Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness
Autor Erin J. Randen Limba Engleză Paperback – 20 ian 2025
In Minor Troubles, Erin J. Rand investigates a series of controversies about youth sexuality and queerness from the early twenty-first century: adult concerns about teen sexting, the bullying and suicides of queer kids, trans youths’ access to gender-segregated bathrooms at school, and sex education. In the public deliberation and mediation of each of these controversies, the imagined qualities of childhood—innocence, vulnerability, nonsexuality, and, crucially, whiteness—are deployed by adults to justify the protection of children. However, these rhetorical figurations of childhood often produce material precarities for actual young people, especially youth of color and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth. Rand foregrounds the fundamental role of racialization in forming ideas about childhood, arguing that the image of innocent white childhood depends upon the dehumanization of racialized youth. Moreover, the rhetorical process of figuration produces vulnerability and constrains agency for real young people and creates cultural ideas about childhood that come to justify policies, discipline behaviors, regulate identities, control knowledges, and determine interventions that shape children’s lives, bodies, and experiences.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259351
ISBN-10: 0814259359
Pagini: 250
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
ISBN-10: 0814259359
Pagini: 250
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Recenzii
“Minor Troubles belongs with the highest tier of recent rhetorical scholarship, offering the kind of intersectional, nuanced, and theoretically rich approach the discipline needs. Rand achieves an incredible depth of rhetorical engagement while also locating her analysis in critical race/gender/queer/trans studies.” —Lisa A. Flores, author of Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant
“Rand offers thought-provoking analysis and critical observations on the precarity of the queer child. Deploying queer of color critique, she provides a necessary and rich interrogation of the state of childhood and the rhetorical and racial (re)constructions of a world which seems perpetually unready for queer child development.” —Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr., author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing
“Minor Troubles makes an important intervention into the ways that we understand contemporary controversies over LGBTQ youth. By focusing on actual people, Rand teases out the complex relationships between the material and the discursive, showing how these rhetorical figurations have significant implications for people’s lives.” —Leslie J. Harris, author of The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity
Notă biografică
Erin J. Rand (she/her) is Associate Professor in Communication and Rhetorical Studies and affiliated with Women and Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance.
Extras
This tension between agency and vulnerability will reappear throughout Minor Troubles, as young people’s own characteristics—their gender nonconformity, their queerness, their Blackness, their sexual agency—cause trouble for adults’ investment in the innocence of the category of childhood. As I will suggest, the racialized rhetorical figuration of the child, when it is instrumentalized in public deliberation, brings cultural ideas about the qualities of childhood into contact with the lives of real children, producing material consequences that are disproportionately harmful to youth of color and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth.
Of course, while Stewart’s interview with Rutledge provides a brief look at some of the central themes I explore, I could have begun with any number of other contemporary examples that also illustrate conservative unease with racial, gendered, and sexual difference in contexts involving children: legislation that prohibits discussions of LGBTQ+ histories and lives in schools, bans on books that feature anti-racist or queer-inclusive messages, prohibitions on education about systemic racism and critical race theory, accusations of “grooming” leveled at adults who teach sex education to minors, worries about drag queen story hours, and unfortunately many more. These controversies get their grip in the public imagination precisely because they target children, but also because race, gender, and sexuality are all flashpoints for cultural unease—especially when young people are involved. As Ian Barnard asserts, threats to the purity and sanctity of children “summon up apparently limitless reserves of unreflective fear, panic, anger, and hysteria,” and those feelings constrain the possibilities for genuine debate. To invoke hypothetically endangered children, then, is to make a virtually irrefutable argument that fallaciously but nonetheless efficaciously substitutes an emotional petition for rational deliberation. Whether or not the children in question are actually imperiled—by learning an accurate history of slavery, by using a classmate’s proper pronouns, by reading a book with a queer protagonist—their imagined distress is instrumentalized as a call for adults to act.
In other words, the idea of the endangered child is a potent rhetorical tool—“a figure to be used, sometimes as a weapon,” as Susan Jarratt puts it—that can be deployed strategically to justify policies that limit the freedoms of both young people and adults. The controversies that we are witnessing today about race, gender identity, and sexuality are remarkable for the transparency with which the figure of the child is weaponized. However, this instrumentalization of childhood is far from unprecedented; rather, it emerges from the sedimentation of youthful vulnerability as a racialized characteristic, the construction of childhood as a repository of adult anxieties, and the mobilization of childhood as a means of maintaining systemic privileges and inequalities that have been decades and even centuries in the making.
