introduction

QUEER THEORY AND CATEGORIES OF AGE

Possibility is not a luxury; it is as crucial as bread.

—Judith Butler, Undoing Gender

Seemingly, this society wants its children to know nothing; wants its queer children to conform or (and this is not a figure of speech) die; and wants not to know that it is getting what it wants.

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us.

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

I have always found great personal urgency in the work of queer theory. In a world in which normative gender and heterosexuality are often still preconditions for social recognition as a person, the methods of queer theory are first and foremost methods of survival. At the heart of a Foucauldian discourse analysis is a resistance to regimes of truth that aim to tell us who and what we are. Drawing from psychoanalysis, Judith Butler explains the “critical promise of fantasy” as the ability “to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality.”¹ Audre Lorde calls it the power of the erotic, the recognition of value and self-worth in feelings that exceed and surpass any existing system of meaning-making.² When queer desire is so often represented as invisible or impossible—ghosting the gay child or ending queer stories with scenes of social ridicule or suicide—the urgency of challenging the boundaries of reality is the same urgency as finding pathways to be and to stay alive.³ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick begins Tendencies with statistics on queer youth suicide and writes, “I look at my adult friends and colleagues doing lesbian and gay work, and I feel that the survival of each one is a miracle.” How did they do it? For her, perverse reading is not only an intellectual practice foundational to queer theory but a way to resist the overwhelming message that queer people should not exist: “We needed there to be sites where the meanings didn’t line up tidily with each other,” and this is the way she could “struggle to wrest from [books and poems] sustaining news of the world, ideas, myself, and (in various senses) my kind.”⁴ Queer theory is much more than a field of study or area of specialization. My work is self-sustaining. Queer theory allows me to look at the world and say, they are wrong about me.

I have also found great personal consolation in the controversial, oft-quoted claim in the field of children’s literature by Jacqueline Rose: “There is no child behind the category ‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes.” This claim, too, tells me that they have been wrong—when children’s literature constructed norms for me, when adults dismissively treated me as a “child” and later a “teenager,” they were wrong about me. Rose’s theory speaks to the degree to which adult projections and fantasies shape cultural understandings of what a “child” is and thus shape what types of interactions are possible between adults and children. This type of cultural analysis is a moving target—it changes depending on context, whether historical, situational, or personal. And yet, I find it urgently necessary to be able to expose what is represented as the “truth” about children and childhood and to begin to ask a different set of questions about these encounters and these contexts. Rose provides a necessary social critique in which she reveals the categorical force of “childhood” in creating “an impossibility, . . . the impossible relation between adult and child.”⁵ This impossible relation is constituted by the very social norms that she seeks to make visible. In other words, she is not making the claim that adults and children cannot relate to one another but rather describing a culture that renders such a relation impossible within the systems of meaning defining childhood itself. If childhood is understood as something entirely separate from adulthood, if the idea of the child describes someone who is naive, unknowing, innocent, who is without agency or desire, then it is this construction that renders the relation between adult and child impossible—impossible because the child is emptied so significantly of anything we might recognize as being ontologically meaningful. And so we are left with the question: What might a more ethical conception of childhood look like? That is, how might we rethink categories of age so that a more ethical relationality among children, adolescents, and adults is possible?

Both queer theory and Rose rely heavily on the methods of post-structuralist critique to make these arguments. The methods and postures of critique have come under great scrutiny in recent years, notably in Sedgwick’s sharp descriptions of paranoid reading, in Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique from literary studies, and in theoretical interventions in the field of children’s literature by Marah Gubar and others.⁶ Using Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” to diagnose what is ailing contemporary academic discourse, these scholars suggest that we move on from critique and expand the parameters of our work.⁷ As Sedgwick puts it, “Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.”⁸ Or, as Felski puts it, “Critique is not always the best tool for the job.”⁹ Gubar worries that the profound influence of Rose’s claims in children’s literature studies has had the contradictory effect of further silencing and eclipsing children themselves because scholarship has tended to focus solely on the oppressive functions of discourse. Additionally, she suggests that the methods of critique have prevented children’s literature scholars from engaging in productive dialogue with the wider field of childhood studies: “If we want developmental psychologists to pay more attention to what the rest of us are saying, for instance, then we probably should not describe their discipline as ‘hegemonic.’”¹⁰ While I agree, I am not so eager to say that the work of critique has exhausted its usefulness in the study of categories of age or that critique itself is what has prevented more constructive, innovative work. Many queer theory books from the past two decades have been accompanied by a disclaimer responding to Sedgwick’s charge of paranoia, which of course can have the effect of only seeming more paranoid. I do not think that this was Sedgwick’s intention. The problem Sedgwick addresses is the emptiness of critique for the sake of critique—a concern shared by scholars like Felski and Gubar—and the failure of critique itself to take us where we need to go. Once we disassemble our constructions, what do we do then? How do we live? What world do we make?

Felski clarifies that she has “no desire to reverse the clock” and return to older or more traditional modes of thought.¹¹ Rather, her goal is to find alternate ways of articulating the value of literary study and the work of the humanities more broadly. I think this is key for any method or project: Why are we doing what we are doing? It is true that the methods and moves of critique are not themselves equivalent to the aims of social transformation. (And, for that matter, one could potentially use the postures of critique and poststructuralist methods to uphold the status quo.) Likewise, as Sedgwick points out, to engage in modes of intellectual thought other than critique does not necessarily “entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression.” I want to join Gubar and others in expanding the work of children’s literature and childhood studies, and this book is possible in part because of these shifts in the field. I am cautious, however, about claims to move beyond critique. I am cautious about returns to tradition, to claims of absolute truth, to speaking for children and their needs in essentializing ways. What is the difference between the romantic idealization of childhood and the trend to celebrate child agency in some recent children’s literature scholarship? Just as we have reevaluated the efficacy and aims of critique, we must also ask of alternate methods: “What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?”¹² When it comes to analyses deeply connected to questions of social justice, I find the insights of poststructuralist critique to be the essential ground from which to rethink and rebuild, particularly when it comes to categories of age, an area that has so infrequently been considered in terms of social justice in the first place.

