents little realize the intensity of the desire to read or how this nascent period is the golden age to cultivate taste and inoculate against reading what is bad.” Hall himself seconds this thought: “For the young especially, the only ark of safety in the dark and rapidly rising flood of printer’s ink is to turn resolutely away from the ideal of quantity to that of quality.” What is so striking about this section on reading is how quickly the reporting of adolescent habits and interests turns to the regulation of those habits and interests. Equally striking is that Hall does not necessarily specify what he means by “quality,” even though the studies he cites frequently name genres and even titles chosen by young people themselves. His point, then, is not what to read but how to intervene in the reading habits of others, how to impose regulation, how and when teachers and parents can take advantage of this “golden age to cultivate taste and inoculate against reading what is bad.”³⁰

After reviewing these detailed statistics and reports, Hall ultimately concludes, “While literature rescues youth from individual limitations and enables it to act and think more as spectators of all time, and sharers of all existence, the passion for reading may be excessive, and books which from the silent alcoves of our nearly 5,500 American libraries rule the world more now than ever before, may cause the young to neglect the oracles within, weaken them by too wide reading, make conversation bookish, and overwhelm spontaneity and originality with a superfetation of alien ideas.”³¹ Importantly, literature and reading are operating here as a measure of human development, an instrument that either supports “proper” development or hinders it. Literature is constructed in the previous passage as doing one or the other; literature is not neutral, not passive, but essential and dangerous. Like the admonishment in Anne of Green Gables by Miss Stacy, this narrow understanding of literature and reading closes down possibilities. Anne says, “Miss Stacy made me promise,” and with that she gives up the book and its pleasures.³²

What is at stake here is not merely access to varied reading materials but control over what counts as knowledge. Hall depicts a passive reader, one who will accumulate the proper degree of cultural capital through exposure to great works or, alternately, one who will become corrupted by a “superfetation of alien ideas.”³³ This depiction of literature and reading ultimately conceals the power dynamics at play, the power dynamics that enable Hall to imagine the adolescent reader as passive and impressionable in the first place. The word “superfetation” is a fascinating choice. Superfetation describes the fertilization of two or more ova from different ovulation cycles resulting in embryos of different ages in the womb. This phenomenon is extremely rare in humans and occurs only sometimes in animals. Hall uses superfetation as a horrifying analogy, where the intellectual development of a young person becomes an embryo, and competing ideologies become a second, belated, alien embryo competing for nourishment and putting the development of the first in danger. Exposure to varied perspectives, to more information, to alternative points of view, is positioned as life threatening rather than potentially enlightening, educational, or even ineffectual. The promise required by Miss Stacy, the advice of Lancaster to parents, the cautions offered by Hall—these mechanisms aim to produce and regulate knowledge through an overdetermined conception of the relation between books and readers. These mechanisms favor a single, fixed, stable definition of knowledge and favor maintaining the dominance of that knowledge, its hegemony.

The idea of impressionable youth has survived to this day alongside notions of youth as unreasonable and uncontrollable. Indeed, such conflicting representations can be found in the same texts. Hall wants to develop mechanisms to ensure that the next generation will share his values, priorities, and morals and so imagines an adolescent reader who can be shaped by reading in predictable ways, in ways that Hall himself is predicting. His fantasy is that, if the proper book is chosen by parents and teachers, then the proper adult member of society will result. This oversimplification is a double bind in that it makes the improper book, the book with other perspectives, all the more threatening. Neither Hall’s fantasy nor his fears account for queer possibilities when readers encounter texts. Neither accounts for the multiple and varied ways that language and meaning diverge and intersect. Reading self, world, or text cannot be managed in the ways necessary to stabilize queer ways of being and knowing. How telling, then, that the adolescent reader is so often imagined in ways that attempt to resolve all that cannot be known about the relation between reader and text, all that cannot be known about the future.

