Abstract
With a title reminiscent of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Queerness of Childhood: Essays From the Other Side of the Looking Glass opens the concept “childhood” to the dreamy qualities of transference and its unspoken influence. Fishzon and Lieber’s literary and cultural study of queerness in childhood orients us to questions of temporality, phantasy, the desire to know and the problem of translatability—questions that arise from the gap between, on the one hand, discourses on childhood, development, queerness, and, on the other hand, their continuous circulation of meaning. The collection of essays uses classic novels, memoirs, film, and historical study of concepts such as “queer” and “childhood” as metaphors through which the reader is invited to think about the contemporary situation of gender. Elements of the queer child—the odd, the inexplicable, the wayward and the gifted child—are identified even in surprising places, such as Dostoevsky’s (1880) novel The Brothers Karamazov. A central preoccupation of the book constitutes the intricate interaction between psychoanalysis and queer theory, with the question of how theories that destabilize the representational help us “think the unthought of normalcy” (Britzman 1998, p. 80). On the one hand, the book attempts to intervene by urging queer theory to turn to psychoanalytic discourses on infantile sexuality and polymorphous temporality, and on the other, return psychoanalytic theory to its “obscure or repressed origins” (Fishzon and Lieber, p. 2).
This book comes at a particular history of psychoanalysis, a time of deep debates concerning trans and nonbinary children. These debates that have been particularly heated and the metaphors used in cultural discourses to describe concern over child’s future, the possibility of regret, and the disruption to development reflect myriad unconscious threats: fragmentation, disruption, contagion, all of which are displaced onto gender. I approach the book with strong sense that what adds to the difficulty of debates concerning trans children is a range of hypotheticals that are uttered where there is no place to really respond because most debates do not address a child who is present. There is something about trans subjectivity that gets caught in the imaginary of “the child,” as a hypothetical universal and we may wonder if the idea of the trans or nonbinary child is refused because its inexplicability is central to heterosexuality’s own self-recognition. The psychosocial dilemma of changing minds and the obstacles to it is therefore urgent.
The structure of the book, which is divided into four sections, represents the difficulties in the field of psychoanalysis and queer theory regarding the figure of the child. While the first section handles theories of origin, parenting, and development, the second section tackles questions of how mythologies in science and within “psy” professions become “political battlegrounds” (Gill-Peterson, p. 127). The third section addresses the politics of childhood, the power dynamics, and contradictory ways in which the figure of the child is used in debates, as well as the dilemmas with theorizing childhood’s “queerness.” The fourth and final section focuses on cultural representations of childhood with considerations of temporality and the question of childhood in relation to queer aesthetics and pleasure, with particular emphasis on animation.
These sections bring me closer to a Foucauldian notion of power. In his first volume on sexuality, for example, Foucault (1978) identifies new modes of identities that are both forms of subjection and resistance. New modes of identity such as the Malthusian couple, the masturbating child, or the homosexual are subject to desire and to the control of others. Every mode of identity that is created by the discursive structures, Foucault suggests, creates its opposition and hence is a place of revolt. If the figure of the child is also placeholder for social processes, then the potential of the book lies in the capacity to consider “the child” as a concept to be analyzed rather than a subject to be controlled. Through an encounter with different pressures that are applied on gender and sexuality including concepts like normativity, development, time, and childhood, the reader will come up against fissures and soft spots where the idealities of science, time, gender, and predictability crumble.
The text presents a number of premises that depend on each field’s point of view. What brings it all together is an ambivalence with psychoanalysis. The book’s critique of moralistic approaches to gender in clinical psychoanalysis is well founded, largely because it stems from the very design of the field’s institutional education (e.g., the insinuation of pathology in trans or in one’s inability to commit to one form of gender or another). The field’s education, of which the analyst is an effect, has the capacity to close in on itself, creating what Bion talks about as Curiosity Arrogance and Stupidity. Bion formulates this constellation as a common response to the helplessness of not knowing; an attempt to know the truth at “all costs,” that becomes an obstructive object to the analyst’s thinking (Civitarese 2021, p. 236).
The helplessness I am imagining in the realm of gender relates to the analyst’s own childhood, the anxieties of not knowing and the projected anxieties onto the trans child (who is then attempted to be rescued again and again). This is the helplessness tied to the difficulty of acknowledging our possible unconscious investment in the child as a part object—a site of our inner phantasies, unconscious desires, pleasures and vulnerabilities. The analyst’s helplessness is animated through the desire to treat the child’s gender as a “thing” that exists independently of the wounding and creating effects of culture, the whole world of experiences and objects that the child is in. Under the guise of concern for the child’s safety, in our loco parenetic mode we imagine that we are able to get to know the fate of gender, without having to wait and see how it unfolds. The tyranny of certainty obliterates the capacity to acknowledge that we really do not know what gender is, that we cannot predict its destiny, or be certain of what in fact is happening in the present.