I find the methods of poststructuralist critique that have been foundational to queer theory to be vital and essential tools for both personal survival and for the work of this book. And alongside many queer and feminist projects before me, this book attempts to go further than critique, to work through the question of what do we do. What in our real lives is at stake in the work of critique and how do we address those stakes head on? For me, these stakes come down to questions of ethics and relationality. And I find categories of age to be at the center of many of the cultural assumptions preventing our most ethical relations to one another.

The Logic of Adolescence

This book pivots around a set of logics and conceptual linkages connected to categories of age, both present and historical. I have chosen to group these links and organize them around what I call the logic of adolescence because, I contend, a particular set of assumptions and beliefs about hierarchy, development, and age emerge at the same time as the category of adolescence appears as a socially significant age group in the nineteenth century. What I am calling the logic of adolescence consists of observable historical phenomena, identifiable ways of thinking and acting on the world found in my archives, while it also informs a set of practices continuing to this day. The logic of adolescence is connected to many other logics, and perhaps I could have named it something else, but I have chosen adolescence as the frame, or what Karen Barad might call the apparatus, through which to interact with my archive because I believe it can show us something important about the habits of mind shaping age relations, social hierarchy, and the politics of identity today.¹³

The idea of adolescence is a relatively recent social category, emerging in the late nineteenth century alongside medicolegal notions of homosexuality and the concept of inversion, which conflates gay or lesbian desire with trans phenomena. While the word “adolescence” dates back to the fifteenth century in English and can be found to designate a stage of human life through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, adolescence begins to function later in medical discourse and early psychology as a type of person, one that can be shaped and directed away from perceived social ills, such as homosexuality and prostitution, and toward social aims such as marriage and reproduction. By the turn of the century, G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence claimed that adolescence was the key to the advancement of civilization, the developmental moment of state intervention that would propel humankind into the next stage of evolutionary history.

We might understand the idea of adolescence as a mechanism of Michel Foucault’s biopower, a technology of self put into the service of the nation-state. One of the ways biopower regulates and disciplines queer and trans phenomena is by locating it in the presumably pliable stage of adolescence, where state intervention appears to be developmentally natural and necessary. In the mid-nineteenth century, both childhood and adolescence became intense sites of disciplinary anxiety and control.¹⁴ Parents, doctors, and teachers were instructed to watch for the warning signs of degeneracy, disease, mental illness, and criminal tendencies. Emerging institutions of medicine, psychology, and education deployed childhood and adolescence to construct institutional knowledge and to establish authority and expertise. For example, it is adolescence that allows Sigmund Freud to claim “complete certainty” about the cause of homosexuality in a young woman in the 1920s, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing similarly uses childhood and adolescent experiences to explain various sexualities and trans phenomena in his 1894 book Psychopathia sexualis.¹⁵ In these contexts adolescence serves a narrative function. It becomes the moment of subjective fluctuation before the presumed stability of adulthood.¹⁶ And, as such, it constructs the narrative inevitability of a normative adulthood.

Adolescence constructs and reifies adulthood as the stage of life when selfhood is final, established, known. And so the idea of adolescence contains transition, movement, and change in which the perceived turbulence of puberty is loaded with meanings about the discovery of self. Adolescence is constructed as the moment that gendered becoming occurs. Adolescence sustains assumptions about what is normal, natural, right, and good, 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 directs us toward the ways in which we are supposed to develop and also secures the ways in which we are not to go. However, this developmental narrative is one we impose on experience, locating moments of transition, change, and rebellion in adolescence and locating moments of arrival, stability, and conformity in adulthood. Queer sexualities and transgender phenomena suggest a much more varied and complex range of possibilities for bodily experience and gendered subjectivity, drawing our attention to the contingency of any subjective arrival, whether it be normative, queer, or trans-identified. Adolescence functions simultaneously as a site of discovery and disavowal, sustaining assumptions about what childhood was and what adulthood should be, manufacturing narrative coherence for moments of arrival and creating distance for moments of contradiction, contingency, or change.

The question of adolescence inevitably becomes a question about the present, a question about the meanings we use to make sense of ourselves and others. I am interested in exploring these ways of making meaning, how they are constituted, and in what ways it might be possible to think differently. One way to consider the question of adolescence, then, is as a hermeneutic of the self.¹⁷ How does adolescence work as a frame for interpreting our memories, thoughts, and feelings?¹⁸ As a hermeneutic, it has a great degree of flexibility, albeit within its conceptual and definitional limits. This hermeneutic of self is also closely tied to other ways of interpreting and producing the self, closely tied to sexuality, to science, to the nation and its notions of citizenship. Within the logic of adolescence there is a sequence in which we are to order our experiences and to feel that we know what they mean.¹⁹ This hermeneutic unavoidably extends to our interpretations of others as well. That is to say, we live in a world with an ever-shifting group of people called adolescents, without their consent, and any of us might be tempted to say that we know them because we have been through adolescence ourselves. Often what is known as adolescence is taken for granted, and as such it functions both empty of meanings and full of meanings at the same time.

The meaning of adolescence appears at first to be shared meaning, to be something everyone has or will have experienced, to be something any of us might speak about. But I want to question that we can or should claim to know adolescence in this way. People twelve to eighteen years old are called adolescents, talked about as adolescents, and grouped as such for research studies, marketing strategies, and school curricula. We find adolescence deployed for complex and even contradictory goals in fields like education, psychology, library science, and public policy. Adolescence can be used as a rationale for schooling, for censorship, for religion, for approaches to parenting, and for the production of young adult literature. More than any one set of rationales, adolescence is remarkable for its adaptability to a wide range of arguments about how things should be. The notions of adolescence we encounter are not stable, not fixed in time, not objectively defined or even definable. The idea of adolescence moves, and yet, in this movement adolescence has a logic, a logic that shapes the ways we see ourselves and the world.