Rather than lingering in the present moment, therefore, Minor Troubles moves into the recent past, engaging with a series of case studies from the early twenty-first century that produce the rhetorical possibilities of the present. In the following chapters I examine recognizable public controversies—adult concerns about teen sexting; the bullying and suicides of queer kids; trans youths’ access to gender-segregated bathrooms at school; and sex education—in order to trace how vulnerability and agency emerge through the racialized, sexualized, and gendered figurations of childhood (re)produced in each debate. For instance, the first chapter’s discussion of the perceived technological menace of teen sexting in the 2000s demonstrates the disproportionate criminalization of youth of color and queer youth, and how the exclusion of Blackness inaugurates the vulnerability of childhood. In chapter 2’s analysis of the media attention to the bullying and suicides of queer youth in 2010 and beyond, vulnerability is tethered to whiteness, masculinity, and queerness, and these assumptions of inherent vulnerability shape government policy and school programs. Chapter 3’s close scrutiny of one community’s debate about gender-segregated bathrooms in 2014 reveals the way childhood is figured according to normative temporalities of development and racialized understandings of transness, and how agency emerges in the disavowal of histories of anti-Black racism. And finally, in chapter 4 the racist and heteronormative aims of American sex education programs are resisted by a contemporary innovative program founded in 2014 that provides comprehensive sexual-wellness education for marginalized youth and presents an alternate version of vulnerability that enables rather than replaces youthful agency.
Of course, while Stewart’s interview with Rutledge provides a brief look at some of the central themes I explore, I could have begun with any number of other contemporary examples that also illustrate conservative unease with racial, gendered, and sexual difference in contexts involving children: legislation that prohibits discussions of LGBTQ+ histories and lives in schools, bans on books that feature anti-racist or queer-inclusive messages, prohibitions on education about systemic racism and critical race theory, accusations of “grooming” leveled at adults who teach sex education to minors, worries about drag queen story hours, and unfortunately many more. These controversies get their grip in the public imagination precisely because they target children, but also because race, gender, and sexuality are all flashpoints for cultural unease—especially when young people are involved. As Ian Barnard asserts, threats to the purity and sanctity of children “summon up apparently limitless reserves of unreflective fear, panic, anger, and hysteria,” and those feelings constrain the possibilities for genuine debate. To invoke hypothetically endangered children, then, is to make a virtually irrefutable argument that fallaciously but nonetheless efficaciously substitutes an emotional petition for rational deliberation. Whether or not the children in question are actually imperiled—by learning an accurate history of slavery, by using a classmate’s proper pronouns, by reading a book with a queer protagonist—their imagined distress is instrumentalized as a call for adults to act.
In other words, the idea of the endangered child is a potent rhetorical tool—“a figure to be used, sometimes as a weapon,” as Susan Jarratt puts it—that can be deployed strategically to justify policies that limit the freedoms of both young people and adults. The controversies that we are witnessing today about race, gender identity, and sexuality are remarkable for the transparency with which the figure of the child is weaponized. However, this instrumentalization of childhood is far from unprecedented; rather, it emerges from the sedimentation of youthful vulnerability as a racialized characteristic, the construction of childhood as a repository of adult anxieties, and the mobilization of childhood as a means of maintaining systemic privileges and inequalities that have been decades and even centuries in the making.
Rather than lingering in the present moment, therefore, Minor Troubles moves into the recent past, engaging with a series of case studies from the early twenty-first century that produce the rhetorical possibilities of the present. In the following chapters I examine recognizable public controversies—adult concerns about teen sexting; the bullying and suicides of queer kids; trans youths’ access to gender-segregated bathrooms at school; and sex education—in order to trace how vulnerability and agency emerge through the racialized, sexualized, and gendered figurations of childhood (re)produced in each debate. For instance, the first chapter’s discussion of the perceived technological menace of teen sexting in the 2000s demonstrates the disproportionate criminalization of youth of color and queer youth, and how the exclusion of Blackness inaugurates the vulnerability of childhood. In chapter 2’s analysis of the media attention to the bullying and suicides of queer youth in 2010 and beyond, vulnerability is tethered to whiteness, masculinity, and queerness, and these assumptions of inherent vulnerability shape government policy and school programs. Chapter 3’s close scrutiny of one community’s debate about gender-segregated bathrooms in 2014 reveals the way childhood is figured according to normative temporalities of development and racialized understandings of transness, and how agency emerges in the disavowal of histories of anti-Black racism. And finally, in chapter 4 the racist and heteronormative aims of American sex education programs are resisted by a contemporary innovative program founded in 2014 that provides comprehensive sexual-wellness education for marginalized youth and presents an alternate version of vulnerability that enables rather than replaces youthful agency.
Cuprins
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Childhood’s Queer Troubles Chapter 1 Illegal Desires: The Sexting Panic and the Criminalization of Queer Black Girls Chapter 2 Wounded White Boys: Figuring Queer Vulnerability to Bullying and Suicide Chapter 3 Too Much to Tolerate: School Bathrooms, Trans Temporality, and Black Excess Chapter 4 From Reticence to Abundance: Talking Back to the History of Sex Education Conclusion Refiguring Futures: Youth Innovations in Agency and Vulnerability Bibliography Index
Descriere
Focuses on the rhetorical process of figuration as instrumental in creating cultural ideas about childhood, providing a road map for understanding alarmist discourses about children, race, gender, and sexuality.