Part 5: Childhood in Queer ActivismAngel White (any/all)I want to start off by acknowledging that this concluding section has taken a while. When I first came up with the idea to write about youth liberation, I intended to write a single article. Quickly, that proposition became unrealistic. And, as I continued to write these articles, I found there was always more to say than I expected. Truthfully, when I finished the fourth part of this article series - 21,000 words into this topic - I was pretty tired of it. Moreover, I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to end. I had done so much in-depth, analytical analysis, but that didn’t feel right for this ending. I had a vague notion of what this final part would be about, some way of addressing the original topic about why we need youth liberation for queer activism, but wasn’t sure what to do with it. But, since part 4 was published, I’ve had some time to think about what I’m doing with these articles. Also, I’ve done a few projects across my different classes which have given me some new ways of thinking about this topic. Specifically, I did two different projects focusing on the effects of school surveillance on trans youth. Seeing the ways in which queer youth in particular are on the front lines of dealing with new forms of technology authoritarianism has become a major inspiration for what this article is about. Here, I want to look at the ways in which youth are central to the struggle for liberation. In the first section of this article, I want to add that youth have been, and will continue to be, key contributors to activist work. We cannot hope for a better world if we don’t allow youth to be leaders in all queer struggles. Then I want to move on to discuss the ability children have to imagine and dream. We’ll discuss how we’ve cut ourselves off from our childhoods and how, only by remembering how to be children again, can we have revolutionary visions. Finally, I’ll explore some concluding thoughts about youth liberation and queer activism going forward. Youth Activists Youth activism is often represented as a modern phenomenon. Looking at the Wikipedia article on youth activism, the earliest mentioned action is the 1903 (incorrectly stated as 1908) March of the Mill Children against the prevalence of child labor in the United States. This choice of a starting point for youth activism interests me for a few reasons. For one, it focuses on the work of mainstream progressives against child labor in the 1900s, ignoring the history of unions fighting against child labor which dates back to the 1830s. This implies that it was the work of mainstream adult forces which began youth activism. It also suggests the origins of youth protest in America and the West. Finally, it makes the claim that youth activism is a phenomenon of modernity. All of these above claims, which often structure our history of youth activism, do not hold up upon further analysis. Youth outside of Europe are in the records of resistance actions. For instance, in 1630s Japan, the Shimbara Rebellion, which revolted against the high taxes, despotic control, and the limiting of Christianity put in place in Shimabara, was led by 16-year-old Amanao Shiro. At the same time, young peasants made up a significant basis for revolts that would eventually topple the Ming Dynasty in China. Two centuries later, youth in India would become bandits attempting to provide for impoverished communities under the policies of British colonialism. But while such examples do highlight the existence of youth rebels outside of the modern West, I think it is important to highlight that in most cases their existence is a footnote. The lack of knowledge about this history is really due to the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a historical compiling of youth resistance in, say, Ming Dynasty China or any other of these places. Instead, our investigation has skewed modern and, when not modern, to older periods in Europe. This historical bias unfortunately means that talking about European history is a lot easier for deconstructing the connection of modernity and youth activism. In the Roman Republic, for example, youth were an important enough political group that the theorist Cicero devoted much of his discussion of rebellion to talking about how young men were convinced to rebel against Rome. And while Cicero specifically argues that adults were the driving force behind these rebellions, his attention towards young men points towards them being an important political consideration. But while youth activism has a long history in Europe, it was the period following the Children’s Crusade in 1212 where this activism reached its peak. The children’s crusade was a collective march, made up primarily of young people, which had the goal of retaking the holy land. While it did not succeed in its goals, this crusade did allow the peasant youth to have a sense of freedom and power that was rare in feudal Europe. This new feeling of youth freedom and power led to a rise in youth revolts, most prominently in 14th century Italy. According to Samuel K. Cohn Jr. in Chapter 4, titled “Varieties of Revolt,” of his book Lust for Liberty, youth were major contributors, and even sometimes leaders, in rebellious