I use the phrase “logic of adolescence” to describe the conceptual ways of being and knowing that make the idea of adolescence possible today. The logic of adolescence does not lay claim to the origin of these ways of thinking but rather constitutes a distillation of various, historically locatable logics brought together by the emergence of adolescence as a key concept in the early twentieth century. In many ways this project is about uncovering that logic, tracking it through texts and through time, and articulating the work it does today. I could put this agenda more broadly: What are the meanings we attach to categories of being, like age, race, gender, or sexuality, and how is that shared meaning sustained and shifting over time? Where and when do these shared meanings break down, radically split, or dissolve? I want to make the claim, then, that to study the history of adolescence is to practice a kind of historical ontology, or study of being.²⁰ We might say it was not always possible to be an adolescent, since this term and the social meanings we attach to it emerged only as recently as the nineteenth century, though this claim is more complicated than it may at first appear. A claim like this about the history of adolescence speaks to a much larger question about the relationship between the names of things and things themselves, a question that forms one of the central lines of inquiry in the chapters that follow.

Child Trouble

This is also a book about childhood and the people we call children. People called adolescents are sometimes included in the logics surrounding children and childhood because they are legally defined as dependents and because they exist relationally if not as children then as someone’s children. I also see categories of age—including child, adolescent, and adult—as constitutive of one another, interdependent categories that produce the “truth” or “reality” of the others. Many important works on childhood have appeared in recent years, but the tendency has been to acknowledge the capaciousness of childhood rather than to consider categories of age in relation to one another, as part of the same regulatory systems.²¹ By focusing on adolescence, and more broadly on the logic of adolescence as a way of knowing the self and the world, I hope to complement and extend important work happening in the fields of children’s literature and childhood studies.

But what does it mean to talk about categories of age like “child”? This question is usually framed as a problem in existing scholarship, an ever-present tension between the category child and the actual people called children. We find this tension in other places too. In gender studies, it is the question of how to account for the social construct of sex/gender and also the materiality of the body. In science studies it is the question of how to account for the social production of scientific knowledge and the material world itself. These questions stem from the difficulty of reconciling some of the insights of poststructuralism with the lived reality of being in the world. And the persistence of these tensions indicates that we still do not have good methods to account for the discursive and the material at the same time or an adequate theory for understanding the relation between them. I engage with this problem directly; however, I confess, the longer I have spent working on this problem and reading outside my discipline, the less I have come to see it as one. What if it is not actually a problem at all but a misrecognition of different types of work?

In children’s literature the profound influence of Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction has resulted in the perception that it is “risky business” to talk about actual children in literary criticism, and different critical approaches are sorted into opposing camps—those who follow Rose and those who do not. Gubar argues that, since The Case of Peter Pan, children’s literature scholars have inadvertently rendered children as passive, alien Others despite their critiques aiming to expose these ways of thinking. “Rose and company,” she explains, avoid speaking about actual children, but in doing so they reinscribe “the radical alterity or otherness of children, representing them as a separate species, categorically different from adults.”²² Gubar believes that Rose “makes statements which presuppose the success” of efforts to “entrance, colonize, and reify young readers,” even though Rose makes clear that she will not make claims about the experiences of actual children.²³ Robin Bernstein seems to agree, stating that her work “challenges the position, espoused by Jacqueline Rose and James Kincaid,” that children are passive recipients of culture.²⁴ Bernstein locates this error in Kincaid’s claim that “a child is not, in itself, anything,” and she characterizes his descriptions of the child as a “wonderfully hollow category” and a “ruthless distribution of eviction notices” as arguments about the lived experience of Victorian childhood rather than the functions of the category child.²⁵ While Kincaid argues that the modern category of child (and of woman too) carries with it instructions to evacuate—to empty and deny the self—this does not mean that he believes women and children simply moved out. Bernstein is interpreting Kincaid as presuming the success of these cultural instructions, much in the same way that Gubar reads Rose.

At another point in Child-Loving, Kincaid writes, “One wonders why, facing this sort of thing, children would not be quick to denounce innocence altogether and take their chances with depravity? Indeed, many children tried (and try) hard to escape the burden of innocence. But it is not easy. Innocence is not, as we said, detected but granted, not nurtured but enforced; it comes at the child as a denial of a whole host of capacities, an emptying out.” Though Kincaid argues that innocence is enforced, that it “comes at the child,” these statements do not refer the responses of actual children as Gubar and Bernstein suggest. Children, on the contrary, are described as inventively taking “their chances with depravity.”²⁶ What I think is happening in these interpretations of Rose and Kincaid is a slippage between descriptions of the “child” and descriptions of actual children, one that equates the functions of the category child—emptiness and erasure—with the beings and doings of actual children. One reason for such interpretations is that the relation between the discursive category child and the lived experiences of children is not well understood. While Rose and Kincaid at moments imply some kind of relation between the two, as Kincaid does with his “eviction notices”—notices that could be received by those who are called children—or as Rose does with her reference to “the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp,” this relation between the discursive and the material remains undertheorized in their works.²⁷

The persistent assumption that children function as passive recipients of culture cannot be traced back to Rose or to poststructuralist approaches like Kincaid’s. This passivity is built into the very idea of a child that we can trace back to both Enlightenment and Romantic thinking, and it takes hold as a culturally dominant idea by the late nineteenth century. While Gubar and Bernstein both point to an important problem in children’s literature and childhood studies scholarship—in which children are inadvertently rendered vulnerable, inactive, or passive—these are ironically the very same problems that Rose and Kincaid aim to describe and historicize. The fact that child passivity haunts critical scholarship on childhood is not so much a failing of the scholarship itself as it is a function of the language available to do our work. Karen Sánchez-Eppler notes, “the very potency of the discourses that surround childhood may ultimately prove blinding, masking children’s experience” and “perpetuat[ing] historical and cultural inattention to children.”²⁸ The more incisive and accurate the cultural analysis, the more difficult it is to see the people called children who are obscured by social ideas about childhood. Every time I use the term “child,” I evoke the idea of passivity inherent in the meaning of “child” itself, even if my intention is to deconstruct the link between the two. I think such deconstructive analysis is essential if we hope to see beyond the “child” to grapple with the bodies, lives, and experiences of the people called children. But, like the gender of Butler’s Gender Trouble, the “child” resists analysis, reasserts itself as its own origin, emerges as undeniably real at every turn. It is for this reason that we must begin with child trouble, both by identifying the trouble with the category and by making trouble for it.