Reading as Suicide

So who gets to say what counts as knowledge? This epistemological question is pressing when it comes to childhood and adolescence, because these groups are not authorized to say what the truth is, often not even the truth about themselves. Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that “power is even more fundamental to adolescent literature than growth. During adolescence, adolescents must learn their place in the power structure. They must learn to negotiate the many institutions that shape them: school, government, religion, identity politics, family, and so on.”³⁴ These power dynamics are frequently dramatized in adolescent literature, and the suspense and humor of these scenes are contingent on social norms that render adolescents without power to interpret their experiences, regardless of their efforts. One such scene appears in Anne of Green Gables. Anne is accused of losing Marilla’s amethyst brooch, and, even though Anne tells the truth about the brooch, she is banished to her room and forbidden to go to a highly anticipated church picnic until she confesses that she took it. Put into this position Anne fabricates an elaborate confession about taking and losing the pin but is still forbidden to go to the picnic, now because she lost the brooch. No matter what Anne says, she does not get to decide what the truth of the matter is, and it is not until Marilla herself later finds the brooch pinned to her shawl that she absolves Anne.³⁵ The humor and suspense of a scene like this depends on the power dynamic between adult and child. If Anne of Green Gables seems old-fashioned, the frequency of these generational misunderstandings in contemporary young adult fiction suggests that they are a cultural trope, one worked and reworked but never resolved.

Joyce Carol Oates dramatizes these power dynamics in her young adult novel Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, in which a nerdy, overachieving high school student named Matt Donaghy is accused of threatening to blow up the school. “The detective with the glasses regarded Matt now with a look of forced patience. ‘Son, you know why we’re here.’”³⁶ But, of course, Matt has no idea why. Oates plays off the climate of paranoia following the Columbine shootings, depicting school administrators and police officers who cannot relinquish their responsibility to “protect” the school until they can prove that Matt is innocent. None of the other high school students remember Matt’s threat, but none can remember his not making one either; caught up in the paranoia themselves, they refuse to defend him against these accusations. There is only one person, an outcast named Ursula Riggs, who remembers the incident in the cafeteria being misconstrued, but even her testimony is not enough to clear Matt’s name. The stigma of the accusation remains until the accusers and their motives are exposed. Over the course of the novel, Matt never has the power to clear his own name, to tell the truth, to say what the truth is.

We find a similar scene in Frank Portman’s King Dork, in which the narrator, Tom, recounts a mix-up with his parents. He comes home from school one day to find his mother and stepfather disapprovingly waiting for him at the kitchen table, “the entire contents of [his] room” spread out before them, including some unusual reading material.³⁷ The items on the table include an assortment of gun magazines Tom carries around at school to appear troubled and dangerous so that bullies will avoid him. His parents assume the gun magazines reflect his interests. Tom narrates the scene, but there is very little dialogue. Tom does not even try to offer his parents an explanation, driving home the impotence of his words, his truth.³⁸ Instead, he stands mute as they say ominous things: “I don’t know what to say. Your mother and I hoped to set an example so you would respect and share our values.”³⁹ In this scene, Portman humorously takes the parent-child power dynamic to an extreme, exaggerating its absurdity. The parents enact the scene, interpret the items spread out on the table, and extract a lesson for their adolescent son while he silently accepts the image of him they are constructing at that moment, an image conveyed to the reader as obviously mistaken.

This scene in King Dork echoes a dynamic articulated by Hall’s Adolescence in very different terms, in which these silencing effects are naturalized as developmental symptoms of adolescence itself: “Plasticity is at its maximum, utterance at its minimum. The inward traffic obstructs outer currents. Boys especially are dumb-bound, monophrastic, inarticulate.” In his preface he writes, “Character and personality are taking form, but everything is plastic.” Later Hall overlaps his discussion of physiological development and character: “Normal muscle tensions are thus of great importance during these plastic, and therefore vulnerable, years.” In a discussion of the development of mind and body, “youth” is an agent and an abstract generalization: “It is plastic to every suggestion; tends to do everything that comes to its head, to instantly carry out every impulse; loves nothing more than abandon and hates nothing so much as restraint.”⁴⁰ One notable aspect of Hall’s writing is his tendency to overlap both literal and figurative plasticity, the physiology of the body and the psychology of the mind, as if these two always reflect each other. The connection Hall makes between plasticity and utterance does not serve to explain or excuse the adolescent’s silence; rather, it becomes an agent of the adolescent’s silencing, an ideological mechanism that prevents the adolescent from being heard, from being recognized. It is a mechanism that makes impossible or irrelevant the adolescent’s naming and knowing. Fictional scenes often portray these power dynamics in ways that simultaneously undermine and reinforce common assumptions about adolescence.

