Just Kids

Front matter

JUST KIDS

JUST KIDS

YOUTH ACTIVISM AND RHETORICAL AGENCY

Contents

Acknowledgments ix INTRODUCTION Activism, Agency, and the Temporality of Childhood 1 CHAPTER 1 Agency as Embodied: Durable Activism for Peace 24 CHAPTER 2 Agency as Perspectival: Vulnerable Undocumented Activism 65 CHAPTER 3 Agency as Capacity: Disruptive Activism for Gun Reform 99 CONCLUSION Reflecting on Activism and Age 138 Appendices 153 Bibliography 161 Index 171

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To the extent that this book sheds light on the rhetorical practices of young activists and advocates for social change, it does so entirely due to the generosity of many people, especially the research participants who took time to meet with me for in-person and video interviews across several years—who spoke to me after getting off work, between classes, over summer break, on snow days, in the midst of everything else happening in their lives. To these participants: I am so grateful for the work you have done, the work you're still doing, and the care with which you shared that work with me.

Introduction

“That resolution will not pass the Senate,” Dianne Feinstein said, interrupting the prepared speech of a sixteen-year-old visiting her San Francisco office in February 2019, “and you can take that back to whoever sent you here.” The late senator was meeting with a group of young people—ranging in age from eleven to twenty-four and affiliated with the Sunrise Movement, the Bay Area Earth Guardians, and Youth Vs. Apocalypse—who were asking her to vote in favor of the Green New Deal resolution, introduced a few weeks earlier by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey. But the meeting had quickly devolved, with Senator Feinstein “lecturing” and “condescending” to the group and both parties interrupting each other in frustration." When the Sunrise Movement released video of the contentious encounter, it quickly went viral, generating headlines, press releases, interviews, even a Saturday Night Live sketch in which an aggravated Feinstein, portrayed by Cecily Strong, repeatedly asks for a “doover’ as she lashes out and then registers how her caustic dismissal of idealistic children might appear to her audience.

1. Lisa Friedman, “Dianne Feinstein Lectures Children Who Want Green New Deal,” New York Times, February 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/climate/feinsteinsunrise-green-new-deal. html; and Peter Wade, “Sen. Dianne Feinstein Condescends to Kid Activists Touting Green New Deal,” Rolling Stone, February 23, 2019, https://www.rollingstone. com/politics/politics-news/feinstein- green-new-deal-activists-799240/.

What does such a scene indicate about the rhetorical power of young activists, about their relationships with their audiences, and about the persuasive tactics they employ to accomplish their ends? This book begins from such scenes, in which public and media attention rests upon children, teens, and other youth as they engage in acts of petition, protest, organizing, and public address. In some ways, such scenes are (or are made into) spectacles. Media coverage emphasized this: the New York Times led with the headline “Dianne Feinstein Lectures Children”; Rolling Stone announced, “Dianne Feinstein Condescends to Kid Activists”; and USA Today reported “Dianne Feinstein Criticized for Arguing with Kids”? These headlines exploit the surprising juxtaposition of a senior US senator—and a Democrat, ostensibly sympathetic with the activists’ cause—responding with sarcasm and impatience during a public encounter with young people and generate clicks from the apparent generational contrast between Feinstein’s age and the youthfulness of those confronting her.

Despite its treatment as media spectacle, the encounter between youth climate activists and Senator Feinstein also suggests the tensions between symbolic power, rhetorical savvy, and material constraint that motivate the inquiries in this book. Media framing of youth activism often relies upon a familiar understanding of young people as potent symbols, representing at various times hope or naivete, innocence or exploitation, either the pure intentions or the utter selfishness of the young. Although such polarities suggest the variability of contemporary associations with children and teenagers, they share a fundamental orientation toward young people as figures who represent either promising or fearful futures. The tendency to treat children as symbols rather than rhetors appears not only in news coverage but also within the encounter itself, as when Senator Feinstein retorts that the children can “take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them.” This expression voices the charge, often levied at young people, that their words and actions are not their own, that they are not speaking but being manipulated by other agents who, by staging the encounter, are exploiting children’s symbolic power. As sociologist Jessica Taft has argued, this is a common assumption—“that children who are involved in social movements or who engage in political speech are merely pawns of adult activists,” victims of “brainwashing,” whose claims can be “dismissed as mimicry. The encounter between young activists and Senator Feinstein, in other words, reflects the reality that childhood is a potent rhetorical