Like Rose, Kincaid is widely cited for his argument that the child is an empty category that functions in relation to adult projections of desire: “The child is functional, a malleable part of our discourse rather than a fixed stage; ‘the child’ is a product of ways of perceiving, not something that is there.”²⁹ I would follow that what is there is a person, one perceived to be a child and thus with particular social and cultural effects. This functional aspect of the category child is what Lee Edelman polemically describes in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, in which the child becomes “the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.”³⁰ Both Kincaid and Edelman point to a contradiction inherent in discursive constructions of the child: as an idea, the child functions independently of and sometimes in direct opposition to the realities of any living, breathing people called children. Noting this distinction between the idea of the child and actual children, however, creates some methodological awkwardness for scholars.

Analyses are full of disclaimers. Kincaid explains, “I hope it is clear, then, that the terms ‘pedophile’ and ‘child,’ point, for me, not to things but to roles, functions necessary to our psychic and cultural life.”³¹ It is not clear at all, though, unless we recognize Kincaid’s focus on the performativity of knowledge—that is, on the roles and functions of what we think we know rather than what actually is.³² Edelman, likewise, explains that his claims are “not to be confused with the lived experience of any historical children.”³³ And Rose writes that “it will be no part of this book’s contention that what is for the good of the child could somehow be better defined, that we could, if we shifted the terms of the discussion, determine what it is that the child really wants.”³⁴ Statements like these are necessary only because language is usually assumed to represent real things.³⁵ If we want to analyze how language and knowledge work—what I consider the primary work and expertise of scholars in the humanities—then such disclaimers become necessary to disorient our usual ways of thinking. Statements like these, however, do not mean that no one can speak of anything real or material or that we shouldn’t ever try. Rose, for example, resists the misunderstanding that she is trying to determine what is good for children, and she challenges the presumption of “speaking to all children” and references to “any generalised concept of the child” by others. She must do this in order to describe the functions of these claims to really know children: the ways the child and childhood are used to “hold off a panic, a threat to our assumption that language is something which can simply be organised and cohered, and that sexuality, while it cannot be removed, will eventually take the forms in which we prefer to recognise and acknowledge each other.”³⁶

Rose’s focus on discursive practices risks leaving out the matter of bodies and lives. This is mainly a problem of emphasis. And, as many scholars are recognizing, the need to overemphasize that language does things is not as urgent or necessary as it was twenty years ago, since this is becoming a more widely accepted view.³⁷ The sociologist Alan Prout writes that childhood, “like all phenomena, is heterogeneous, complex and emergent, and because this is so, its understanding requires a broad set of intellectual resources, an interdisciplinary approach and an open-minded process of enquiry.”³⁸ What this means is that there is value to be found in different types of work. What I have found in the archives and outside my discipline is that it matters less what a particular text says about actual children than what it does. What I am paying attention to is the performativity of knowledge—the effects of a particular set of claims. The disciplinary conventions of one field or another may invite or require generalizations, but, in the context of a particular work, what do these generalizations do? A book like The Drama of the Gifted Child by the psychologist Alice Miller, for example, radically breaks with the social and institutional practices of simplifying children and denying agency, while at the same time it makes generalizing statements about children. I have found Miller’s book to be unique in its characterization of childhood and invaluable in its ethical implications for adult-child relationality (discussed in chapter 4). To dismiss Miller’s book offhand would be to misrecognize her efforts to understand the perspectives and emotional lives of children. To dismiss Rose or Kincaid, on the other hand, would be another type of misrecognition, forgetting the importance of their work on the dubious effects of childhood as a social construct. Neither are these two types of work opposed: Miller comes to the same conclusions as poststructuralist approaches do in her exploration of the ways adult projections can powerfully eclipse the actual people called children.

This book aims to do both at once, attending to the discursive functions of categories of age with the aim of understanding their effects on actual bodies and lives. This type of approach has never been far from the work of queer theory in the first place. Even Edelman, whose infamous claim of “fuck Annie” secured his reputation as decidedly antichildren, evokes the “violence” that “actual, flesh-and-blood children” suffer in the name of the figural “Child”: “Institutional violence, for example, of a near universal queer-baiting intended to effect the scarification (in a program of social engineering whose outcome might well be labeled ‘Scared Straight’) of each and every child by way of antigay immunization.”³⁹ An analysis like Edelman’s “rejects not the child, but those who make use of the child for their own ends.”⁴⁰

Likewise, Sedgwick’s essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” works primarily on the level of poststructuralist critique to expose the heterosexist bias implicit in evocations of childhood by practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts, but she also states that she does so for the gay and protogay children harmed by these institutional practices specifically designed for their erasure. She explains that she is departing from the standard practice of “constructivist arguments” that have “tended to keep hands off the experience of gay and proto-gay kids” so that she can advocate for a “strong, explicitly, erotically invested affirmation” of the “felt desire or need that there be gay people in the world.”⁴¹ Sedgwick’s personal investment, one that underpins much queer theoretical work, takes the form of an appeal made on behalf of children (albeit gay and protogay kids), invoking futurity in a way Edelman eschews. But Sedgwick’s vision of futurity is a far cry from the mechanisms of reproductive futurism described in No Future. Rather than set them in opposition to each other, I would argue that Edelman and Sedgwick are at work on a similar problem in relation to the social functions of childhood—namely, the ways childhood is conceptualized to extinguish queer ways of being and queer persons themselves (even when those queer persons happen to be children). That said, they propose different possibilities for survival—the affirmation of queer life or the embrace of the death drive. And although Edelman and Sedgwick provide foundational queer theoretical work on the child, neither provides a clear methodology for navigating both the figure of the child and the material beings and doings of actual children.

