preface

It seems grotesque to speak of a society without teenagers.

—Albert K. Cohen, foreword to Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order

This book develops a critical, historical, and theoretical framework that brings together questions of queer theory and categories of age, tracking shifts in social conceptions of adolescence from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reconceive notions of identity and relationality in the present. I draw from a varied archive, including British and U.S. newspapers, educational treatises, medical papers and pamphlets, popular media, and adolescent and children’s literature circulating on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the ways adolescence operates as a kind of hermeneutic of the self, one closely tied to ideologies of sexuality, science, and the nation. My work here encompasses a wide range of materials and historical moments to explore the ideological dimensions of adolescence as a category and how these ideological dimensions circulate and reappear in specific, located contexts. The category of adolescence emerges out of and reproduces a particular logic, a way of making sense of the world and ourselves that I trace back to nineteenth-century deployments of social evolution and the emergence of developmentalism as a dominant epistemological framework. This temporalizing logic makes the idea of adolescence possible, mobilizing biological growth as a metaphor used to naturalize and maintain existing social hierarchies. I argue that the logic of adolescence is one we must do without if we are to think beyond reproductive futurism and conceptualize queer and ethical possibilities beyond the biopolitical imperatives of adulthood, normative gender, heterosexuality, and the nuclear family.

One of the difficulties with putting pressure on the category of adolescence is its interpretive flexibility, its resistance to revision, its stickiness to the ideas it upholds. In 2004 Philip Graham published The End of Adolescence with the Medical Publications series of Oxford University Press, arguing that we do away with the category of adolescence. He uses interviews and his clinical experience as a child and adolescent psychiatrist as evidence for the competence and diversity of young people.¹ He believes that “the idea that the teen years are a separate phase of life, clearly different from the years that come before and after is seriously flawed.” He documents “the ways in which adult society fails to take into account the competence of young people and refuses to allow them to use their skills,” which “infantilizes and disempowers young people, often with disastrous consequences.”² Psychology researcher and professor Robert Epstein makes a similar argument in his 2007 book, The Case against Adolescence: Recognizing the Adult in Every Teen. A second edition was released in 2010 with a new, more marketable “self-help” title that on first glance appears to affirm common stereotypes about adolescence: Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families from the Torment of Adolescence. This book plays into common myths about the “torment of adolescence” to make its argument that teens deserve to be treated with the same respect as adults: “the serious problems faced by America’s teens—high rates of depression, drug abuse, drinking, pregnancy, gambling, sexually transmitted diseases and conflict with parents—problems that reverberate harshly through our families and our society—are largely unnecessary.” Epstein shows how these “problems” of adolescence are caused by the infantilization of competent teenagers.³ Both Graham and Epstein argue for specific legal and social changes to improve the status of teenagers. Whether these arguments to do away with the concept of adolescence will shape the future of research in medicine and psychology, however, remains to be seen.

Graham and Epstein are also not the first to make attempts to pressure the concept of adolescence. In 1996 the independent researcher Mike Males wrote a book called The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents, using the state of California as a case study to argue that both children and adolescents have been abandoned by government policy, law, education, and even the family. Males points out how adolescents are continually made the center of a crisis in these systems, positioned as the root of a shifting set of social problems. By constructing adolescents as the source of these social problems, government officials do not have to take responsibility for their role in the extreme poverty, economic stress, and disenfranchisement of children and families.⁴ In his second book, Framing Youth: 10 Myths about the Next Generation, Males debunks popular myths about adolescents—including those about violence, drugs, suicide, and teen pregnancy —using meticulous data from the state of California to show how these myths are in fact lies perpetuated by the media and government agencies alike. So far, these works by Graham, Epstein, and Males have failed to shift social conceptions of adolescence—not by lack of effort or expertise but because of the centrality of adolescence in the maintenance of other social realities. Adolescence plays a key role in naturalizing systems of social hierarchy, creating normalizing structures for identity and selfhood, and providing a scapegoat to distance social ills.