Bringing the concept of the child into a field of culture allows us to think about what is disavowed as well as what is created through the concept of childhood. I am invited by the collection to consider how the conception of gender as binary is so saturated that a threat of wreckage looms when something appears as other to its saturation. On the one hand we witness an opening for new proliferations of gender formations, while on the other, we see a push back and a regression to conservative views in psychoanalysis and beyond. The collection brings to view how theories of gender might become places of omnipotent ideality, particularly when a scientific viewpoint (theories of plasticity, growth, and etiology) is mistaken for a psychoanalytic viewpoint about development. The editors are particularly critical of the “normative insistence on sexuality” (Fishzon and Lieber, p. 4), which they feel “often forgets its origins in Freud’s interrogation of infantile sexuality (preferring to emphasize ego defenses, object relations, the intersubjective field, etc.)” (p. 4). By addressing the ways in which the child has been used as a vessel to contain adult anxieties, the collection brings to view the dilemma of how, in many ways, the question of the trans child is not yet ready for analytical discussion in most settings, because the question of the child is permanently entangled in debates about nature and biology. Children’s lives, as Gill-Peterson puts it, are “subject to the straitjacket of development” (p. 129).
A Question of Transference
I want to step back now and consider the question of what the psychoanalytic clinic can offer in terms of thinking about the work of trying to articulate an idea, in this case, an idea of “childhood” and “queerness.” A clinical orientation will give us a different vantage from which to see what else is occurring in the book: and that is the transference. From the vantage of transference, my interest is in object usage. The transference dilemma affects the handling of an idea like “child,” because whatever theoretical vantage we take, an adult is still constructing the child. Here, we are immediately in the realm of transference because it speaks to the fact that we cannot separate our childhood from the machinations of unconscious time. Even when we use the figure of the child conceptually, it becomes impossible to speak of “the child” or of “childhood” in isolation or as a sheer transparency that rests independently over situations. In turning to concepts like childhood, development, or queerness, we therefore enter a dreamy space. Far from pure, these concepts are overpopulated with meanings and are a consequence of a larger dynamic that cannot be solved. What then can I glean from the structure of the book as a whole about the author’s transference to the concepts of “child” and “queer”? How is the object of the “queer child” is situated in this book? How is the “child” used across the chapters of the book?
One of the book’s premises involves the conceptualization of the queer child to reframe gender through pleasure, uncertainty, or alterity. The editors turn to Winnicott’s famous quote “there is no such thing as a baby,” to assert that the psychoanalytic “infant, the toddler and the young child constantly fall short of implicit adult norms” and therefore that childhood is itself “a queer failure” (Fishzon and Leiber, p. 2). Kathryn Bond Stockton’s insistence that we might “see any and every child as queer” (quoted in Lieber, p. 21) functions strategically to critique the institution of American Psychoanalysis. Contemporary American psychoanalysis, she insists, compromises the psychoanalytic insight into the polymorphousness of childhood and psychic time in favor of a preoccupation with developmental stages. The child in psychoanalysis, they suggest, “reveals the ways in which such normative aspirations themselves defend against the constitutional queerness already resident within” (p. 2). Through the idea that childhood in psychoanalysis is a “queer failure” the collection imagines the child’s entrance to the adult world to be oppressive structure. From this perspective, the child is subjected to normative messages that are reinforced, metabolized, absorbed, and saturate the child. The child is in need of protection. At the same time, however, the figure of the queer child is imagined as a rescuer of (American) psychoanalytic theory, through the association between childhood and polymorphous sexuality.