The Performativity of Categories of Age

Gubar finds an adequate method also missing from the fields of children’s literature and childhood studies, despite the interdisciplinarity of work from these fields. Citing a range of scholars from English departments, philosophy, and sociology, she notes the general reluctance to theorize childhood in constructive terms—that is, to say what is about children and childhood. And yet, Gubar observes that complex treatments of children and childhood have been written despite the absence of such a theory.⁴² She gives the example of Sánchez-Eppler’s Dependent States, which accounts for children on three levels: as the focus of adult interventions including parenting and education, as an ideological figure deployed for various political and national discourses, and as people who are children—that is, “individuals inhabiting and negotiating these often conflicting roles as best they can.” With these three levels in mind, Sánchez-Eppler aims to practice “a method that will analyze and illuminate the ties between the powerful discourses of childhood and the lives—sometimes competent, sometimes vulnerable—of individual children.”⁴³ Gubar sees Dependent States, however, as falling short of this goal and instead moving between “two extremes,” rendering children on the one hand as passive to “structural and institutional power” and on the other hand as fully independent agents.⁴⁴ I think that this representational tension speaks more to the language and concepts available to us to talk about children than to the limits of Sánchez-Eppler’s argument, a point she herself articulates: “The tension in these chapters between depicting childhood as a rhetoric for the articulation of social norms, and recognizing children as particular persons affected and often betrayed by those very norms is ultimately discernable as a tension inherent in America’s attitude toward childhood.” In other words, scholars are bound by the very social conditions that we wish to make visible. In Sánchez-Eppler’s case the assumed passivity of childhood and the mythology of full autonomy are most visible as “two extremes” because they uphold each other, both working to obscure her argument that “interdependence or partial independence may be far more accurate terms for understanding civic life.”⁴⁵

Gubar’s work in Artful Dodgers represents the child as an independent agent in her revision of Golden Age histories, arguing that children’s authors did not produce images of children as naive and passive, as is commonly accepted, but rather constructed complex child characters shown negotiating their agency in cunning and powerful ways.⁴⁶ Gubar’s analysis of Golden Age literature brings us back to the question of why the passive child is still so often what is seen when we look at children, fictional or actual. Likewise, Bernstein’s Racial Innocence emphasizes child agency, using children’s dolls, diaries, and letters to show how nineteenth-century white children were “co-producers” of racism and not merely passive recipients of a racist culture’s messages.⁴⁷ Both Gubar and Bernstein make important interventions in the pervasive and enduring construct of the child as passive, though these interventions may overemphasize child agency to do so. The challenge we all face is how to recognize and describe at the same time the complex ways discourse acts on social persons as well as the ways social persons act on discourse. An edited collection like Anna Mae Duane’s The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities represents an array of approaches to the problem of “how to bridge the relationship between the rhetorical child (the cultural construct of “childhood”) and the historical child (actual young people making their way in the world).”⁴⁸

Building on this conversation, I aim to articulate a theory for categories of age that bridges the divide between the discursive and the material, between social meanings and the body, between poststructuralist critique and the need to construct knowledge about ourselves and our world. This means working through not one, the other, or even both, but seeking to represent the complex relations between them. These relations are always there, even when they are not acknowledged. An earlier work on childhood that negotiates these divisions with great success, Carolyn Steedman’s Strange Dislocations, contains a disclaimer in the preface, strangely disavowing the role of discourse in the production of reality: “I do not . . . understand language as a force that shapes or forms people living in the past, or texts and narratives as productive of meaning or human identity.”⁴⁹ And yet, the book itself offers a sophisticated account of a modern form of subjectivity made possible through radical shifts in nineteenth-century conceptions of the self and the child.⁵⁰ Though Steedman’s disclaimer might be contextualized as a 1990s remnant of debates about language and culture, even Sedgwick expresses in Touching Feeling her dissatisfaction with the seemingly totalizing theories of discourse in two foundational queer texts: volume 1 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality and Butler’s Gender Trouble. Though in later writings Foucault extends and complicates his theories from volume 1, Sedgwick explains that the overconfidence of the “repressive hypothesis” cast its mechanisms as so pervasive that they encompassed even the work of critical analysis itself. Seemingly, there was no outside to the regulatory functions of discourse. The excitement of the “repressive hypothesis” was the promise of a way out, a way of thinking otherwise. However, Sedgwick finds that volume 1 could not deliver on this promise, and she laments the unfortunate effect of “propagating the repressive hypothesis ever more broadly” through interpretations of Foucault that continue to fixate on prohibition as the most important part of his argument. The binary opposition between repression and liberation that Foucault aimed to dismantle has persisted in the critical analysis that followed, as we see in opposing constructions developed later like the hegemonic and the subversive.⁵¹

Conceptualizing cultural analysis in terms of oppositions like these—like passivity and agency, the “child” and actual children—close down possibilities for thinking otherwise about the very things we intend to study and critique. Setting up two opposite poles like the hegemonic and the subversive obscures the complex and even paradoxical forms of resistance that can occur in the spaces between acceptance of the status quo and complete refusal of it. Much like Gubar’s urging to “chart a middle course” in the study of children and childhood, Sedgwick argues that it is “only the middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual creativity and change.”⁵² The disclaimer by Steedman and this critique of Foucault by Sedgwick both stem from some unanswered questions within poststructuralism. What can we do within the constraints of language and culture? What interventions will have meaning?

Sedgwick’s dissatisfaction with Butler’s Gender Trouble likewise suggests some strategies for answering these questions. Though Sedgwick expresses great affinity for Butler’s early work, she traces a theory of performativity beginning with J. L. Austin to Jacques Derrida and Butler, in which she observes how the move “from some language to all language” was seemingly “required by their antiessentialist project.” One of the consequences of this move “to all language” is that the original playfulness of Austin’s examples is lost—what was “originally both provisional and playful, can persist only as reductively essentializing” when all language is understood to be productive of a normalizing reality. Sedgwick does not reject the antiessentialist project as a whole but rather sees what she is doing in Touching Feeling as a “step to the side” and a “relative lightening of the epistemological demand on essential truth.” If the antiessentialist project must vigilantly expose “truth” as contextual and contingent, Sedgwick seems to suggest that we can relax this requirement—one of the requirements of critique—perhaps even strategically leaving room for a truth to be. Here is where I think Sedgwick makes space for different types of work to be evaluated by their functions and effects rather than by their specific methodological loyalties. Declining to interrogate a “truth” does not make the truth any less contingent or any more stable, but it does provide the opportunity to assess what that truth is doing, what it might be able to do, and to try to do something ourselves by making an attempt at saying what is. Sedgwick also highlights her own departure from “analyzing apparently nonlinguistic phenomena in rigorously linguistic terms,” a method characteristic of poststructuralist critique. Though Sedgwick’s priorities align with many deconstructive methodologies, she does not privilege language in Touching Feeling, clarifying that “the line between words and things or between linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena is endlessly changing, permeable, and entirely unsusceptible to any definitive articulation. . . . Many kinds of objects and events mean, in many heterogeneous ways and contexts, and I see some value in not reifying or mystifying the linguistic kinds of meaning unnecessarily.”⁵³ I think this intervention in poststructuralist critique is key to bridging the division among scholars in the study of childhood and categories of age more generally.