2. Hayes, “I Know What I’m Doing;” USA Today, February 22, 2019, https://www. usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/22/dianne-feinstein-criticized-arguing-kids-overgreen-new-deal/2956607002/.

construct often wielded but infrequently examined—and rarely considered from the standpoint of children. If children and young people are symbols of innocence and hope, or ciphers who mimic or are manipulated by the adults around them, in neither interpretation can they be understood as agents who act on and through their surroundings.

But this encounter can be viewed otherwise: as a demonstration of youth engaging in rhetoric, using their words and bodies to influence attitudes and induce actions. Whether their strategic rhetoric takes the form of traditional public protest, such as marching, assembling, and speechmaking, or newer forms of protest grounded in social media networks, such as directly engaging with elected officials through Twitter, young people’s actions should make their agency as rhetors visible. This book contends that children and youth are not merely symbolic receptacles for the fears and hopes of adult audiences. Instead, the many young activists who are highlighted in this book act with rhetorical knowledge and purpose: they craft their speeches, time their remarks, choose their words; they share tactics and resources with supporters both online and in person; they stage events, build and maintain organizations, teach others how to hew to talking points in interviews with journalists and how to persuade reluctant organizations to become sponsors or allies. Despite a long-standing, well-established tendency of media organizations to portray young people as figures to be lauded, protected, or feared, young activists are clearly using their available means to alter the social, political, and material worlds they inhabit.‘

In addition to foregrounding the contrast between viewing young people as potent symbols or as persuasive speakers, the confrontation between climate activists and Senator Feinstein also hints at the numerous material constraints young activists must navigate. After asking a sixteen-year-old speaker her age, Feinstein retorts, “You didn't vote for me? Material constraints bar children and teens from formal avenues of influence in many civic spaces— exclusions that necessitate creative tactics. For instance, the Dream Defenders—a group of teens and other young activists who began organizing Black youth in 2012 following Trayvon Martins murder—occupied the Florida Capitol for thirty-one days in 2013, after George Zimmerman’s acquittal, pressing legislators to repeal Florida’s stand-your-ground law.’ Through incursions into civic spaces (such as statehouses and Senate offices), young activists juxtapose their lack of voting power against the urgency of their demands. School

4. On the tendency of media to portray young people as lacking in agency, see Burman, “Between Identification and Subjectification’; Moeller, “Hierarchy of Innocence”; Raby and Sheppard, “Constructs of Childhood”; and Feldman, “Activists.”

5. See “Our Story,” https://DreamDefenders.org/our-story.

4 + INTRODUCTION walkouts, likewise, convert material constraints experienced by young people into an avenue for demanding redress; required by law to be present at school, children and teens generate media coverage through their coordinated refusals to comply. Such refusals were employed widely, for instance, following the 2014 grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson for eighteen-year-old Mike Brown’s murder and after twenty-year-old Daunte Wright was killed by Kim Potter in 2021.° Although adult commentators often deride young people—and Black youth in particular—for deviating from “proper procedure” or disrupting civic norms, an array of material barriers limit teens’ and children’s access to forms of protest. For instance, the activists I interviewed about their March For Our Lives organizing encountered numerous bureaucratic hurdles as they attempted, as fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds, to secure a city permit, rent sound equipment, purchase insurance for their events, and file paperwork to create an organization legally responsible for the funds they were receiving from community supporters. They relied heavily on the one eighteen-year-old among them to complete the numerous tasks that required the signature of a legal adult. Many of the forms of activism pursued by young people confront the legal and procedural barriers that limit their direct civic power.