To my mind, Winnicott’s provocative assertion 1 also suggests a conflict in the book: Unless there’s a conception of a transitional space and the child’s relationship to a transitional space, then what we have is a paper child and a fantasy of rescuing the paper child, now through queer theory. The question about the use of the “child” reverberates across the chapters. In speaking about the figure of the child, the authors in the collection do not consider the scene that they are in, of an adult trying to create a frame for thinking about questions of development, normativity, and sexuality. The child enters an adult world, and the adult world, as Aulagnier (2001) describes it, is a very complicated and violent world. If we turn to Laplanche, however, we will consider the child’s entrance into the adult’s world to be other than saturation. The messages the child receives are enigmatic, not simply normative. This conceptualization considers a psychic experience with the world that involves the work of interpretation. The child’s ego defenses (e.g., identifications) might indeed move toward normalization. But they also may not. 2
I agree with the premise of the collection that the child who presents as queer is an enigma to institutions (educational, psychoanalytic, political) and is often seen as a hostile object. The collection’s attempt to bringing of queer theory to the question of emancipation in American psychoanalytic discourse, particularly bears on the question of gender because it makes use of psychoanalysis’ major insistences of development that sexuality is traumatic. 3 In psychoanalysis emancipation is closely related to freedom from the cruel certitude of knowledge. Perhaps the most powerful intervention of the book is therefore its possible appeal to educators within psychoanalytic institutes. Emancipation, however, is always a backward glance, and hence, as an address to something we break free from, it is also transferential.
As I read the book, I was therefore asking myself where the theoretical framing of the book may have set limits to free associations or to open-endedness, with the understanding that theory is a hypothetical situation. One place is the abstraction of the structuration that is proposed of the position of the child in relation to queerness. At one point the child is positioned as “always queer from the position of the adult” (Bond Stockton, quoted in Lieber, p. 21), while at another, it is not the child who is queer but the adult whose knowledge is insufficient. The child, in other words, presents as a cypher or an encryption encumbered with meaning. At different times in the book a struggle can be observed between an attempt to represent the actual dilemmas of queer children and representing the representation of children. The attempt to, on the one side, stabilize the object and at the same time insist that the object is unstable is contradiction that shapes many of the dilemmas that the book performs.
If terms like queerness and development need an object, we are also at risk of collapsing the figure of the child as a soft or malleable object with the actual child, particularly the trans child, in need of protection. The critique of Edelman is a place that I have found to be particularly overwrought to the extent that we lose the dilemmas of being in the world. Which child is being considered here when Edelman’s is blamed for “missing the opportunity to reveal the inherent queerness of childhood” (Fishzon and Lieber, p. 7) or for positioning the child as “anti-queer,” the child of theory, or the actual child? This is a difficult question because what is being talked about are fields of thought as opposed to actual experiences. In the same vein, which child is imagined when “developmentalism” is critiqued for disavowing and pathologizing “a range of affects” (p. 4) in children?
We might at some point pause to ask, now that we have killed the idea of developmentalism off, what are the ways in which we might begin a dialogue between the problem of development and the structures that attempt to intervene in it, like psychology, education, or psychoanalysis? Edelman, in my view, gave us an intervention. “No future” is a commentary made from a nachträglich vantage point on the emotional situation that is used conservatively to close down freedoms for adults through parental control, through control of education or the censoring of books, all in the name of the innocent child. At stake is not really the aggression of the child, but the aggression of the parents. “The child,” in other words, constitutes a constellation of a field.
Keeping the figure of the child as a malleable object requires that we observe our own transference to concepts. What child do we have in mind when we conceptualize the child as queer? Here the collection is at risk of idealizing childhood. The usage of queerness to describe the situation of childhood is clearly meant to be an intervention. The places of overgeneralizations, however, do not make the argument stronger. Thinking about the child as quintessentially queer and in turn thinking about queer theory as the one that gives us the best view of the child is, I believe, somewhat naïve. I have found myself asking, are we addressing here the object of the child, the adults that surround it? Or the field of study that has not been able to adequately theorize the child? Is there something about the concept of queer that itself is very labile so that at one point it is addressed to identity, at another to relationality and at times it is a problem of epistemology? What becomes clear through reading the collection is that the use of the child is an emotional situation.
Any reader was once a child, and the reader will think about their own childhood in relation to what they are reading and decide whether this resonates. That is the reader’s transference. We have a quest for fiction or make believe at the same time that we must make a distinction between the child’s capacity for “make believe” and the “make believe” child. Freud imagines the child as a sex researcher, who desires to know at all costs, giving herself “over to the same aimless quality of the transference” (Britzman 2006, p. 18). In this way the situation of childhood is not far away from that of the analyst, whose difficulty of thinking “wrenches the thinker back to a ‘theory Kindergarten’, an uncanny confusion between desire for knowledge or a passion for ignorance” (Britzman 2002, p. 122), that is also a feature of childhood. Ideality constantly challenges the theorist’s openness as the theorist negotiates loyalties in the work, in the same way that the child may become moralistic very quickly. The psychoanalytic child may become a walking superego: judgmental and hypernormative.