I do not see the need for scholars to agree on a method or to participate equally in the various ways we might approach the study of categories of age. Our project, on the contrary, might be to embrace the interdisciplinarity of our field and to value methods that depart from our own, cultivating the kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration Gubar hopes for in the future of childhood studies. Sedgwick refutes the charge that theories of discourse like performativity ignore or deny the significance of bodies, matter, and lives. Like interpretations of Rose that take her argument to mean that we cannot (or should not) speak of actual children, a similar accusation has plagued interpretations of Butler’s theory of gender performativity since Gender Trouble. But Sedgwick does not reject performativity on the whole; she nuances and clarifies its usefulness for both discursive and nondiscursive phenomena. Barad similarly clarifies that “performativity, properly construed, is not an invitation to turn everything (including material bodies) into words; on the contrary, performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real.”⁵⁴ This contestation of language is vital to work in queer theory, and I would argue that performativity is equally crucial to the study of categories of age, in which the discursive weight of the word “child” eclipses again and again our efforts to complicate, revise, and restore our view of the actual people called children. As I show in the pages that follow, the idea of adolescence similarly obscures the group it purports to name.

Performativity describes a relation between matter and meanings: contrary to “the misconception that would equate performativity with a form of linguistic monism that takes language to be the stuff of reality,” Barad explains, “performativity is properly understood as a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.”⁵⁵ Butler describes performativity “as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”⁵⁶ One of the primary analytic modes of this book is to describe the problematic ways in which categories of age produce the effects that they name—the ways the logic of adolescence produces particular subjectivities or senses of self, how these categories shape particular bodily and experiential phenomena as real and true while excluding others, and how the logic of developmentalism naturalizes social hierarchies of race, class, and nation. This analytic mode is not to suggest that categories of age cannot or have never aimed to describe something material and phenomenological about the experience of being a child or adolescent. Rather, it is to say that these concepts far exceed this function. It is to recognize with Barad that

discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another; rather the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity. The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated.⁵⁷

Both Barad and Butler theorize materiality alongside discourse and its effects, insisting that materiality cannot and should not be determined by the limited representationalist view of language as merely descriptive of matter. Whereas Barad expands performativity to include the agency of matter within her concept of agential realism, Butler primarily describes materiality in terms of its relation to discourse—where materiality describes what we are able to see through existing social meanings, what we can even recognize as material or having matter. Butler does not make the specifics of bodily phenomena or the physical world central to her inquiry, but queer and trans analyses engaging and extending her concept of performativity account for both mechanisms of constraint or erasure and the productive function of bodily phenomena—that which appears within discourse as normative and that which appears to us only as it is excluded—inviting materialist and intersectional approaches that aim to account for the lived phenomena of bodies produced by the performative categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age.

The performative functions of categories of age often prevent the recognition that children and adolescents are already people now (rather than not-yet-adults to be shaped and formed), that they are complex beings (rather than metaphors for nature, the future, innocence, or evil), and that they are as various in personality, feelings, and needs as adults. These somewhat obvious statements form the basis for developing an ethical relationality to the people called children and adolescents. This work is and has been engaged by psychologists, teachers, parents, and caregivers. I draw from a variety of sources, wherever I have found ethical knowledge practices that I might build on. It is interesting to note, though, how often these ethical articulations are made possible by their acknowledged opposition to the cultural norms for describing children and adolescents and their needs. I see these two types of work as inextricably linked, both cultural critique and the practical matter of young people’s lives. More ethical practices with regard to childhood and adolescence are made possible by identifying the ways that categories of age produce and regulate the bodies and experiences of children and adolescents.

Knowledge is performative, and so we can recognize varying and even opposite doings or effects for the same types of claims. Seemingly opposite claims might have similar goals or effects depending on context. It is this awareness that leads Sedgwick, writing in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, to caution that both social constructivist and biological explanations for gay identity might be put to the use of an “overarching, hygienic Western fantasy of a world without any more homosexuals in it”—social constructivist approaches on the one hand emphasizing “choice” to invalidate the legitimacy of gay identity, and biological explanations on the other hand paving the way for the discovery of a “gay gene” in order to develop protocols to prevent or correct it.⁵⁸ Likewise, the idea of “storm and stress” associated with adolescence illustrates the importance of attending to the performativity of knowledge because of its opposite functions in different contexts. Turn-of-the-century theorizations of adolescence following Hall take storm and stress to be a biologically driven part of adolescent development, and this essentializing view has had the effect of producing other dehumanizing conceptions of adolescents as uncontrollable, rebellious, hormonal, or criminal. Disagreeing with Hall, Margaret Mead deployed a constructivist argument in the 1920s, contrasting U.S. American adolescence with the Samoans, to suggest that storm and stress was social and thus preventable.⁵⁹

Contrasting Hall’s and Mead’s approaches, it might appear that a constructivist point of view is more ethical. However, there is today a countercultural trend among fundamentalist Christians also arguing that adolescence is socially constructed, but for the purpose of denying their adolescent children the space for individuation usually associated with storm-and-stress phenomena.⁶⁰ Adolescent children are expected to move directly from an obedient childhood into a dutiful adulthood without questioning the authority or beliefs of their parents. With Hall and fundamentalist Christians, one essentialist and one constructivist, we find two unethical uses of adolescence designed to control others, one based in the claim that adolescent stress is natural and the other based in the idea that it is entirely a social construction. Rather than tackle this problem within the well-worn nature-versus-nurture debate, as constructivist and essentialist positions invite us to do, we might ask instead through an ethical frame what such knowledge does and how it might shape the experiences of adolescents in different contexts. Performativity also allows us to recognize the potential for ethical uses even in essentialist claims. For example, the idea of storm and stress could be used to recognize and accept a fuller range of emotional experiences in a young person, or a skeptical view of storm and stress might similarly allow for a fuller recognition of adolescents as people deserving of respect. What matters in this range of examples is what a claim to knowledge is doing, what its effects are, and whether these effects are harmful or helpful in a particular context.