In my approach to the rhetorical practices of young activists, I highlight the savviness and creativity they demonstrate in response to the widespread, unequally distributed barriers they experience to civic and political access. When and whether young people are granted a hearing depends on a host of interrelated factors, including age as well as race, sexuality, gender, dis/ability, class, language, religion, and nationality. In other words, as Barrie Thorne and other scholars in childhood studies have shown, “like gender, racial ethnicity and sexuality, age is an embodied form of difference that is both materially and discursively produced and embedded in relations of power and authority,’ and barriers to political power are not experienced evenly among the varied embodiments and identities of those under the legal age of adulthood.’ In the case studies investigated in subsequent chapters, I ask: What avenues did these

6. See Elisa Crouch, “Students at Several St. Louis High Schools Walk Out in Protest, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 3, 2014, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/ students-at-several-st-louis-high-schools-walk-out-in-protest/article_98b9do2d-2948- 5806-9d96-4afbbbdd33e6.html; Rebecca Klein, “High School Students around the Country Are Walking Out of Class for Ferguson,’ Huffington Post, December 1, 2014, https://www. huffpost.com/entry/high-school-students-protest-ferguson_n_6249802; Erin Golden, “Minnesota Students Stage Walkout to Protest Racial Injustice” Star-Tribune, April 19, 2021, https:// www-.startribune.com/minnesota-students-walk-out-of-class-to-protest-racial-injustice/ 600047739/; and “Hundreds Join Minneapolis Police Walkouts: ‘Police Don't Care About Us,” The Guardian, April 20, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/19/ minneapolis-st-paul-high-school-student-protest-walkout-daunte-wright-george-floyd.

7. Thorne, “Crafting the Interdisciplinary Field,” 150.

collectives of young rhetors pursue when confronting an urgent, felt need for change in policy, law, or practice? For children, teens, and young people petitioning for a space to express their hope for peace, seeking protection from deportation, or requesting more restrictive laws governing the sale of deadly weapons, such requests demand exceptional rhetorical savvy, spoken as they are by individuals without official standing: nonconstituents, nonvoters, in many cases noncitizens.* The case studies that follow foreground the salience of age for rhetorical analysis, demonstrating that childhood is a construct that both facilitates and constrains rhetorical possibility. Age shapes encounters between interlocutors—as between Senator Feinstein and the group of activists who addressed her—and impacts how such encounters circulate to and are understood by broader audiences. Considering children, teens, and youth as strategic rhetors navigating constrained circumstances, therefore, not only confirms the significance of their activism but also invites reconsideration of their rhetorical agency. In the following pages of this introduction, I explore the connections that bring my analytical arguments and methodological commitments together, showing how these commitments led me to develop the concept of reflexive agency that I mobilize across the case study chapters. I then draw on work from childhood studies to clarify youth as a contingent and intersectional category of identification, connect this category to temporal dimensions of agency and reflexivity, and preview the arguments developed in each chapter.

INTERVIEW METHODS AND REFLEXIVE AGENCY

Two primary research questions orient me to the cases of youth activism that follow in this book:

1. How do young people navigate both their symbolic power and the material constraints that shape their circumstances? And how do they leverage these circumstances to achieve rhetorical (including social and political) purposes? In other words, how is age salient, both as opportunity and obstacle, in the situations young rhetors address?

2. What do the reflections of young activists (and former activists) indicate is important about their activism, on their own terms and in their own lives? In other words, how do interviews with people who are or were

8. This is not to suggest that being of legal voting age somehow dispenses with barriers to political power, of course, and the activism I analyze in this project both includes and exceeds a focus on citizenship; see Brandzel, Against Citizenship; Yam, Inconvenient Strangers, 18-24.

activists in their childhood, adolescence, or youth reveal how they navigate situations strategically and make sense of their own trajectories as rhetorical beings?

To address these questions, this project combines familiar forms of rhetorical analysis—attention to activists’ spoken performances, staged events, media interviews, circulating texts, and so on—with qualitative interviews to enable “reflection about rhetoric’s emergence, meaning, and influence”? In the words of researchers Amanda Nell Edgar and Andre E. Johnson, when rhetoric scholars “ask individuals to account for their own behaviors” through interviews, we “put an ear to the ground, listening for the ways local”—and individual—“histories and experiences reverberate through social movements.’