movements. The most notable instance is in 1383, where youth in the city of Perugia organized and led a rebellion which overthrew the ruling Raspanti government. Youth also were often involved in protests concerning war. In Naples, children led protests chanting “peace, peace!” demanding an end to Naples’ war with Sicily. In 1323, youth marched in Florence for the opposite reason, demanding that the government declare war on Lucca who was raiding the countryside. Most impressively, many of the protests that happened in Italy during this time involved coalitions of youth and adults. One of the most notable is in the city of Parma, where people of all ages conducted a non-violent protest that won a decrease in taxation, and a freeing of all prisoners who had been charged with inability to pay the previously high taxes. They did this by physically taking over and unlocking the jails, and then having youth lead a march around the edges of the city. After getting these wins, the protestors continued their disruptions and forced the government to make peace with Lucca a month later. While Italy was the center of such actions, it wasn’t the only place to see youth involved in movements. In 1365, youth were major players in the tax revolt against the rulers of Tournai, in modern day Belgium. Similarly, during the 1418 revolt of commoners in Paris, children found ways to participate through harassing the nobles. In England during the 1500s, apprentices were often involved in riots and were leading opponents of enclosures, high food costs, as well as the rise of the modern bureaucratic state. The average age of apprentices at the time was 17, and many were as young as 13 or 14. There are countless examples of such youth activism, but I think the point from here can be made that children have, even before capitalist modernity, been significant political actors. I think realizing this history of youth activism should change how we discuss current activist situations. There is often an argument which goes something like this: youth are more likely to engage in activism today than in previous times. Young people are also demonstrating higher rates of dissatisfaction with democracy than with older generations. Therefore, the solution is to fix the issues with democratic institutions so young people can shift their activism back into the mainstream and do it through voting. While this argument sounds good, when we take a larger historical perspective, I think it becomes clear that current levels of youth activism is the norm, not the anomaly. Young people have always been on the front lines demanding change. This suggests that we really should be asking some different questions. For instance, how was youth activism suppressed during the late 20th century? And how do we, as youth and adult activists, create the conditions under which youth can flourish as activists? To try and answer these questions, I want to look at an important example in the history of decolonization: Ghana. Youth were one of the groups that led Ghana’s radical push for independence. This new, radical perspective from youth came about for a few main reasons. First, education greatly increased in Ghana during the early 20th century in response to changes to colonial rule. Specifically, Christian missionaries were allowed to promote education, and this increased literacy and exposure to radical thought. These changes to colonial rule also had impacts for tribal control. Embracing the principle of Indirect Rule, colonial authorities gave increased administrative and economic power to tribal chiefs and elders. These newfound powers, as well as their increased presence on the colonial Legislative Council, meant that tribal leaders became invested in upholding the status quo of colonial rule, and were less connected to the needs of the people. In reaction to this power, the newly radicalized youth of Ghana started to critique both the colonial regime and its co-option of the tribal system. This dual critique, combined with a Marxist analysis, became the basis for the Convention People’s Party (CCP) formed by Kwame Nkrumah. The CPP was founded as a splinter of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) after many members of the convention were concerned with the UGCC’s embrace of tribal chiefs and opposition to modernizing education. Backed by the new radical youth of Ghana, the CPP won elections all throughout the 1950s, and eventually achieved independence for Ghana in 1957. Yet, just as the CPP opposed a system which ignored the needs and voices of youth, they too became a similarly oppressive force. The next generation of youth in Ghana, those who went to the universities of the independent state, came to be the main internal oppositional force to Nkrumah’s government. Student discussion groups were a significant place for sharing theories that went against government opinions, and student publications were the only news sources in Ghana that openly criticized CPP policies. In response to this, the CPP attempted a number of tactics to instill pro-CPP opinions in youth. They created youth programs, modeled after similar programs in Israeli settlements and the Soviet Union, which combined job training with state propaganda. The CPP also arrested student