What I aim to do in this book is to describe the broader social and historical functions of categories of age while attending to the complexities of context, the ways that ethical pathways have been and might be forged through our existing concepts despite the misuses I have identified. Such an analysis aims to sort through these performative functions of our knowledge of children and adolescents to discover what ethical uses it might serve while abandoning uses based on dominance, control, and oppression. Bringing the insights of post-structuralism to bear on the lived realities of being in the world make possible this more ethical enactment of knowledge, one that grapples with the performative effects of our knowledge-making about an agential world. Performativity does not mean that language is in control; on the contrary, Butler explains, “the iterability of performativity is a theory of agency, one that cannot disavow power as the condition of its own possibility.”⁶¹ This understanding makes an active engagement with the ethics of our relationality all the more urgent and necessary.

Queer Historical Method

This project deploys the performativity of knowledge as a historical method. One of the central tensions between constructivist and essentialist approaches to history has to do with what the archives can be said to tell us. While traditional historical methods might use archives to make claims about the material realties of the past, and constructivist methods might use those same archives to make claims about language and meaning, performativity as a historical method acknowledges the entanglement of matter and meaning. The archives neither give us direct access to reality nor do they merely represent ideology. As Barad reminds us, “The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment.” What this means for the study of history is that

performative approaches call into question representationalism’s claim that there are representations, on the one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation, on the other, and focus inquiry on the practices or performances of representing, as well as the productive effects of those practices and the conditions for their efficacy. A performative understanding of scientific practices, for example, takes account of the fact that knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world.

Though Barad offers scientific practices as her example, her description is indicative of the potential for historical study as well. My approach to history and to my archives attends to both the situatedness and productive effects of my sources as well as my own interpretations of them. Neither my sources nor myself as a writer are before or after language, neither productive of unmediated knowledge or entirely constrained by a regulatory discourse. Barad asserts that “theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice.”⁶² This insight is as relevant to Hall’s theorizations of adolescence at the turn of the century as it is to my own arguments in this book. My principal historical questions indicate this consideration of mutual entailment, investigating the specific ways that adolescence became historically possible, and later essential, to what we understand as real and true about ourselves and the world.

The idea of adolescence raises questions about identity and the self, about what it means to be in the world and to experience ourselves and others in relation to language and meaning. These are questions about the present, about being in the present, though we can consider notions of being themselves historically located and contingent, shifting over time and place. The question of adolescence is not simply one of terminology, not simply a matter of linking earlier notions of youth with twentieth-century notions of adolescence; rather, it is a historical inquiry into the ways we conceptualize identity and the self, agency and power, language and reality. In this sense I find that there are both radical contingencies in notions of adolescence in the present and significant conceptual links between past and present notions of youth. If we understand language and meaning as performative, as moving with each iteration and reiteration, then my framing historical question is not whether adolescence existed in earlier centuries but how its logic existed in shifting, fragmented, and interconnected discourses over time. This methodology allows me to speak to the perplexing question of how language constitutes social realities and modes of knowledge.

The availability of widely circulating historical newspapers and periodicals in electronic databases, in conjunction with searchable full-text books online, makes an investigation of this scale possible, allowing me to trace patterns of meaning that both echo and depart from the big thinkers we now associate with adolescence. While Foucault is interested primarily in tracking the big thinkers of each age in The Order of Things, I am interested primarily in the broader dispersal of modes of thought, how and in what form certain ways of thinking circulate in public discourse. Through wide reading of these archives, I have found a significant number of shifting, multipurposed conceptualizations of youth, not only those articulated by experts but also those that circulated in more popular forms. My primary focus in the archives is on tracing and articulating broad patterns of thought connected to categories of age, the logic underpinning such knowledge production, and the beliefs and assumptions that make the category of adolescence possible in its particular forms from the nineteenth century to the present. There is value to very specific, contextualized historical analysis, but such analysis tells us more about a particular context than about how shared cultural meanings appear and persist through time. To argue that a set of logics surrounding adolescence emerges and shifts over time, I use a broad and varied archive, demonstrating ideological connections among disparate sources sometimes separated by a hundred years or more. This project takes a somewhat promiscuous and nonlinear approach to time, drawing from the past and the present in each chapter. Likewise, I move between British and U.S. archival sources throughout the book, following the influence of Hall’s ideas as well as his educational and professional background, which spans both sides of the Atlantic. In this regard, what I have found examining sources from both Britain and the United States are meaningful commonalities leading up to conceptions of adolescence today.

For Carla Freccero the “spirit of queer analysis” involves a “willful perversion of notions of temporal propriety and the reproductive order of things.” She describes a method of “reading ‘against’ history,” because her method of analysis “at times works counter to the imperative—appearing in many discourses called literary as well as those called historical—to respect the directional flow of temporality, the notion that time is composed of contiguous and interrelated joined segments that are also sequential.” Importantly, however, she asserts that “this does not, nevertheless, mean that the work is anti- or ahistorical.”⁶³ The “imperative” to regard time as directional, sequential, and progressive can itself be historicized within the arguments of my book, as it refers to a particular way of viewing the passage of time (and categories of age themselves) that emerges over the course of the nineteenth century. I think it is useful here to think of Barad’s keen observation about Einstein’s theory of relativity: “Time isn’t an abstract idea for Einstein; time is what we measure with a clock.”⁶⁴ Time exists in its material instantiation as a unit of measure, not as the epistemological ground of all knowledge. What makes Freccero’s disregard for historical imperative “queer” is the fact that this developmental view of time is normative and, I would argue, foundational to the continued production and maintenance of normativity itself. As Michael Warner reminds us, the emergence of “normal” as a social value is a recent phenomenon, located in the explosion of measurement, categorization, and documentation of people in the nineteenth century.⁶⁵ In “Queering History,” Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon describe a “rigorously historical” study of the past that would simultaneously “refuse what we might term the compulsory heterotemporality of historicism.”⁶⁶ This is something like the methodology Freccero describes: “These analyses proceed otherwise than according to a presumed logic of cause and effect, anticipation and result; and otherwise than according to a presumed logic of the ‘done-ness’ of the past, since queer time is haunted by the persistence of affect and ethical imperatives in and across time.”⁶⁷ It is precisely these “ethical imperatives” that motivate my reading of the archives for what possibilities they open up for thinking otherwise about adolescence, temporality, and selfhood.