Seeking this “ear to the ground” perspective, I also undertook interviews because I was convinced by prior scholarship that talking about young people without also talking with them about their experiences would lead me away from my commitment to ethical research practices. Thus I sought in interviews and focus groups participants’ perspectives on how their activism emerged, how it felt at the time, and how they viewed it in retrospect.” I expected that my interviews would yield insight into the prior schooling, writing, and speaking experiences that enabled young activists to develop the capacities they demonstrated in their work. Further, I anticipated that their perspectives would generate a clearer understanding of the emotional attachments and interpersonal networks that compelled these individuals to invest their time and energy toward activist ends.

What I found was that answering my questions led participants into complex reconsiderations of fluctuating cultural moments, gaps between what they recalled and what my archival research uncovered, and shifting relationships between their present and prior selves. Through interviews, these participants became my partners in discerning the significance of their activism over time—not only by shaping my reading of textual artifacts, archival documents, media coverage, and so on, but also because their retrospections expanded the time under consideration beyond the parameters of their most intense organizing. By asking about their preparations for the work they engaged in, their sense of successes and setbacks, and their assessment

9. McKinnon et al., “Articulating Text and Field; 4. See also Rai and Gottschalk Druschke, “On Being There,’ 2-3. 10. Edgar and Johnson, Struggle Over Black Lives Matter, xii. 11. The first iteration of this project received IRB approval in 2016 through UNCG IRB 16-0369. The expanded research received approval in 2018 through UNCG IRB 18-0202. See the appendices for interview and focus group questionnaires.

of what was most important about their activist work, I received responses that went straight to the heart of questions of rhetorical agency: How do we know what chains of cause and consequence precede and follow our actions? How can we say with confidence what factors led to the outcomes we experienced at the time—and if we would now diagnose our earlier rhetorical situations differently, is our later perspective more accurate or less so? Asking activists to revisit their experiences invited their ongoing formulation of their own agency and of themselves as agents. That is, although I took the agency of young activists as a given, I discovered that my participants’ reflections about what they did, why, and to what effect led me into complex considerations of agency, as I witnessed participants working in the present to align (or speak to the disjuncture between) past and present selves, priorities, convictions, and actions. Thus both my analytical argument—that childhood is a construct that facilitates and constrains rhetorical possibility— and my theoretical concern—to conceptualize reflection as a site of rhetorical agency—emerge from my methodological commitment to seek young activists’ perspectives directly.

My analysis of the cases of collective youth organizing that follow in this book demonstrates the first of these arguments, that childhood is a construct that impacts rhetors’ strategic possibility. It is a constraint in Keith Grant- Davies sense: a factor within the rhetorical landscape that rhetors must grapple with, both positively and negatively, toward the enactment of their ends. It is, in other words, a source of rhetorical potential that rhetors, young and old alike, may seek to mitigate or capitalize on. As rhetoricians Luke Winslow and Eli Mangold have argued, children’s presence within an unfolding social movement activates widely shared associations with truth-telling clarity, moral obligation, and the threat of childhood’s loss.® Such rhetorical possibilities might be minimized or amplified, as they carry both risks and opportunities for young people pursuing collective rhetorical goals. A fourteen-year-old activist might highlight her age to suggest she speaks with the clarity of an uncorrupted vision—or she might view her age as a detriment to being taken seriously as an informed speaker and choose language that downplays her youth to construct her authority in more conventional terms. The rhetorical salience of her age will vary contextually and in relation to other dimensions of her embodiment—her race, language, nationality, sexuality, dis/ability, class, religion, and more. The cases of collective organizing that follow in this book bear out this understanding of age as a rhetorically salient dimension of activism. Though their ages vary from as young as ten to as old as their

12. Winslow and Mangold, “Theorizing Rhetorical Children,” 87-88.

midtwenties, these rhetors grapple with how to capitalize on the powerful symbolism of youth while still engaging with audiences as speakers rather than merely symbols.