leaders, deported rebellious faculty (both Ghanaian and non-Ghanaian), appointed party loyalists to important positions in universities, and created “Education for Citizenship” classes to push government messages. The most notable suppression tactic though was the creation of scholarship review boards which evaluated if students should retain scholarships or not. One of the factors considered by these boards was whether or not the students showed “close identification with the spirit and objects of the Party [CPP].” Unsurprisingly, in response to these measures, students protested, refused to participate in CPP organizations, and continued to publicly critique the government. The fight between youth and the government in Ghana didn’t end in the 1960s. It continued through the 1970s when student movements became a major force, often being a deciding factor in political swings. It even continues today, where youth protest in the face of police violence. This example shows, for one, that youth are necessary for revolutionary movements. Ghana’s independence movement needed youth to be leaders in order to succeed. And, it should be noted, Ghana isn’t unique in this regard. Senegal similarly relied on youth movements to push their countries beyond Indirect Rule towards radical revolutions. And, again like Ghana, Senegal continues to see youth activism today which clashes with police. These examples point out the reality that radical youth thinkers and activists are always on the front lines of revolutions. If we are to push for radical change in the future, we must prioritize such youth involvement. Another thing the example of Ghana points out is that youth involvement in movements hasn’t historically led to benefits for young people. Ghana relied on youth to become independent, but then didn’t create conditions to benefit or empower them. Such a reality has also played out many times in American activist history, such as the many young women involved in the fight for women’s suffrage. Young suffragettes staged debates in schools, spoke out at corners in cities, petitioned local governments, and did a significant amount of the work necessary to expand and popularize a movement. Yet, instead of being recognized for this, they were objectified by adult activists who rarely saw them as more than props to disprove the idea that suffragettes were bad mothers. Further, youth were among the main people criticizing the suffrage movement for its racist, anti-immigrant, and heteronormative assumptions. Most importantly though, suffrage as a campaign was fundamentally never going to benefit youth. The vote is not something children are allowed to have so their political participation could never have been rewarded. If we are to go forward as radical activists, we must make space for youth to articulate ideas, and find ways to incorporate their needs into our demands. Finally, as their multi-dimensional critiques demonstrate, youth in Ghana show us how youth activists generally have a more nuanced understanding of issues. I know this is a counter-intuitive conclusion given our adultist expectations in the United States, but this reality makes sense when you consider that youth are less likely to have investment in a systemic apparatus. When you aren’t embedded into a power structure, it gives you a much better vantage point on that system as a whole. And, for evidence towards this, I would ask you to think about the many intersectional and complex critiques you hear youth activists saying. Whether the youth who participated in Black Lives Matter, the young revolutionaries fighting for democracy and against austerity in Sudan, or the international youth combining demands for climate justice and indigenous liberation, we see the nuanced and complex positions of youth. If we want to develop a greater consciousness around the struggles in the world, we must rely on youth activists to help create such a perspective. The important question left to ask for this article is: what does all of this mean for queer activism? The simple answer is that we really need to finally learn the lesson of letting queer youth lead. Back in the second article for this series, I talked about both contemporary queer activism and the gay liberation movement. While these two groups had different approaches towards queer youth, it is notable that queer youth were never given significant leadership qualities in either time period. For example, Gay Youth, the leading queer youth organization during the 1970s, left the New York Gay Liberation Front due to their issues not being taken seriously. While problems of queer youth coming out or being in school are taken more seriously now, we still don’t let queer youth take the lead. We need to finally create a world where queer children are leaders, where they are taken seriously. If not, queer youth will never be liberated. And as a result, queer liberation will never come to be. Childhood and Queer Imagining With that being said, simply including queer youth won’t fix the problem. If we plan to be truly revolutionary, we must also remember how to be children. In “Childing the World,” Toby Rollo writes that “childhood is merely a different way of being, one that is not exclusive to the youth.” What this means is that