My questions proceed from a queer relation to history, one that muddles the separateness of the past and the present and resists the urge to create a historical narrative in which the past forms the justification for the present state of things. The logic of adolescence is a temporal logic, a way of understanding the stages of human life, selfhood, the past and future. This developmental logic of life-as-a-progressive-story, one that overlaps the interiority of selfhood with the biological growth and aging of the body, constitutes the epistemological ground from which the stages of human life and history itself are perceived and known. That is, “history” within this schema refers to a progressive narrative of development toward the present. But the idea of history as a thing itself rather than a sequence of discrete events comes out of the profound epistemological shift in the nineteenth century known as “historicism” or “developmentalism.” The dominance of historicism has made it difficult to see the past as anything other than a point in time within a historical process that has led to our present. This viewpoint illustrates a logic in which the primary significance of the past is to search for developmental causes for the present. My project does, at times, participate in the methodology I am aligning with developmentalism here, in which I speculate about causes and effects. Steedman puts it this way: “My conviction that events marshalled into a chronology can explain something is a turn of thought connected to the very development of childhood in its modern sense, and one that I cannot escape, even should I want to.”⁶⁸

However, my critique of developmentalism carries over into the organization of this book. Thus, I do not attempt to string together historical events as a cohesive story of what happened in the past. My departures from this method are not to dismiss it altogether but to acknowledge that developmentalism “knows some things well and others poorly,” to reuse a phrase from Sedgwick.⁶⁹ I want to know: What happens if we look backward with another goal in mind? What can we see if we look at the past outside these narrative and developmental logics? What becomes visible when we disregard national boundaries and the usual periodizations of academic study? What connections emerge through wide reading of a broad archive? This is not a disregard for the past (which is the complaint often lodged against queer theory) but rather a different sort of attention to it.

In this sense my project is one of opening up rather than closing down meanings, moving my inquiry inside its very questions rather than attempting to answer questions while I stand outside them. One way I have approached the problem of discourse is to overlap language, text, and world, a strategy that makes visible the performative and hermeneutic dimensions of any engagement with these contradictory and shifting constructions of self and other. Certainly, the objective of critique is to challenge existing interpretations, to shift or stretch the interpretive possibilities of self, text, and world. Scholars in queer theory emphasize the performativity of gender and sexuality because of an often personal awareness of ways of being that fall outside of language, outside of the existing definitions and categories. Performativity reminds us that lived realities are always more complex, contradictory, and queer than the discursive ways of being we use to make sense of those realities. This book attempts to hold open some of these possibilities, to acknowledge the vast range of being and knowing that exceeds discourse. Sarah Chinn suggests that childhood studies can “maintain its rigorous historicism” while incorporating from queer theory “a less materialist recognition of the unknowability of children.” She explains, “We can recognize the historically and culturally specific narratives that construct ‘childhood’ while also understanding that actual children are and have always been far more mysterious, perverse, incomprehensible, antisocial, productive, and embodied—that is to say queer—than our scholarship has given them credit for.”⁷⁰ Like gender or sexuality, adolescence is not a thing in and of itself but constituted through discourse, and, as such, it is unstable and contradictory, shifting through time and space. This is not to disregard the material world, the body, or our experiences of them, but on the contrary to attend to the ways discursivity shapes what it is possible to see and know about such material phenomena in the first place.

Of course, adolescents and children are people. But the privilege of personhood is not granted to all children or adolescents and such privilege is highly dependent on social factors beyond the control of young people themselves, at times contingent on the discretion of a few parents, teachers, doctors, or social workers. The logics of childhood and adolescence powerfully function to justify the denial of personhood to this person who is not yet recognized as a person, to those who may never achieve personhood. Childhood obscures these abuses of childhood. And adolescence so often serves as reason enough to deny a young person the dignity of their own meaning-making. As I have inhabited throughout this project so many evocations of adolescence and childhood, I have paid particular attention to those that seemed driven by projects of control. What were these projects of control, and what did they want? What seemed to motivate their values and assumptions and grounds for justification?

We cannot control other people. I say this, perhaps, at the risk of stating the obvious. And yet, for some the idea of allowing others control of themselves ushers on visions of anarchy and chaos, visions of a world in which all hope of freedom and security are gone forever. Here we find the utopian project of imagining a better world to be only one side of the coin, which on the flip side is merely a dystopian nightmare. The ominous phrase, for example, “the end of the world as we know it” gives away its investments in preserving to the end the known over the unknown, this threat hinging on apocalyptic fear. I am interested in understanding the vexed relationship between the productive, even utopian, project of imagining a better social world and the regulatory impulse to manage those aspects of the social world that we cannot know, anticipate, or control. Figures of youth can be used to hold apocalyptic visions at bay, coming to represent both the cause and the cure for fears of the unknown, both what propels us toward the end of the world and back toward its beginning. It is perhaps the fantasy of control that adolescence promises, the illusion that there are origins we can discover or return to, futures at which we can arrive.

Adolescence is a fiction, but one that cannot be so easily undone. It is always difficult to see the present as the present. That is, a critical inquiry that aims to describe the present is perpetually enmeshed in the very culture it seeks to describe. My hope is to pry apart language and begin to wriggle it free from the natural, the normal, and the known of our present. With this objective in mind, I have sought after the perverse interpretive possibilities of both past and present. I have sought after the submerged and explicit ways that we need adolescence, what functions it serves, and whether we are best served by it. I do not know if we can ever do away with adolescence, whether the disciplines of medicine and psychology will move away from it in the twenty-first century, whether changes will occur in public policies on the age of consent, voting rights, driving, drinking, and compulsory schooling. For now my hope is to dislodge adolescence from its present knowability and, with it, the logic that sustains it.