Young people's rhetorical agency is strategic as well as reflexive, and each case study chapter unfolds strategic possibility as well as reflections that demonstrate how participants regard their activist work in retrospect. Each chapter analyzes the rhetorical tactics adopted by a collective, demonstrating how available means and audience uptakes are shaped by age as a salient dimension of their situations. I chose these cases because each is youth-led, large-scale, and sustained across multiple years. These collectives comprise scores of leaders and many thousands of variously involved participants as they attempt significant public interventions that prompt vigorous public response. The affordances and risks of childhood can be seen in the rearticulations experienced by young peace activists in chapter 1; in the racialized citizenship exclusions faced by im/migration activists in chapter 2; and in the rhetorical opening generated and exploited by the largely white teens advocating for gun reform in chapter 3. Carefully analyzing the situated, strategic work of young activists in each chapter, I explore how activists navigate constrained situations, material exclusions, and dismissal from adults, as well as how they leverage symbolic associations of childhood in pursuit of their shared goals. Demonstrating how age shapes each collectives rhetorical possibilities, I situate readers in specific tactics designed to meet a rhetorical context in which mitigating assumptions around childhood is necessary.

Such grappling with material and situational limitations and affordances, as young activists must undertake, is made easier by current understandings of agency in rhetorical studies, which have expanded both agents and forms of agency dramatically. When I assert that young people engaging in activism operate as rhetorical agents, readers outside of rhetorical studies might understand this to mean they make things happen in the world and might expect an account of what their efforts have amounted to: What laws have been passed? What policy platforms have been adopted? How has public discourse been changed by youth activism around issues such as gun violence or im/migration? Yet for readers within rhetoric, these questions miss the mark, grounded as they are in an understanding of agency as rooted in cause and effect, intentional action followed by consequence. Instead, many in rhetorical studies understand agency ecologically, involving interactions among not only rhetors and audiences but also shared discourses, material environments, technological objects, and complex networks. In rhetorical studies, agency involves us in questions that move beyond “Who convinced whom?” and “Who made this happen?”

ACTIVISM, AGENCY, AND THE TEMPORALITY OF CHILDHOOD œe 9

Approaching the activism of young people from a perspective that affirms their fundamental rhetoricity, this book argues that youth exercise rhetorical agency not only through their navigation of complex constraints in pursuit of activist ends but also through their acts of retrospective reflection. Developing the concept of reflexive agency out of my interviews with activists, I demonstrate how activists, through metacognitive practices of reflection, articulate new linkages among the assemblages they have created, claim ownership over the significance of their work, and cultivate capacities toward undetermined, contingent futures. Rhetoric scholars Krista Ratcliffe and Kyle Jensen trace four types of agency, all of which operate “singly, relationally, and intersectionally,” naming these personal, discursive, cultural, and material and reminding us that none of these forms of agency is “unlimited or unfettered’ Personal agency, the form with which I am most concerned here, names “the capacity and willingness of a person to act, which creates an opportunity to be heard; it is the power of people to think and act in relation to other people and things as well as other types of agencies, when addressing rhetorical problems.’* Reflexive agency is a particular form of personal agency that emerged in my interviews as I asked activists to revisit their tactics and assessments of months or years prior. Participants articulated agency as embodied experiences that endure, as rooted in perspectives that change over time, and as embodied capacities with unsettled future uses. Working from these formulations, I define reflexive agency as a form of agency that constructs relations among prior, present, and future selves. Rooted in embodied experiences and inflected by temporal change, reflexive agency reaches back from present to past perspectives and practices of the self. It also reaches forward to future perspectives and practices, anticipating the self in uncertain future circumstances. Reflexive agency foregrounds the self and its capacities as unfinished, intersubjective, inescapably temporal, and engaged in perpetual becoming. In reflexive agency, rhetors renarrate their reasons and strategies, grapple with effects and consequences, and create links between prior and present selves. These are understudied but widely practiced forms of rhetorical agency that I can theorize on the basis of having solicited participants’ reflections on their activism.