childhood is a way of analyzing the world. Building on this, Rollo introduces the term “childing” which “demands a revision of our conception of a human, away from the sole veneration of speech and reason, allegedly secured by our escape from childhood, toward a vision of humanity characterized by differences and pluralities.” Childing is necessary if we plan to be revolutionary. To show this, I would like to remind people of Ashanti Alston’s “Childhood & the Psychological Dimension of Revolution.” Alston spends most of this article discussing how the family disrupts our ability to retain childhood creativity and dreaming. Instead, as he says, it forces a mask upon us. Importantly, though, is what Alston connects this to for revolutionary purposes. Alston notes that childhood dreaming is the perspective which envisions revolutionary truths. It is our cutting off from these dreams, the process of becoming an adult, when we lose the ability to fully see a revolutionary future. Therefore, when we talk about childing, we are really talking about the process of reclaiming our ability to be radical. In addition, childing is also necessary for us to work with youth. As Uilliam Joy Bergman points out in the essay “Hold On to Your Child (Within),” from the book Trust Kids!, being an adult requires us to cut ourselves off entirely from childhood. This means also refusing to relate to children. Therefore, if we want to achieve the previously mentioned goal of incorporating youth into our movements and taking them seriously, we must find ways to be children again. While Rollo, Alston, Bergman, and others have shown the necessity of re-embracing childhood, I think such calls leave a major question unaddressed: what defines childhood? If we agree with the conceptualization of childhood as a state of mind, what is defined within that state of mind? How does it differ from our current state of mind, and how do we understand the elements of childhood in a way which doesn’t reinforce adultist presumptions? To get at such questions, I want to turn towards Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology in the Phenomenology of Perception. Phenomenology, at its most basic, is the study of the lived experiences of phenomena. Merleau-Ponty outlines that such a study emphasizes the facts of the phenomenon over an explanation for them. For instance, one might provide a scientific explanation for the cause of a thing that happens, but such an explanation does not describe how we, as people, experience the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that our engagement with the world happens through two steps. First, we pre-reflectively construct an image of the world. Later, we reflect upon that image and notice objects, movements, and other phenomena. Through reflection on the pre-reflectively constructed world, we ask questions about the nature of human interaction with the world thereby allowing for an existential phenomenology. To understand the nature of our pre-reflective interaction with the world, Merleau-Ponty focuses on the body. Previous phenomenologists had generally considered consciousness to be that which creates our vision of the world. Merleau-Ponty disputes this, arguing the body is where we find expressiveness and intentionality. The body is that which orients us spatially. When I wish to move into a space, I do that through positioning my body towards that space. Therefore, my expression towards space is through the body. In addition, the body isn’t just stuck in space. Instead, the space around me appears how it does because of where it is in relation to my body. I view a door as openable because my body can move to the door and open it. Therefore, my perception of space around me is based on its relationship to the position of my body. From this, we can understand that intentional actions can only happen because of how my body creates my awareness of space around me. The important conclusion from this is that the body, because of its creation of space and possibility for action, is the place of subjectivity. The thing which allows me to have a unique relationship with the world around me, and therefore be a unique person, is my body. From this, we can learn that if we wish to understand our subjective experience and thinking, we must focus on the body and its relationship to the world. I think it is these notions of bodily subjectivity and the body as the source for possible actions which give us the ability to understand childhood. If our subjectivity is in the position and orientation of the body, then this is where we must look to understand how to be children again. This idea, of interpreting Merleau-Ponty to explain multiple different forms of embodied experience, isn’t entirely novel. For instance, in “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris Young describes the ways in which social expectations and objectification lead to differing bodily orientations for men and women. Similarly, Sara Ahmed has deployed Merleau-Ponty to theorize queer bodily orientation. But where these authors have developed ideas of different identities having different embodied experiences, I want to suggest we all can have different orientations. Moreover, I hope to suggest that it might be best if we learn