What does it mean to take a theoretical position on the figure of the child, and what happens with the insistence that the theoretical child is the motor force for the structure of sexuality, adulthood, education? The problem we encounter in placing the figure of the child in the context of queerness is that there is no authentic child. The dilemma I face as a reader is therefore one of projection. A lot seems to be riding the shoulders of the child, at the same time that, as Jaqueline Rose (1992) insists, childhood cannot be represented, because of nachträglich action. We can say that queer child is the adult’s magnificent mythology. The longevity of the queer child in the collection, however, may be excessive.
The concept of queer, in other words, is not a tonic for the complications of psychic conflict of having to grow up, of dependency, ideality and identification. A more careful consideration of what exactly “polymorphous perversion” of children means, may open the frame of the book. When I think analytically about sexuality as polymorphously perverse, I am also conceptualizing it as a function of the mind, and hence close to fantasy, the psychoanalytic idea that there is no correspondence between the features of the body and the desire of the mind expresses a deep disjunction, a split subject. Of course, the split in the psychical sphere of id, ego, superego is familiar, but splits also emerge in the gaps between desire, limit, and reality. Where we see those splits in the most amazing ways is in our dreams. They attest to a part of us that has no regard for reality, and that is the space from which our imaginations pour, that is the pleasure principle, and that is the polymorphous perversion of the psyche. This is not necessarily the idealized porousness of the child’s gender. The radicality of childhood is a situation of being born without language, not knowing whether our body is our own, and the foreignness of birth and infancy. Childhood is an uncanny situation that must be contained, and, in my view, a different notion altogether than polymorphous perversion. 4
A theory must be capable of transforming itself as well as critiquing society, and in this way, theory also ages. The arrival of queer theory constituted something called heteronormative, and as soon as it was constructed, it was no longer a matter of individual attitudes but a system. Queer theory in this regard is a traveling theory, overlapped with many terms with very different implications. Its value in my view is its capacity to provide a kaleidoscopic lens for looking at something that has been totally foreclosed. Where it is useful is in opening the minds of analysts who remain totally dedicated to normative theories. We may also wonder, however, if concepts such as estrangement or otherness, which get at the question of existence and death beyond the problem of intelligibility, do not describe better the dilemmas that sexuality presents to the psyche.
While queer theory in and of itself may not save us from the areas of rigidity in the psychoanalytic field, a text such as The Queerness of Childhood is an important intervention that is being made in terms of the social discourse on the body, and the question of freedom. This intervention is of particular importance for psychoanalysis because the field itself must be shaken. It represents a current moment in psychoanalysis where a newer generation, far away from Freud, offer a modern view of gender. The book is by and large an academic intervention from various fields of thought: humanities, literature, education, psychology; fields that lay claim to understanding and structuring the human: education, law, social work, psychology, government. It is of interest to psychoanalysts, educators, and literary critiques, not as a guide or suggestions of how one should act but as a study of the emotional situations of childhood and gender that have existed, or what they see as existing now. Such studies are critical for readers of JAPA because they present an interdisciplinary endeavor that touches on different dilemmas, and interdisciplinarity is an open invitation to think across fields of thought. One of the challenges of reading the book is therefore the work of thinking differently. As a reader, I am posed with being open to these arguments, but they will still have the problem of making up their own mind. The intervention of the book is theoretical, and its methodology may open the crypt of theory. It opens a transitional space with which to think about our transference to childhood, to gender and to theory. Its fate, however, is unknown because no matter what theory we have in mind, there is still the problem of how it will be received by the reader.
Footnotes
1
The usage of Winnicott’s quote in the book is incomplete. In Winnicott’s frame, it is the idea that there is no such thing as the baby without the other and without the cultural world of objects. We continuously breach, limits of thinkability because culture, as Winnicott prompts us to imagine, is a transitional space, rather than a set of restrictions.
2
This intermediate situation goes back to the problem that Winnicott articulates, that unless we have a conception of a transitional space and the child’s relationship to it, what we have is a paper child and a fantasy of rescuing the paper child, now through queer theory.
3
It starts from a trauma of not knowing, needing to know, wanting to know and not being able to know as well as the incapacity to soften the primal scene. In confronting gender as something we do not know we are also confronting our sexuality and here we feel at our most helpless.
4
Polymorphous perversion for Freud means that that our erotic life has no purpose other than pleasure. It runs by the pleasure principle, it has no regard for reality, and that must mean that it is unconscious. The sexual drives, Freud suggests, are a demand on the mind to work. It is not simply the situation of the child but a quality of human sexuality. Some of it is repressed, some of it is sublimated while other parts are repressed. Our ego defenses, however, pale in the face of the forces of the drives.