This formulation of reflexive agency bridges rhetorical studies and the “kinship” model of agency espoused within childhood studies by scholars such as Marah Gubar, who writes that adults and children “are akin to one another in that from the moment we are born (and even before then) we

13. Jensen and Ratcliffe, Rhetorical Listening in Action, 55-57. 14. Jensen and Ratcliffe, 55.

are immersed in multiple discourses not of our own making that influence who we are, how we think, what we do and say—and we never grow out of this compromised state.” In other words, children’s rhetorical agency is not partial where adults’ is complete, or developing where adults’ is fully formed. Children’s agency does not offer a definitional contrast, shoring up a binary or a too-porous boundary. Instead, agency—both its exercise and its contingencies—stretches in both directions along the line that separates adults from teens, adolescents, and children.

YOUTH AS A CONTINGENT, INTERSECTIONAL, EMBODIED CATEGORY

The rhetorical framework implied in my research questions is highly amenable to the transdisciplinary reach of scholarship in childhood studies. As scholars of childhood studies have long established, childhood as a category is historically contingent, imbued with meanings and contained by boundaries that vary across time and place. Such scholarship underscores the myriad ways in which childhood, as cultural historians Caroline Levander and Carol Singley have argued, is “not only a biological fact but a cultural construct that encodes the complex, ever-shifting logic of a given group?” That is, boundaries between child and adult, and those surrounding more recently emerging concepts such as adolescent and teen, have developed in specific cultural and political contexts. Understanding childhood as a contingent, historically varying category—rather than one that appears naturally or aligns with universal experiences of growth and maturation—has enabled scholars across this rich interdisciplinary area to probe the specific mechanisms by which childhood is rendered salient, articulated to large-scale cultural projects. In the US, these projects include white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and the production of neoliberal consumerist subjects.’® As sociologist Jessica Taft has argued, sociohistorical approaches to childhood and adolescence emphasize that “age is not destiny” and that “what it means to be a child is context-dependent and malleable.”

15. Gubar, “Risky Business,’ 454.

16. Aries, Centuries of Childhood; and Field and Simmons, Global History of Black Girlhood.

17. Levander and Singley, American Child, 4.

18. Raby, “Children’s Participation”; Sanchez-Eppler, Dependent States; Webster, Beyond the Boundaries; Burman, “Between Identification and Subjectification’; and Stockton, Queer Child.

ACTIVISM, AGENCY, AND THE TEMPORALITY OF CHILDHOOD œ 11

Key to the work of investigating childhood as a contingent, varying category has been articulating its production through (and its contributions to) frameworks of race, gender, and class. For instance, in Phillipe Ariés’s sweeping history of the emergence of childhood, many of the characteristics now associated with childhood—as a protected stage, detached from economic production—first arose for white, aristocratic males, “the first group . . . to

»20 experience childhood as a set apart, specialized stage of life?*? In contrast, Wilma King’s groundbreaking work Stolen Childhood excavated the meaning of childhood for enslaved young people in the US, demonstrating that to the extent that childhood was in any way a protected status for these children, it was through the vigilant labors of their families endeavoring against outrageously inhumane circumstances to make it so.” In the “diverse and uneven” context of childhood in the contemporary US, Taft reminds us, “poor and working-class children and children in immigrant families tak[e] on substantial responsibilities and act[] with far more independence and autonomy than their more socially and economically privileged peers?” A great deal of childhood studies scholarship has shown that “the image of childhood as a time of safe, protected, and responsibility-free play is . . . a racialized and class-specific myth,” Robin Bernstein’s work on “racial innocence,’ for instance, exposes the whiteness at the heart of conceptions of childhood in the US, uncovering how scripted everyday performances assigned innocence to white children and excluded Black children not only from innocence but from childhood itself.” These exclusions are not only inherited but perpetually reenacted in the present: in school contexts where Black youth are disciplined more harshly than white youth, in public spaces where police officers overestimate the age of Black boys beginning at age ten, and in public discourse where, as Crystal Lynn Webster puts it, “African American girls continually face disbarment from ideas of childhood and girlhood?” As Miriam Ticktin has argued, “innocence inserts hierarchy into the concept of suffering?” BIPOC youth, and Black young people in particular, are “made available for imprisonment and exploitation by the withholding of innocence?”

20. Thorne, “Childhood,” 20.

21. King, Stolen Childhood.

24. Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 7-8.

25. Webster, “History of Black Girls.” See also Epstein, Blake, and Gonzalez, Girlhood Interrupted, 4, 6; Blake and Epstein, Listening; and Shalaby, Troublemakers.

26. Ticktin, “World without Innocence,’ 587.

27. Gill-Peterson, Sheldon, and Stockton, “What Is the Now? 496. See also Meiners, For the Children?

While unearthing and historicizing the shifting boundaries of childhood, scholars have also articulated temporality as a key dimension of its manifold cultural valences. Whatever else it has been in specific cultural contexts, Julian Gill-Peterson, Rebekah Sheldon, and Kathryn Bond Stockton argue, “the child, to be sure, has been a creature of chronology?” Queer theorist Lee Edelman famously argued that the child, as a “repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications,” serves as an “obligatory token of futurity,’ constraining political possibilities by embodying “the telos of the social order?” Other theorists have found children’s temporal associations backward-turned, linking the past to the present by mobilizing “nostalgias that .. . are far from innocent”? Children serve both as idealized, hazy reminders of adults’ own (scarcely remembered or entirely forgotten) past and as equally idealized portents of the (unseeable, unreachable) future.

Childhood is temporally defined as well insofar as it names a temporary status: something one is expected to grow out of, making childhood a key category for the regulation of capacity, sexuality, dis/ability, and consent, as numerous critiques from disability studies have shown.” Demarcating, governing, and surveilling the chronologies of childhood, adolescence, and maturity made the child a crucial object of study for developmental sciences that formed across the twentieth century, including psychology, education, and endocrinology.” These fields contributed to the constitution of childhood as “based in deferral and delay: of work, of sex, of civil rights”? Such “developmentalist discourses” are consequential: when they “position young people as ‘becoming’ rather than “being,” they also “define young people as incapable, partial, and deficient in contrast to an imagined vision of the capable, complete, and rational adult.* Such temporal linkages divest children of meaningful relationships with their own present, a present in which actual children not only signify adult investments in past and future but also act to influence the world around them. Figurations of children as the past of adults, as future adults, and as the future of adults all rely upon a fundamental binary that maintains children as not adults and, in particular, not coeval with adults but inhabiting a different time. Their agency is deferred to a later date, when they attain the status of adulthood.

28. Gill-Peterson, Sheldon, and Stockton, 495.

29. Edelman, No Future, 11-12.

30. Burman, “Between Identification and Subjectification,” 297.

31. Randall, “Consent as Rhetorical Ability”; Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip; Wilkerson, “Disability”; and Rand, “PROTECTing the Figure of Innocence.”

32. Gill-Peterson, “Implanting Plasticity.”

33. Gill-Peterson, Sheldon, and Stockton, “What Is the Now,’ 496.

34. Taft, “Teenage Girls’ Narratives,” 29.

ACTIVISM, AGENCY, AND THE TEMPORALITY OF CHILDHOOD œe 13

A further contribution of scholars working in childhood studies has been to demonstrate how binary formulations that contrast children with adults operate to stabilize the characteristics associated with adulthood. If childhood as a concept generates and sets boundaries around affiliated concepts—such as maturity, responsibility, culpability, and growth—it also powerfully structures the meaning of adulthood and the productive, self-regulating, autonomous citizen presumed to be its culmination. As Taft explains, “ideas about childhood are also always ideas about adulthood: the two categories are positioned in opposition to one another. Many of the dominant ideas about modern Western selfhood—that we are rational, free-willed, independent individuals— rely upon a binary logic in which children are not those things?” Historian Nancy Lesko likewise investigates what she calls “confident characterizations” of teenagers; these characterizations are applied in pervasive cultural scripts that assert that adolescents “come of age” through the unstoppable power of “naturally emerging” and “uncontrollable force[s],” that teens are subject to “raging hormones” that overwhelm their mental and emotional capacities, and that they are so profoundly “peer oriented” as to be “less individuated” than adults. As Lesko argues, these narratives work together to imply “that adolescents are not fully autonomous, rational, or determining, all of which are valued characteristics for successful, modern adults”°°