to have many different ways of being in our bodies. Now that we have a framework to develop from, I want to suggest some key features of a childhood bodily orientation. This is not meant as a definitive listing or a technical definition, but instead as a starting point for moving towards a liberated mind. To start with, an important part of childhood is curiosity. To be curious, is to position ourselves as beings trying to learn about the world. To do this, we need to see the world as containing phenomena to be learned about and understood. Beyond just re-conceptualizing space, to be curious is also to view our bodies as capable of learning. We can learn from our bodies, and use our bodies to engage with the world. Further, we can also use a relationship with the world as a way of understanding and reflecting upon ourselves. We are in the world and, therefore, curiosity about it will allow for novel understandings of our own bodies as well. Playfulness is another important part of childhood. To be playful requires being aimless. This is not to say that one should be without intention, just that our actions don’t always have to be serving a larger purpose. Instead, we can be in the moment and interact with the phenomena we experience. Be in the moment, enjoy it, and use it to find new starting points for action. Along with playfulness, being a child also requires joy. Too often, we view the world around us as an obstacle. Instead, we must conceptualize the things around us as means of creating joy for ourselves and others. I think playfulness and joy are also very important to activist work, and too often not allowed in these spaces. We are so often dealing with pain and reacting to that with strict planning. While such actions are necessary in many situations, we must also learn how to create joy and spaces for play. An occupation, for instance, is as important for its ability to create a space for spontaneous joy as it is for the actual goals it is trying to achieve. Childhood is further defined by creativity. I think creativity is often the most important thing which we lose in becoming adults. To be creative, we need to pull back and remember how much we can redefine. Merleau-Ponty tells us that while the literal objects may exist prior to our subjectivity, the existence of space does not. If spaces are our creations, then they can be unmade and thought of in new ways. We must learn how to see spaces differently. Too often, we accept when we are told that a space has these boundaries, and is meant for this purpose. Disrupting such prescriptions are inherent to activist work. To protest is to disrupt the purpose of a space, and declare that it is for the new purpose of voicing demands and addressing issues. If we become more willing to expand our thinking about spatial boundaries and uses, we can sharpen both our analysis and our means of engagement. In addition, we also can start to rethink the relationship of body and space. How we exist in relation to space is down to how our body is oriented. If we learn new orientations, to be differently in space, we create new spaces. Implicated in this is that we will learn how to be ourselves newly, to construct new subjectivities. And with those new subjectivities, we will learn again to envision first new spaces and then new worlds. A final orientation I want to highlight in relation to childhood is self-expression. Self-expression is fundamental to how we act as youth, but eventually we move away from it as adults. We slowly become concerned how people see us, an issue made worse by the ever growing mass surveillance panopticon. To fight against this domination, we must create spaces and find new ways to express ourselves. This is especially important for queer people whose expression is constantly threatened by cisheteropatriarchy. I think that phenomenology can help us understand that western individualism drastically limits where self-expression is located. Merleau-Ponty tells us that transcendence, the goal of life, is accomplished through changing the world in accordance with our visions. Therefore, expressions of self are felt not just in the way we act as individuals, but can be in the way we define and transform the world around us. Such work is, in a lot of ways, already being done. As someone who enjoys queer fanfiction, I believe that such fanfics demonstrate a great example of this. They can rewrite worlds, creating novel queer realities and meanings for objects. Further, they allow us to explore ourselves within a created world, demonstrating the importance of space creation for self-expression and exploration. I hope that eventually we can transform our material world into a canvas for such similar self-expression and meaning creation. I hope that the above five characteristics are a good starting point for developing a childhood embodiment. To be a child in this way is something I hope we can all achieve, but it will inevitably require a lot of work. Specifically, it requires us to be committed towards making three fundamental changes. First, we must learn to reorient our body, and experience ourselves differently. Second, we must learn to have new goals. The orientation of the body is only useful insofar as we use it. Therefore, we must learn to develop