In a scene of reading from a late nineteenth-century children’s novel, Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s 1869 The Story of a Bad Boy, which was published in serial form the same year as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, there is another playful, ironic dramatization of adult fears about young people.⁴¹ The main character, Tom Bailey, is an unreliable narrator like Holden Caulfield, except that his exaggerations are more obviously being played for laughs. In a chapter titled “I Become a Blighted Being,” Tom recounts the loss of his first love, Miss Nelly, whom he was not old enough to marry. He enacts a parody of adult fears about the naive, overly literal, and impressionable reader. He says, “For a boy of a naturally vivacious disposition, the part of a blighted being presented difficulties.” But he tries on the part anyway: “I neglected my hair. I avoided my playmates. I frowned abstractly. I did not eat as much as was good for me. I took lonely walks. I brooded in solitude. I not only committed to memory the more turgid poems of the late Lord Byron—‘Fare thee well, and if forever,’ etc.—but I became a despondent poet on my own account.”⁴²

Literature and reading model for Tom how to enact the part of a blighted being, the part of a scorned lover, the part of a despondent poet. The artificiality of this enactment is emphasized by the step-by-step instructions, the absurdity of purposefully neglecting one’s hair or taking lonely walks, and these acts are set in opposition to the normal state of being a “naturally vivacious” boy. Literature enables Tom to resist nature, to resist the natural inclinations of boyhood, to “overwhelm originality and spontaneity” with reading.⁴³ Tom is not depicted as projecting his lovesick feelings onto his reading but rather as being vulnerable to the influence of a book and getting absorbed, swallowed whole by Lord Byron. He becomes a blighted being: “I stayed at my desk reading some lugubrious volume—usually The Mysteries of Udolpho, by the amiable Mrs. Radcliffe. A translation of The Sorrows of Werther fell into my hands at this period, and if I could have committed suicide without killing myself, I should certainly have done so.”⁴⁴ The irony of this scene, in which Tom is not literally at risk for suicide, works as a critique of anxious nineteenth-century social discourses about the negative influence and consequences of adolescent reading. While adult fears about adolescent reading are made to seem overblown and absurd by Aldrich, this scene also undercuts the authenticity or truth of adolescent actions and intentions. Tom’s experiences and knowledge of himself are cast as artificial, temporary, and unstable. Tom’s consideration of suicide both mocks and confirms the dangers of reading as imagined by the educator and the censor, as imagined by Hall. Tom dramatizes the figure of the passive reader vulnerable to literal interpretation, vulnerable to the invasion and “superfetation of alien ideas” that could derail development altogether and end the young reader’s life.⁴⁵

The irony of The Story of a Bad Boy resonates uncomfortably with the irony of The Bell Jar, where the issue of suicide takes on a very different character both in the novel itself and in the cultural mythology surrounding Plath’s own suicide a month after The Bell Jar’s publication. The queer possibilities suggested by The Bell Jar—Esther’s resistance to marriage, to having children, to giving up writing poems—are subsumed by suicide and take on the quality of a cautionary tale. Reading perversely, however, one can interpret Esther’s fictional suicide attempt as a representational strategy used by Plath to critique and reject social norms. Michel Foucault writes about suicide in The History of Sexuality as “one of the first astonishments of a society in which political power had assigned itself the task of administering life.” Whereas a sovereign ruler (God or monarch) had previously held the right to condemn one to death, biopower reverses this entitlement, claiming instead the right of the nation “to ensure, maintain, or develop its life.”⁴⁶ The problem of suicide, then, becomes a problem for the nation, a sign that it has failed at its purpose, a sign that it does not in fact have the power to ensure life.⁴⁷

Foucault’s formulation of a political power with the “task of administering life” makes possible what Edelman refers to as reproductive futurism. Likewise, Edelman’s queer refusal of the future is a refusal of the “life” implied by that future, a life that is not his own but a heteronormative ideal imagined by the institutions charged with fostering life. Foucault understands this institutional power as one that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.”⁴⁸ This “positive influence” resembles Hall’s intentions as he stated them, his desire to establish “true norms” by which “to both diagnose and measure arrest and retardation in the individual and the race.”⁴⁹ Foucault describes suicide from the perspective of the nation and its institutions; hence it is their astonishment and not the suicidal person’s. He does not attempt to account for the intentions of any individual suicide but nevertheless suggests that suicide is a resistance or, more precisely, a refusal, of this power over life: “Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its domination; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private.’”⁵⁰ Suicide, in this formulation, does not necessarily represent the desire to die or the refusal of life, but a refusal of the life intended for the individual by the institutions of family, school, and state. It represents the last available means of resistance when one cannot imagine oneself outside the mechanisms of regulation and control operating under the logic of reproductive futurism.

In The Bell Jar Esther recalls something her boyfriend has said to her, something she accepts to be true without question: “I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems anymore.” Even though Buddy’s prediction clearly contradicts what Esther knows about herself, she accepts what he says as true because she has heard it before, heard it everywhere, heard it without ever having to remember hearing it. His sinister knowing comes from a much larger institutional and cultural knowing, one that says who a woman is supposed to be and how she is supposed to feel when she is a mother. She has seen it in her own mother, in books and magazines, at engagement parties and weddings, at all the rites of passage presumed to be good and right and normal. Her resistance offers her few alternatives: “So I began to think that maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.”⁵¹ She does not know if married women are brainwashed or even unhappy, but for her it would feel like being brainwashed, like numbness, like death. Esther says she is never getting married, and this declaration can be read as a form of queer resistance. However, the cost of her resistance—the ways that it may render her illegible in the narrative coherence defined as life, illegible as a woman, and therefore as a person—calls into question the very viability of her life.

The cost of resistance is of particular concern when it comes to queer lives. Resistance is the inevitable condition of falling outside of normative conceptions of life, what counts as life. Resistance implies willful choice, but from the outside, from the perspective of power, resistance is the name given to the subject who resists guidance, regulation, and control; resists despite efforts to shape and influence; resists because this queer subject cannot be shaped in the desired ways. Resistance, then, is also the condition of being unable to conform; unable to achieve the life that is good, right, and normal; unable to achieve what is understood as human. Even though Esther says she is never going to get married as if this is her conscious choice, these words imply that she cannot be made to fit the image of wife and mother Buddy Willard refers to, cannot make herself feel differently, even though that is exactly what is expected of her. The association of adolescence with resistance—or rebellion—sets adolescence in perpetual conflict with adulthood and comes to represent the critical moment of institutional intervention, the moment before it is too late. Rebellion does not describe the actual behaviors of adolescents but instead speaks to the powerful inscription of adolescent agency as inherently resistant, rebellious, and nonconforming regardless of their behavior. Adolescence exists in a curiously contradictory relation to conformity as the place where resistance belongs and is expected and yet where it can still be managed, guided, and, ultimately, grown out of. Adulthood needs adolescence to maintain the illusion of stability, the illusion of fixed meaning, the illusion of arrival at these sites of institutional control, normative identity, and reproductive future.

The Unlivable Life

The word “survival” in the cliché I survived my adolescence does not suggest that living through adolescence is a given. James Dobson, the founder of the antigay Christian organization Focus on the Family, frames the adolescent years starkly in life or death terms in his 1978 self-help book for teens, Preparing for Adolescence.⁵² The book begins with a preface directed at parents, using the metaphor of a football game to talk about the “game of life,” in which parents are coaches. Dobson explains, the coach “knows there will be little opportunity to teach or guide once the game has begun,” and so “his final words are vitally important, and in fact could even change the outcome of the game.” The phrase “final words” is somewhat ominous, along with the phrase “vitally important,” evoking life-and-death stakes. The preface concludes by reiterating this point, using a degree of condescension one might expect Dobson to save for his younger readers: “Do you get the message? If you have a youngster in the preadolescent age, you should capitalize on this final ‘coaching session’ prior to the big game. You must take this occasion to refresh his memory, provide last-minute instructions, and offer any necessary words of caution. But beware: if you let this fleeting moment escape unnoticed, you may never get another opportunity.”⁵³ Like the early twentieth-century figures of the child and adolescent (discussed in chapter 2), the “preadolescent age” is imagined by Dobson as pliant and receptive, whereas adolescence is imagined as inaccessible to the parent-coach, the moment when it is too late. The rhetorical question, “Do you get the message?” and the warning, “but beware,” play on parental fears. The preface is anxious for parents to do things a certain way, to enact a particular type of control over their children, to reinforce particular ways of being at this so-called critical moment of intervention. Parents are called on to play a vital role in shaping the future of their children and thus the future of society through the management and control of adolescence.

Like the preface for parents, the chapters addressed to adolescent readers continually use language that suggests their very lives are at stake, advocating for specific kinds of behavior and self-regulation to stay safe. But this threatening language also constructs an adolescent reader who is resistant to the book’s message or at least likely to be unimpressed by it without the peril implied by its life-and-death stakes. For example, the first chapter introduces another extended metaphor for life: “Imagine yourself driving alone down the highway in a small car.” On the highway of life, Dobson explains, the reader has just driven through a town called Puberty and is headed toward one called Adultsville. As if being alone and in a small car were not frightening enough, Dobson intensifies his account of the risk involved in this journey:

But as you round a curve, you suddenly see a man waving a red flag and holding up a warning sign. He motions for you to stop as quickly as possible, so you jam on the brakes and skid to a halt just in front of the flagman. He comes over to the window of your car and says, “Friend, I have some very important information for you. A bridge has collapsed about one mile down the road, leaving a huge drop-off into a dark canyon. If you’re not careful, you’ll drive your car off the edge of the road and tumble down that canyon, and, of course, if you do that you’ll never get to Adultsville.”⁵⁴

In this metaphor a young person does not safely, consensually, or calmly sit down to read Dobson’s book about how to prepare for adolescence. Instead, the book is a “red flag” and a “warning” that requires the adolescent reader to “jam on the breaks” and “skid to a halt” just before running over Dobson, as if the default status of adolescence is equivalent to speeding down a highway with poor visibility. The stage of adolescence is made equivalent to imminent death with the images of driving off the edge of a bridge and tumbling down a dark canyon in a small car.

If the reader were inclined to interpret the canyon as merely a dark time, perhaps even as a metaphor for adolescence itself as a difficult stage of life, Dobson heads off this possibility by asserting that falling into the canyon means “you’ll never get to Adultsville.” Likewise, he explains that the reader can’t back up (does this mean reverse time?) and so needs to drive slowly, exit the highway, and go around the “ruined” bridge. The possibility of driving around the canyon further suggests that Dobson means the driver’s literal life is at stake on the highway, but he further muddles the differences between the ordinary challenges faced by adolescents and the literal risk of death, explaining that the road is life and that he is the flagman: “I want to warn you about a problem that lies down the road—a ‘canyon’ that most teenagers fall into on the road to adulthood.” If most teenagers fall into the canyon, it stands to reason that he is not talking about a literal death. And yet, he asserts that “many young people have wrecked their lives by plunging down this dark gorge, but I can show you how to avoid it—how to go around the danger.”⁵⁵ The phrase “wrecked their lives” overlaps with the language of wrecking the small car by tumbling down the canyon. Like the danger implied by Hall’s “superfetation of alien ideas,” the ambiguity remains between a literal or metaphorical death for the adolescent reader, overlapping threats to one’s bodily safety with ways of being that Dobson merely disapproves of. Thus, the metaphor suggests that teenagers might choose to live in such a way that they are “wrecked”—that is, in ways that Dobson views as equivalent to death. Queer possibilities figure the social’s death drive.⁵⁶

Dobson’s metaphor does not empower the adolescent reader with a safer car, a map of the road, or the possibility of skilled driving. The danger is not located in the realm of the driver’s agency, in which a teenager might be capable of making good decisions or learning from challenging situations. The danger is instead on the road of adolescence itself, which is in disrepair and lacks a detour sign. This metaphor constructs the need for adult control in order for teenagers to survive. In 2009 Allstate Insurance ran a series of full-page ads about teenage driving that appeared on the back covers of the Economist, the New Yorker, Time, and Newsweek magazines as part of a campaign to pass stricter graduated licensing laws at the national level.⁵⁷ These ads resurface disabling narratives about adolescent faculties found in Hall’s work at the turn of the twentieth century. What for Dobson was an ambiguous metaphor—driving on the road of life—is for Allstate a literal threat wielded to prevent teen driving.

One advertisement features a drawing of an expansive graveyard full of tombstones. The years denoting births and deaths etched on the tombstones indicate that all the graves belong to teenagers. An empty road runs through the middle of the many rows, and the headline reads, “Last Year, Nearly 5,000 Teens Died in Car Crashes.” Below this headline, in all capital letters, it reads, “MAKING IT SAFER FOR A TEEN TO BE IN A WAR ZONE THAN ON A HIGHWAY” (see fig. 3.2).⁵⁸ Another ad in the series reads, “Two Out of Three Teens Admit to Texting While Driving: Some of Them Will Never Be Heard from Again.”⁵⁹ These ads were part of a campaign for government legislation, the STANDUP Act of 2009, a bill that would create national criteria for graduated driver-licensing laws. Below, in bold, the ad reads, “Let’s make sure the STANDUP Act doesn’t get buried, or nearly 5,000 more teens could.”⁶⁰ Like Dobson’s message to parents, these ads are aimed at adults—who are potential voters and buyers of insurance—making an appeal to parental concern with the threat of death presumably posed by adolescence.

One of the most insulting of the ads features a headline that reads, “Why Do Most 16-Year-Olds Drive Like They’re Missing a Part of Their Brain?” What seems like a joke takes a serious turn when this question is answered in all capital letters: “BECAUSE THEY ARE.” Beneath these words is a cartoon drawing of the human brain with a car-shaped hole, on a display pedestal labeled “16-Year-Old Brain,” as if to (humorously?) indicate the scientific validity of Allstate’s claims. The small print below the illustration explains, “Even bright, mature teenagers sometimes do things that are ‘stupid.’ But when that happens, it’s not really their fault. It’s because their brain hasn’t finished developing. The underdeveloped area is called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. It plays a critical role in decision making, problem solving and understanding future consequences of today’s actions. Problem is, it won’t be fully mature until they’re in their 20s. It’s one reason 16-year-old drivers have crash rates three times higher than 17-year-olds and five times higher than 18-year-olds” (see fig. 3.3).⁶¹

Since most states allow full driving privileges at the age of sixteen, it is strange to correlate these crash rates primarily with brain development rather than with inexperienced driving. Likewise, the claim that the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped until after adolescence—a claim resembling nineteenth-century developmental theories—has been challenged by recent studies in neuroscience.⁶² Along with these spurious uses of neuroscience, the ads feature some misleading statistical support for their position, declaring that “when states have implemented comprehensive GDL programs, the number of fatal crashes among 16-year-old drivers has fallen by almost 40%.”⁶³ Another ad cites a specific state: “Since North Carolina implemented one of the most comprehensive GDL laws in the country, it has seen a 25% decline in crashes involving 16-year-olds.”⁶⁴ The fact that both figures specify declines only among sixteen-year-olds suggests that the data has been skewed specifically to promote GDL laws. One of the consequences of GDL laws is the postponement of driving privileges, which means that in states where stricter laws have been passed, there would be fewer sixteen-year-olds on the road. North Carolina’s GDL laws, in particular, require a year of supervised driving after having completed drivers’ education classes and written exams at fifteen years old or later, followed by six months of restricted driving before full driving privileges are granted, thus delaying full driving privileges to at least sixteen and a half years of age. A report on the effects of GDL laws in North Carolina shows a 29 percent decline in crashes among sixteen-year-olds between 1997 and 1999 and only a 1 percent change in crashes involving older drivers, which at first glance appears to confirm that GDL laws are working. However, later in the report we find that the control group of older drivers included only drivers over twenty-one, leaving seventeen- to twenty-year-old drivers out of these figures entirely.⁶⁵ If inexperience is the biggest predictor for accidents rather than age, fewer sixteen-year-old drivers would merely shift the majority of accidents to seventeen-year-old drivers in their first year on the road. Much like the fears expressed about adolescent reading throughout the twentieth century, the ad campaign by Allstate hinges on the dangers of adolescence to disempower teenagers rather than framing the problem as one that can be solved through increased competence and skill.

Likewise, Dobson’s Preparing for Adolescence demonstrates conflicting investments in the capabilities of adolescents, on the one hand characterizing them as incompetent and unpredictable, while on the other hand seeming to need readers to be capable of self-knowledge and self-direction. This conflict is particularly evident in Dobson’s chapter on conformity:

The word “conformity” refers to the desire to be just like everyone else—to do what they do and say what they say, to think what they think and wear what they wear. A conformist is someone who is afraid to be different from the majority; he feels a great need to be like everyone else. To conform means to accept the ideas, the fashion, the way of walking, and the way of talking that is popular at the time. In our society, there is a tremendous pressure on all of us to conform to the standards of the group.

In what follows we find out that the dangers of conformity are succumbing to drugs, sex, and secular culture and that “the pressure to conform is at its worst during adolescence,” which is why “teenagers often move in ‘herds,’ like a flock of sheep.” Ironically, Dobson’s most pressing concern is the risk conformity poses to Christianity. He hopes his readers will have the strength to say, “I’m not going to let anything keep me from living a Christian life. In other words, ‘I will not conform!’”⁶⁶ Dobson does not acknowledge that the “Christian life” he refers to requires another degree of conformity, one that may be even more totalizing than the one he is guarding against. The Christian life requires conformity on the level of behavior, thoughts, feelings, and desires. Dobson encourages his readers to think for themselves so that they will not unthinkingly do as their friends do. But on the other side of this empowering message is an enormous pressure for readers to live as he prescribes, to conform to the norms of the Christian life, and to suspend thinking when it comes to his prescriptions. Dobson’s adolescent reader is much like the reader imagined by Hall or by censors in the mid-twentieth century, someone easily manipulated by a book or by “alien ideas,” someone who can be led like a flock of sheep.⁶⁷

Dobson calls his book Preparing for Adolescence, but what this book is purporting to do is prepare adolescent readers for life, operating under the assumption that adolescence is the crucial moment at which such preparation must take place. Understood this way, the book makes a pretty bold claim. But the category of adolescence relieves Dobson of the need to make a case for his credibility to speak to such matters. Dobson can claim that he knows how to prepare for adolescence because of the cultural assumption that adolescence is an experience we all go through, that anyone who has been through it knows what it’s like, and that this experience is transferrable in some way. This is another one of the ways in which the category of adolescence creates the illusion of knowledge about others and the illusion of control over an unpredictable future. Adolescence allows Dobson to presume that he knows how to prepare others for life through careful interventions during this developmental stage. But adolescence is not a preparation for life, as if such preparation were even possible, as if there were a stage before life. Adolescence is life.

Queer Possibility

When twentieth-century evocations of the adolescent reader, from Hall to Dobson, are read alongside fictional representations of adolescent reading, they speak to the necessity of naming and knowing the self—the urgency of having this power of naming and knowing—not to settle meaning once and for all but to make space for the inevitably unpredictable, unanticipated, and queer ways of being and knowing that surface over the course of a human life. This proposition is not simply a matter of making queerness more “normal” or recognizable within privileged structures, a strategy that will always reinscribe an inside and another queer outside. Rather, we must disrupt the developmental logics that create the inside and the outside in hierarchical relation in the first place. Kate Bornstein disrupts developmental sequence this way: “I have this idea, that every time we discover that the names we’re being called are somehow keeping us less than free, we need to come up with new names for ourselves, and that the names we give ourselves must no longer reflect a fear of being labeled outsiders, must no longer bind us to a system that would rather see us dead.”⁶⁸ For Bornstein new names are a matter of survival. We appear in the world, seen by others, in part through the identifications made possible by a language that inevitably precedes our arrival. Bornstein’s approach to the problem of identity is to destabilize it through an endless, playful, and empowering revision of the names we call ourselves. Likewise, Judith Butler theorizes this process in creative, productive terms as “practices of instituting new modes of reality,” which “take place in part through the scene of embodiment, where the body is not understood as a static and accomplished fact, but as an aging process, a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm.”⁶⁹ Butler’s “aging process” does not demarcate a developmental sequence but suggests that aging is a “mode of becoming” marked by moments of fluidity and fixity, but never static, a mode of becoming that “in becoming otherwise” disrupts normative notions of adulthood.

One of the performative effects of categories of age is that they are conceptualizations of human life and developmental sequence imposed on our subjectivity through the process of meaning-making and cohering the self. While the work of critique is primarily concerned with the oppressive functions of language and culture, we can also consider meaning-making from a feminist and queer psychoanalytic perspective in a therapeutic sense—that is, as needed and necessary even if that meaning is always contingent and unstable. One of the insights of feminist psychoanalysis and queer theory is that the meanings we make to understand ourselves are not stable or locatable in an essential self even if it is important that they feel right and true. This perspective departs from a social constructivist mode that might position discourse and meaning-making as inherently oppressive. Meaning-making is regulatory in the sense that it cannot help but shape what we see and experience as real and true, but it is not inevitably oppressive even if my analysis has lingered on moments when it is. Even Rose acknowledges, “All subjects—adults and children—have finally to take up a position of identity in language; they have to recognize themselves in the first-person pronoun and cohere themselves to the accepted register of words and signs. But it is the shift of that ‘have to’ from a necessity, which is shared by both adult and child, to something more like a command, which passes from one to the other, that seems to find one of its favourite territories in and around the writing of children’s books.”⁷⁰ This tendency toward command is also what scholars in queer theory and transgender studies expose in the oppressive functions of gender and sexuality, even as gender and sexuality remain foundational to queer and trans subjectivities. Butler explains, “when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and we must) we mean something complicated by it.”⁷¹ Like gender and sexuality, categories of age can at once be essential to self-understanding and also subject to self-reflexive analysis and revision. All meaning is constructed, all of what we understand as “the self” is assembled out of projection and fantasy and thus subject to disruption, shifts, and changes. We cannot live without our constructed selves. I think the key is recognizing this—not so that we can do away with fantasy—but so that we can participate more consciously in these meaning-making activities. My analysis is invested in understanding the discursive and narrative functions of categories of age while also mobilizing our capacities to shift them in ways that serve us better individually and collectively. This is criticism with a therapeutic function.

I want to end this chapter with a scene from E. R. Frank’s America, a young adult novel that I read as one writer’s compact, interpretively rich negotiation of being in the world. On the first page of this young adult novel, we meet a teenager named America, the narrator, who has grown up in foster care and, when we first encounter him, has found himself living in a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. The novel opens with this telling advice from America: “You have to watch what you say here because everything you say means something and somebody’s always telling you what you mean.”⁷² In these lines we can imagine the series of doctors, therapists, nurses—the voices of the institution—telling him what he means, what his words say according to their textbooks, manuals, and procedures. In the institution his words can be made to speak their language.

Everything one says does mean something; he’s right. “You have to watch what you say” because his words already belong to a language that is not his, a language that is part of discourse, that is part of the shared meanings we use to make sense of one another. But America doesn’t speak and instead tells us, “So, I take their medicine and walk around in socks the way they make you, and stay real quiet.”⁷³ In his not speaking America does something else. The people around him, perhaps, believe that their words are their own even as they are a part of discourse, part of the institution, part of medicine and psychology, part of culture. But America feels this fraught relation to discourse in a way that they do not. They speak the language of the institution to exercise its power. As the one walking around in socks, America feels these power dynamics and the paradox of his own agency. America knows that “everything you say means something” and that he is not the one who gets to say what it means. It is his relation to discourse that makes him aware of this gap, this fissure of meaning, this excess. And, in that space, he finds the possibility of meaning something else. He finds the queer possibility of not meaning something at all, the queer possibility of meaning nothing. His advice to us—and to the adolescent readers of this book—renders this gap visible and suggests both his and our own paradoxical agency to remake meaning or to take pleasure in no meaning at all. His words open to the unknowable, generating meaning and withdrawing from it. It is perhaps no coincidence that Frank’s narrator shares a name with the nation, an overlap we might see as a literal and symbolic investment in the fate of both, like the one made by Hall at the turn of the century. The author, a practicing psychotherapist, has written four young adult novels based on her experiences with her patients. In writing an adolescent novel, she mobilizes Kristeva’s theory of adolescence to inhabit the subject positions of both doctor and adolescent patient simultaneously.

Kristeva, another practicing psychotherapist, suggests that writing is useful for both patient and analyst during therapy. She does not consider “adolescent” to be a “developmental stage” but an “open psychic structure” accessible at any age through the act of writing. Kristeva overlaps novel writing with the historical conception of interiority and selfhood first manifested in the “nineteenth-century psychological novel.” “More real than a fantasy, fiction generates a new living identity,” she explains. And, she suggests, “the solitary economy of writing protects subjects from phobic affects.”⁷⁴ For Kristeva this solitary and realized exercise of fantasy creates the space for a patient to work through problems and to make changes through its access to the open psychic structure she calls “adolescent.” Kristeva offers us both adolescence and the novel as fluid spaces that might be read and interpreted, that enable the reconstruction of identity and self, and that sustain the instability of meaning long enough for something else to take shape.

What we invest in the meaning of adolescence, as writers or readers of these texts, is really for ourselves. What makes Kristeva’s theory so useful is the overlap of self, text, and world in which we are situated as a kind of reader. But there is no place within psychoanalysis to finally settle on meaning. If meaning is not inherently stable, the question ceases to be what do things mean, but why do we continue to find certain meanings and not others? What do we desire? Even, what do we need? My analysis of the adolescent reader in this chapter focuses on locations where meanings seem to have stabilized to fulfill a desire or need over the course of the twentieth century. What we find in fiction are meanings also subject to cultural patterns, but they are also open to interpretive flexibility, both reading and writing available to us as complex negotiations of being in the world. Whether adolescent, child, or adult, we are all pressing at the limits of language and culture, all bound by institutional discourses and yet full of queer possibility; we are all dutiful and unpredictable, impressionable and rebellious readers.