We can find arguments similar to these researchers even as early as 1965, in Frank Musgrove’s Youth and the Social Order. Musgrove writes about the diminished status of youth in the 1960s, which “has profound consequences for the kind and quality of relationship which exists between generations.” Using interdisciplinary research methods from history, sociology, and anthropology, Musgrove addresses the “problem of youth”—the assumption that young people have rebelled against the values and authority of earlier generations—and finds instead that “what emerged with the greatest clarity was the rejection of the young by adults.” Musgrove argues that youth movements driven by “impetus towards social experimentation and change” do not occur when young people are granted too much social power but rather precisely “when they are denied it.”⁵ Citing studies in biology, Musgrove believes that sexual and physical maturity is being reached at earlier and earlier ages at the same time that social and institutional mechanisms have been working to keep the young even longer in a state of economic and legal dependence.⁶ This dependence is lobbied for as a means of protecting young people, and yet, Musgrove states, “Protective measures are a two-edged device: while they may signify concern for the welfare of the young, they also define them as a separate, non-adult population, inhabiting a less than adult world.” The consequences of this prolonged state of dependency are similar to those described by Epstein and Graham. For example, Musgrove finds that those elite youth chosen for university study in Britain, which further delays their entrance into the adult world, reported feeling more alienated and depressed than their modern school (the British equivalent to high school) peers who identified themselves more closely with the adult world.⁷ These researchers strongly suggest that the infantilization of teenagers is having a profoundly negative impact on even those young people who are conforming to societal expectations and succeeding in school.

The resistance of the category of adolescence to revision can be seen in the foreword to Musgrove’s Youth and the Social Order by Albert K. Cohen. Surprisingly, Cohen undermines Musgrove’s argument, beginning the foreword with a curious declaration: “When I was a teenager, in the early depression years, there were no teenagers!” On the one hand, Cohen may be right if what he is remarking on is the difference between social conceptions of adolescence in the 1960s compared to the 1930s. The word “teenager” did not even come into popular usage until the 1940s. And yet, Cohen’s insistence that there were no teenagers when he was teenaged demonstrates a distinct form of disavowal, an insistence that the contempt toward young people in the 1960s never belonged to him. Cohen accurately summarizes Musgrove’s arguments, stating how the book calls into question a “conception of young people as a species apart” and how Musgrove finds problematic the idea that “young people need a protracted period of preparation for life but must not participate directly in it together with adults, not even under their benevolent tutelage and authority.” But the phrasing of this summary exposes Cohen’s conflicted perspective, at once acknowledging the problem of preventing young people from participating in life “together with adults” while defensively overemphasizing the “benevolent tutelage and authority” of adults like himself. At one point Cohen announces, “Dr. Musgrove’s conclusions could be wrong,” but he says that they should be considered anyhow because of the good intentions with which they were made. Cohen, a college professor potentially complicit in prolonging the dependency of adolescence through higher education, dejectedly remarks that “Dr. Musgrove has some . . . rather bleak thoughts on the matter.” At each point Cohen summarizes the arguments made by Musgrove while seeming to undermine them, inadvertently reinforcing some of the very assumptions about youth that Musgrove’s research refutes. The foreword ends by shifting the blame back onto young people themselves for perhaps too naively “believing the rhetoric of the commencement address and the brochure from the college’s public relations office” and so, he implies, becoming the agents of their own disempowerment.⁸ For someone who grew up in a time when there weren’t any teenagers, Cohen seems unable to let go of his belief in them.

Articulating the stakes of deconstructing adolescence, my introduction situates my work at a key theoretical intersection between queer theory and the fields of children’s literature and childhood studies, among tensions between the discursive and the material, gender and the body, the category child and the people called children. I show how poststructuralist critique in both fields emphasizes language and discursive meanings to complicate, revise, and restore our view of the actual people called children. As a theory that accounts for the relation between the discursive and the material, I focus on the performativity of categories of age—the ways that childhood, adolescence, and adulthood structure how we experience ourselves, others, and the world around us. I use the phrase “categories of age” as a way of signaling that the categories “child,” “adolescent,” and “adult” are discursive and performative, historically contingent processes and practices that produce subjectivity. As such, I argue adolescence has a logic, a way of thinking that emerges over the course of the nineteenth century and that survives in various forms to this day. It is this logic that makes the idea of adolescence possible and that naturalizes our historically specific ways of conceptualizing time, development, social hierarchy, and the self. This book goes beyond critique to work through the question of what we might do to more ethically understand categories of age and relate to the people named by them.

G. Stanley Hall is often called the father or the inventor of adolescence, a claim that locates the origin of adolescence at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing from British and U.S. nineteenth-century newspaper archives, chapter 1, “G. Stanley Hall and the Logic of Developmentalism,” complicates this history by tracking the circulation of the term “adolescence” in the hundred years before Hall’s 1904 two-volume work Adolescence to show a pattern of positive descriptors accompanying adolescence, such as the “vigor of adolescence” and “healthy adolescence,” in the first half of the nineteenth century. I mark a significant change in usage in 1870, where positive descriptors are replaced by negative and condescending descriptors like the “absurdities and crudities of adolescence,” a change that I link to an epistemological shift over the course of the nineteenth century called “historicism” or “developmentalism.” Developmentalism describes an interiorized conception of time, history, and the self as a process of development leading to the present. Categories of age were not the source for this epistemological shift but rather were reinterpreted as distinct stages and types of people within developmentalism. Developmentalism is a temporal logic, one that orders the growth of the child, the growth of individuals, and the growth of entire nations or societies along a developmental timeline toward an ideal outcome. Conversely, non-European people or nations can be imagined as regressive, stuck in an earlier developmental time. I show how categories of age served as a way to naturalize existing social hierarchies within these new ways of understanding the social world and how existing social prejudices made their way back onto adolescence by 1870. The logic of adolescence is developmentalism, the way of thinking that makes the category possible in its modern form at the turn of the century. I end with an interrogation of the normative futurity projected by developmentalism in order to contend with violent uses of futurity while making space for the alternative logics of queer futurity, remapping more ethical relations to children, development, and time itself.

Chapter 2, “Temporality, Selfhood, and the Politics of Difference,” turns to the early twentieth century, contextualizing the “discovery” of adolescence as a narrative belonging to the emerging institutions of medicine, psychology, and education at the turn of the century as they negotiated for new forms of authority and expertise. Childhood and adolescence serve separate functions in this process. Whereas childhood often represents potentiality and futurity—the fantasy of a stable, knowable truth that science can discover and direct toward the future—adolescence, on the other hand, stands in for the unknown, the limits of social control, and the aspects of being and experience that these institutional discourses exclude as pathological. Though childhood and adolescence appear to be universal stages of human development, the specifically modern form of adolescence that emerges in the late nineteenth century is a fundamentally racial category from the start, operating within the logic of developmentalism to naturalize existing social hierarchies on the level of both individuals and groups. Through the logic of developmentalism, categories of age function as temporal categories in which anyone, but particularly marginalized people or groups, can be relocated in developmental time as regressive, immature, or underdeveloped while masculinity, whiteness, and wealth operate as the normative characteristics of adulthood. Drawing on archival examples from nineteenth-century racial science, the history of endocrinology, and early twentieth-century medical and public health documents from the Wellcome Library in London, this chapter shows how categories of age work together to manage anxieties about race, class, gender, and sexuality. These performative functions continue to this day, in which adolescence serves as a site of disavowal and desire, a disciplinary mechanism of selfhood used to maintain existing social norms and social hierarchies. The idea of adolescence imposes a narrative, progressive, developmental structure onto human experience and conceptions of identity. While I do not think it is possible to do away with narrative or to find an essential truth beyond it, unraveling these threads allows us to question what the narrative constructs as real, natural, and inevitable.

My aim is to put pressure on these developmental narratives through the history of adolescence in order to imagine alternate ways of conceptualizing the stages of human life, ways that grapple with but do not resolve the ever-shifting ground of identity and selfhood. Chapter 3, “Perverse Reading and the Adolescent Reader,” draws from social discourse surrounding adolescent reading and from fictional scenes of reading to unravel the cultural logic of adolescence as it has been deployed throughout the twentieth century. Hall’s work is deeply anxious about the corrupting and stunting influence of reading, an anxiety that permeates discussions of adolescent reading and young adult literature in publishing, library science, and educational discourse today. Like the classifications of adolescence found at the turn of the century, the “adolescent reader” is defined with a set of qualities so flexible and amorphous they are synonymous with the perpetual unknown. As a counterpoint to institutional delineations of the adolescent reader, I look to fictional scenes of adolescent reading from late nineteenth-century novels, twentieth-century classics, and contemporary young adult fiction to illuminate queerer possibilities for being and knowing. Novels are complex forms that interact with cultural meanings in any number of ways, pushing against or complicating commonly accepted knowledge and ways of thinking. The act of reading, likewise, might be carried out in any number of ways, with or against meanings invited by the text. The tensions surrounding adolescent reading and interpretation echo tensions between social norms and queer possibilities, and I engage these tensions to explore the issues of identity and agency central to childhood and adolescence. I approach fictional representations as compact, interpretively supple negotiations of being in the world, showing how these diverse representations of self and world play with notions of age, identity, and norms. Drawing on queer and psychoanalytic schemas, I theorize adolescence as a hermeneutic of the self that shapes the ways we experience ourselves and others.

Chapter 4, “Toward an Ethics of Relationality,” synthesizes the work of my previous chapters to think through the question of what we might do to more ethically care for and relate to the people called children or adolescents. Drawing on Karen Barad and feminist science studies, I propose a theory of ethical entanglement for conceptualizing agency, subjectivity, and autonomy within relationality. Working through relational circumstances such as compulsive obedience, over-achievement, parent-child projections of trauma, the infantilization of adolescents, and suicidality, this chapter illustrates the consequences of developmentalism in the present, which invites the use of children to meet parental needs as well as the unethical control of children’s actions and self-concepts under the guise of protection. I examine two books for young people, Kate Bornstein’s Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws and Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth’s Sex Is a Funny Word, to demonstrate and elaborate the dynamics of a more ethical relationality, the limits of our control over others, and the urgent need for queerer possibilities to live and stay alive under the suffocating productivity and isolation normalized by late capitalism.

I conclude by reflecting on the present moment as one quite different from the nineteenth-century episteme that made the category of adolescence possible. The epilogue, “Queer Theory in the Age of Alternative Facts,” considers the role of queer theory and the work of critique in the context of post-truth, neoliberalism, and what Rebekah Sheldon calls “somatic capitalism,” a form of biopolitical exploitation that no longer relies on conceptions of the unified subject or a coherent sense of interior selfhood but profits from the utilization of separable, vital capacities.⁹ In many ways the academic reevaluation of critique has been prompted by witnessing the explicit harm of neoliberal capitalism playing out before our eyes. Social norms are no longer operating through myths about the greater good but rather through new logics of commodification, privatization, and profit. My project emerges out of this context, participating in the ethical turn in childhood studies and the field of children’s literature, part of a larger shift in the humanities toward the constructive, world-building work that comes after deconstruction. I argue that queer theory’s antinormative methods have a key role to play, allowing us to imagine ourselves and the world otherwise.

My stakes in interrogating constructions of childhood and adolescence are not only discursive but relational, concerned with unfolding a new logic for speaking about and relating to people called children and adolescents. This is at once a deeply personal undertaking, touching on the ways we see ourselves and the ways we care for others, and an abstraction that aims to unravel the institutional logics that have shaped these relations without our consent or control. This project brings to light a nonlinear history that reframes present assumptions about adolescence and opens up the category as a powerful site for work in queer theory, childhood studies, and children’s literature.