new things to aim for and new ends to reach for. At the same time, we must also create space for play and not being goal driven. Together, we can find not only new ways to position our body, but bring those new positions into the material world by changing the things around us. Finally, we must change the spaces around us. Our world is constructed to exclude people. Whether that is through the existence of national borders, hostile architecture, or public spaces that exclude children, our world simply prevents such means of embodiment. Therefore, if we wish to allow ourselves the ability to exist differently in the world, we must work to overturn and change such systems. This process of learning how to be children is, I think, necessary for being queer. Queerness is a thing of the future. By that, I mean that queerness is about thinking of novel ways to rearrange the world, and therefore is something we are always aiming for. At the same time, queerness collapses the distinctions between the past, present and future. I often think of the beautiful description from the band G.L.O.S.S. where they describe trans women as “WE’RE FUCKING FUTURE GIRLS LIVING OUTSIDE SOCIETY’S SHIT!” I think this suggests for us that queerness is of the future, and to be queer is to become yourself of the future within the present. This process of queering oneself requires imagination and dreaming of the future. In other words, we are ourselves because we can envision a future where we are ourselves without oppression. I think Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can help us understand this process. If we have subjectivity in relation to the world, then a queer subjectivity requires a queer world. This world I live in currently, the present, is not queer. It is being queered, and will be queer, but it is not yet. Due to this, I think we need to start imagining again. I want us to share which worlds our queerness comes from. I want to know how you relate to that world, how it overlaps with the present, and how we can make that future come true. Only when we accept the childhood imagination which produces such worlds, can we truly be queer. In other words, there is no queerness without childhood. The liberation of the child, I contend, is necessary. Otherwise, queerness can never be a reality. An Ending Looking back, I’ve written a lot about youth liberation in this series. Every section up to this final one has amounted to over 26,000 words. In the first article, we discussed the history of childhood and the nuclear family, demystifying them and revealing their problematic, hierarchical, and often violent history. Following that, we looked at the history of queer activism and its failure, both in the past and present, to help queer youth. In part three, we went into depth about the failure of education and political systems to support and empower young people. Part four followed up with a similar analysis of the failure of marriage and the nuclear family, and ended with a discussion of the pros and cons of abolishing the family altogether. Now finally we are here, where we’ve discussed the ways in which youth activism, and incorporating childhood into our ourselves, is necessary for effective activism, and for upholding queerness in our activist work. I hope that, together, these articles have politicized childhood, shown the necessity of fighting for youth liberation, and demonstrated how queer activists have failed to do that yet.
In addition, I hope I’ve shown the importance of using youth as a category of political analysis. Queer youth in particular continue to be targeted, and we need to look at these issues from a youth liberation perspective. To show this one final time, I want to highlight the rising trend of anti-queer school surveillance. Since the beginning of Covid-19, schools have drastically increased the surveillance of students. Beyond just generally chilling speech in the classroom and on assignments, limiting the ability for students to talk to teachers without being recorded, and further dehumanizing youth then they already were, there are specific harms for queer youth that need to be highlighted. Surveillance systems use keywords to flag students as potentially accessing inappropriate or illegal material. Some of those keywords are “gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender.” In addition, schools have been setting up facial recognition cameras outside of school bathrooms. While they claim this is to stop vaping, it also has the effect of creating a means of knowing every student who enters a bathroom, thereby allowing schools to track which gendered bathroom a child is using. The consequences of this have been what you expect. Queer students are now even more likely to be disciplined or arrested. In Minneapolis, recordings from surveillance cameras were used to out a queer student to their parents. I highlight this issue of school surveillance for two reasons. First, it is one of the biggest issues facing queer youth right now, and I don’t see it getting enough attention. It is ignored enough that I was unaware of it when I wrote the part of this series focusing on education. If anything, I hope this shows how truly out of touch the general queer community, as well as queer activists, are with the issues facing queer youth. But, secondly, it reminds us that analysis through and with queer youth is necessary. If we prioritized their voices, we would know about these issues. If queer youth had power over their schools, they could more effectively advocate against such measures. There are so many ways in which a world based on youth liberation would facilitate opposition to such systems. But, at the current moment, it is difficult to get the queer adults (who should care) to be aware of this topic. Further, beyond the needs of queer youth, such policies also have implications for queer adults. Schools, currently, seem to be acting as testing grounds for anti-queer, and specifically anti-trans, surveillance technologies and practices. We are so used to kids not being seen as humans that we fail to recognize it. But, if the government is allowed to develop means of tracking and outing queer youth, they will deploy it on a wider scale. And if not the government directly, these technologies, which are developed by private companies, will be sold to other corporations. This really should just be a reminder that, as always, the means of oppressing the most vulnerable become the ways in which everyone in the community is oppressed. We need to do a better job of noticing trends like school surveillance and targeting them, otherwise we will be blind to the largest threats to queer liberation on the horizon. Learning about school surveillance did teach me a final, and humbling, lesson. Which is, even now that I’m just a few years out of high school, the issues are very different. To be fair, we don’t always see such a seismic shift in the means of controlling youth, but I think the point of how quickly we become disconnected from youth stands. I don’t know anyone in high school anymore, much less in middle or elementary school. I can learn about problems and pull on my own experiences, but I’m already becoming out of date with the current situation. A lot of this, of course, is my fault. I need to be better at taking the advice I’m giving here and building those intergenerational friendships and networks. But, at the same time, I recognize that this is the way in which our society is set up to function. It is hard to resist the expectations of cutting yourself off from children when you have so much else to worry about. And, besides, there aren’t many good ways to talk to kids outside of a teaching context which don’t feel a little bit creepy. I don’t say this as an excuse, but more as an acknowledgement of my own place in the cycle that keeps youth and adults separate. We must create the institutions to facilitate these connections and build the networks necessary for intergenerational action. That, from what I can tell, is the pressing first step we always seem to fail at. At the same time, I think my failure to theorize might also be due to the inevitable changes that come along with growing up in our society. I’ve been exposed to many new ideas, and continue to get introduced to new disciplinary perspectives. I’ve noticed my writing style has moved to reflect the complex, nuanced, texts without a clear message that I’ve been reading. And it is easy for me to see this as improvement. My writing has become itself more nuanced, more willing to deal with ambivalence, and deeper in how where my analysis goes. But, truthfully, I think this conclusion demonstrates my own subconscious commitments to adult supremacy. While all of those improvements are true (I think), they also ignore that my writing has become less focused, less fiery, less willing to say what I mean and not care for perfectly constructed thoughts. I’ve become less willing to say things which I can’t entirely prove. You might even say my writing has become more conservative. I’m not here to say one way or another if this is a good or bad development. The development I’m going through seems to appear in the works of many authors, and is the expectation of becoming an adult. Under adult supremacy, I feel as if this process is somewhat inevitable. I wonder if this final part will, because of these changes, be less relevant to those it is meant for: queer youth. I like to think not, but it isn’t something for me to decide. Instead, I’ll leave with this thought. Remembering to dream and imagine like a child has made me realize how much I’ve lost for what I can see of the future. And, even as I’m working to gain that back, I don’t think I ever fully will. The years of repression and trauma, as well as the never ending list of mental health issues, seem to be a block to the full potential of this. Ironically, it was those factors which I think have given me the motivation and feeling of necessity that drove the analysis throughout this series. But, regardless, I hope that what this means is that even my wildest dreams will fall short of the world that can eventually be created. Hopefully, someday, in a world of youth liberation, theories like mine will even be considered conservative. If a queer child in the future reads this, I hope they can recognize all of the places where I failed to notice my own biases, ignorances, and assumptions. Maybe, if you're a queer child now, you can already do that.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |