Raising queer children and children of queer parents: Children’s political agency,human rights and Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘parental responsibility'

Introduction

Where does parental responsibility towards children end? Where does children’s political and personal agency begin? How do these two questions intertwine with issues relating to sexual orientation and gender identity? In light of ever-growing debates on parents’ acknowledgement (or lack thereof) of their queer and trans and intersex children, as well as the evergreen dispute on whether queer or trans parents are good parents in different national and supranational settings, it is necessary to confront questions of parental responsibility and children’s self-determination. This exponential focus on the sexuality and gender of children (and of parents) calls for a close and critical reflection on the various sites in which children’s interests are mobilised, predicated and contested through the prism of sexuality and gender.

This article attempts to address these questions by resorting to Hannah Arendt’s problematic concept of ‘parental responsibility’ discussed in her 1959 text ‘Reflections on Little Rock’. In addressing the Black Civil Rights Movement’s request for school de-segregation for black children in the US, Arendt problematically argued that children should not bear the responsibility of being involved in adults’ political fights and should be left free to develop their own political engagement. Arendt’s words caused infuriating responses at the time. Given their polemical potential, however, they can act as a dialectical device to reflect on the balance between parental responsibility towards children and children’s right to self-determination when parents raise queer children or when queer parents raise children (be them queer or not). This is ever more relevant considering that the ‘best interests’ of these two groups of children are often heavily scrutinised, especially by conservative segments of society (Robson, 2000: 916).

In the first section of the article, the author lays out the theoretical foundations of the analysis, by critically appraising Arendt’s concept of ‘parental responsibility’, which is grounded in the history of the movement for school de-segregation for black children in the US in the 1950s. The article carries out a reflection on the legacy of such a problematic concept almost 60 years after its first appearance. It seeks as much as possible to refrain from ‘whitewashing’ (or, for that matter, ‘queerwashing’) the crucial historical significance of this episode in the economy of the fight for racial de-segregation and human rights of African-Americans in the US. Simultaneously, the section discusses the notion of children’s political agency arising out of Arendt’s analysis and it connects it with current debates on children’s right to self-determination. The second section considers how the two intertwined concepts of parental responsibility and children’s right to self-determination play out in the literature concerning parenting practices for queer children. The sections seeks to highlight the extent that queer children’s political agency is often mediated by parents’ own understanding of their ‘best interests’. In the third section, the attention diametrically shifts from children’s onto parents’ sexuality, gender and gender identity. Here, it is considered how children’s welfare is framed and assessed in the case of non-heterosexual or non-cisgender parents, particularly in relation to the questioning by ‘anti-gender movements’ of queer individuals’ fitness to become parents. In the fourth section of the article, it will be suggested that both the process of raising queer children, as well as parenting practices by queer individuals, require a radical (and often uncomfortable) engagement with the notion of ‘children’s political agency’, and a re-articulation of the concepts of ‘the best interests of the child’. This engagement will lead to the articulation of an emancipatory political framework for children, regardless of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity or the characteristics of their parent(s).

Children’s political agency and Arendt’s concept of ‘parental responsibility’: Limitations and critical engagements

‘Reflections on Little Rock’ is one of Arendt’s most controversial interventions. Published in 1959, two years after Arendt originally wrote it, this short essay was vehemently criticised by liberals and by civil rights movements in the US. In ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, the German philosopher controversially analysed the scandalous issue of racial segregation in American schools, in the aftermath of the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education. Arendt focused on the events of 4 September 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, when 15 year old African-American student Elizabeth Eckford went to the Little Rock Central High School to attend her classes and was prevented from entering the building by both the Arkansas National Guard and an angry mob. The pictures of that shameful episode soon became public domain and Arendt, at the time living in the US, decided to write a critical comment on the event.

In the text, Arendt argued that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the allies for the rights of African-Americans in the US were wrong in leading their political battles on school grounds. Whilst African-American children and adolescents were called to defy school segregation by virtue of their mere presence in the school buildings, parents, activists and allies were positioned in the background. Arendt was convinced that this retreat by parents and adults was unacceptable. A passage illustrates clearly the author’s position in this regard:

The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education which, by abolishing the authority of adults, implicitly denies their responsibility for the world in which they have borne their children and refuses the duty of guiding them into it. Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world? And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the school yards? (Arendt, 1959: 50)

This article does not have the pretence to compare the fight for the rights of African-Americans in the US with issues relating to sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Whilst this analysis seeks to be intersectional in its intentions, an abrupt comparison would vilify the fight against racial segregation and racism, comparing two phenomena that are incommensurable. Similarly, there is no space here to assess the claim that Arendt was unable to understand in depth the question of racial discrimination in the US (Burroughs, 2015). If correctly transposed, however, some of the ideas expressed in ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ offer hints for reflection on the thin line of demarcation between the responsibility of parents and the agency of children.

Numerous commentators (Elshtain, 1996; Kallio and Häkli, 2011; Morey, 2012; Nakata, 2008; Topolski, 2008), nearly 60 years after the appearance of this text, have engaged in symbolic conversations with Arendt on issues relating to education, the politicisation of childhood, and children’s rights and citizenship. These conversations take place in an international context in which trans children’s lives and experiences are routinely trivialised and politicised in media outlets (think of the coverage of these issues in tabloids such as the Daily Mail or the Sun in the UK ¹ ) and the lives of intersex children are closely scrutinised by medical practitioners and social and legal institutions (Ammaturo, 2016). Furthermore, in several countries (Italy, France and Spain, to name a few), movements such as ‘La Manif pour tous’ virulently protest against the parenting rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBT) people, using the ‘best interests of the child’ argument almost as an ideological device.

In light of these phenomena and Arendt’s provocation, we need to ask two questions. Firstly, does this increasing attention paid to issues relating to the sexual orientation and gender identity of children and adolescents truly correspond to a genuine interest in the promotion of children’s rights? Simultaneously, one would have to question whether this interest could, instead, be the result of the imprecise transposition of the broader fights for LGBT rights onto the terrain of childhood for strategic purposes. Secondly, how it is possible to safeguard and promote the rights of queer children and adolescents and children of queer parents without calling on them to sustain the weight of adults’ human rights campaigns for LGBT rights whilst, simultaneously, nurturing their social, political and juridical subjectivity?

Here, it is important to consider the real extent to which, in the context of human rights promotion, these children and adolescents can concretely acquire and exercise agency in the determination and expression of their interests. Similarly, these questions help to find out the extent to which children and adolescents remain imbricated in the representations of their presumed interests identified by adults. Ultimately, these two questions can be traced back to Topolski (2008: 275), for whom the issue is ‘(…) whether our battle for the “rights” of children truly stems from altruism or rather, is it our refusal to accept our responsibility for their futures?’. Two preliminary clarifications are useful at this point: firstly, a reflection on the concept of ‘political participation’ when referring to children and adolescents; secondly, an exploration of how the subjectivity of these children and adolescents is recognised in the political and social sphere, where the notion of the ‘political’ encompasses the everyday experiences of children and adolescents.

Arendt’s problematic vehemence in discussing the events at Little Rock derived from her conviction that, in order to offer children the best possibility of acquiring independence and freedom, and of being agents of social change, they should not be prematurely exposed to the political problems of the adult world. In this regard, she insisted on the necessity of maintaining a neat separation between the public and the private spheres, in order to allow children to develop a marked and autonomous sense of self (Morey, 2012: 102). As a classical theme of feminism (Long, 1998; Pateman, 1983), the public/private distinction has been considered by many as being based on ideological distinctions (Rose, 1987: 66) and an idealised vision of the family (Okin, 1989). Arendt’s position, more explicit in The Human Condition (Arendt, 1958), strictly separates the public from the private, where the private is a space of personal nurturance and a retreat from worldly affairs and the public is the sphere of action. This approach has been heavily criticised by feminist authors (Benhabib, 1993; Butler, 2015; Honig, 2010; Prokhovnik, 1998), insofar as it participates in the reproduction of a dichotomy based on biological essentialism (Benhabib, 1993) and disregards the extent to which, in real life, children are never completely sheltered from politics, as Elshtain (1996: 23) has aptly commented. So, how to distinguish between the political action of the child or adolescent as a genuine response to environmental stimuli, and the ‘politicisation of childhood’ as a process initiated by adults who intend to act in the interests of the child in question?

As Oswell (2013: 7) has observed, the child does not always express hir ² role as agent in an entirely unitary, reflexive and aware fashion. The child does not necessarily possess a constant awareness of the fact that hir actions may have an inherent political or social character and that they might be instrumental in the articulation of hir needs or rights. Although children are able to create and maintain power relations in the context of their social interactions (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 2), children’s possibility for political action is almost entirely articulated on the subjective positions assigned to them by adults (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 2) and follows rules and schemes proper to the adults’ world. These rules require a hierarchical organisation of the various subjects based on the concept of political, social and/or juridical ‘maturity’.

This presumed ‘immaturity’ of the child as a social and political agent overlooks the fact that the acquisition of the child’s political maturity is a gradual process that needs to be accompanied by the equally gradual and parallel recognition of the child’s citizenship rights (Rehfeld, 2011: 150). An approach of constant inclusion of children into decisional and participatory processes can help for seeing children as ‘social beings’ rather than ‘in continuous becoming’ (Oswell, 2013: 40). This approach, furthermore, allows neater discernment of the extent to which the identification and definition of children’s interests are influenced by pre-conceived ideas on childhood and adolescence in general and by adults’ memories of their own childhood and adolescence in particular (Bridgeman, 2007: 9). A useful illustration is represented by debates around the ‘sexual agency’ of children and adolescents, often based on the premise of ‘enlightened innocence’ (Egan and Hawkes, 2009: 390). Research conducted in various settings has highlighted that children actively participate in the process of gender construction of themselves and other children and adults (Robinson, 2012: 267), as well as being capable of expressing sexual agency during adolescence (Överlien, 2003), navigating and problematising sexual dangers in difficult contexts (Oduro, 2012) and expressing engagement when empowered to express their gender and frustration when they are prevented from doing so (Ehrensaft, 2012: 338).

The political role of children can be clarified by two distinct models. The first model sees the child as being fully capable of being involved in all sorts of decisions that concern hir (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 3). The second model considers the political role of the child as being exercised in the daily activities of hir life in which broader social questions become relevant (Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 3). The former contains an explicit conceptualisation of ‘children’s rights’, and children are called to play decisional or participatory roles that are entirely different from those they are required to play in their daily life (Kallio and Häkli, 2011). Adults, guided by the intention of safeguarding children’s rights, may hence project onto children categories and dynamics that are proper to their own world. These may possibly be removed from the children’s daily experiences relating to their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

This disparity between children’s and adults’ perceptions of daily experiences relating to sexuality and gender may also be illustrated by the evidence for children’s and adolescents’ strong politicisation of their own corporeality. The body becomes the main site of resistance for the child and the adolescent who does not possess other resources in order to resist ‘(…) most attempts to control, manipulate and rule their lives’ (Kallio, 2008: 294). Whilst this supports the fact that the majority of the policies concerning children have as their focus the very body of the child (Kallio, 2008: 294), it also sheds light on the nexus between sexual orientation, gender identity and children’s rights. The rise of ‘anti-gender movements’ ³ throughout Europe whereby various secular and religious actors (mostly Catholic) become actively opposed to socially constructed conceptions of gender and sexuality (Korolczuk, 2017: 293), particularly when children are concerned, illustrates this critical point. This case exemplifies a transfiguration of the concept of the ‘fear of the queer child’ (Rosky, 2013; Valentine, 2008), whereby the child is considered heterosexual by default (and deprived of a sexuality in the first place) and, therefore, actions are taken to preserve the purity and innocence of the child, as well as the heteronormative order. There are, however, undeniable dangers that this battle for ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, in Rich’s (1980) terms, bears for children and for their political agency.

Raising queer children: Whose ‘best interests’?

In everyday life, parents routinely make decisions according to their children’s ‘best interests’. Some decisions go unnoticed, whereas others are heavily scrutinised, acquiring social and political, and juridical, significance. Whilst the notion of ‘the best interests of the child’ is enshrined in Art. 3.1 of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), its meaning, as well as its usefulness for safeguarding children’s rights, is problematic. Some commentators have argued that the notion of ‘the best interests of the child’ is indeterminate (Bird, 2005), subjective (Giordano, 2013) and paternalistic (Schuz, 2014). Moreover, the simultaneous inclusion in the CRC of Art 12.1 that prescribes that children should be heard on matters affecting them according to their level of maturity and their capacity to form an opinion complicates the picture even further. Are parents always able to discern the child’s best interests when the child in question is not able to form hir own opinion on a given matter?

The notion of ‘the best interests of the child’ intersects with the above-mentioned ‘fear of the queer child’ (Rosky, 2013; Valentine, 2008). In this regard, it is relevant to ask to what extent parents’ understanding of the notion of ‘the best interests of the child’ may be already inherently attuned to a conception of children’s sexual orientation and gender identity as being heterosexual and cisgender by default. Several authors (MacDougall, 2004; Rosky, 2013; Stockton, 2009; Valentine, 2008) have argued that the child is always considered to be inherently heterosexual. Moreover, this presumably inherent heterosexuality is accompanied by a value judgment that prescribes it to be preferable to homosexuality. Moreover, the child is usually seen as being inherently cisgender, thus completely obliterating the existence of the trans child. Additionally, the child is desirably seen as fitting the anatomical criteria of the female or the male biological sex, clearly denying the existence of intersex children. A corollary to this is the ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ ⁴ (McRuer, 2010) through which children and adults are seen as normal/deviant. Hence, through the lenses of ‘standard’ parenthood, the child cannot be homosexual, transgender, intersex or (dis)abled unless these categories are conceptualised as transgression from the social, biological and legal norm. These observations suggest that parents may resort to the compound of heterosexuality/cisgenderism ⁵ /biological sex/ableism when thinking about their children’s ‘best interests’.

Against this background, Arendt’s claim that children should be free to develop their own political agency is problematic. On the one hand, Arendt’s suggestion would imply that sexual politics should not be done at the expense of (the bodies of) children. In practice, this would require re-configuring her distinction of the private/public within the context of the family itself, where the child’s body and sexuality would be private as opposed to the other interactions within the family itself that could be deemed to be public. Arendt’s conception of the public/private distinction is based on a strong relegation of corporeality to the sphere of the private (Benhabib, 1993: 89; Butler, 2015: 86–87), and tends to associate the body with an impossibility for freedom because of its immediate ties with the notion of necessity (Butler, 2015: 47).

In light of Arendt’s limited articulation of the inherent political (public) character of the body, it is possible to ask how the queer child can politicise hir own life without it being politicised by others. Brighouse (cited in Rehfeld, 2011: 151) has aptly captured the tension between the child’s exercise of hir sexual political agency and the danger of becoming the pawn in the sexual politics proper to the world of the adults: ‘Children cannot come to be competent agents without some experience of agency. They must have the experience of choice before it makes sense for them to be seen as having the right to choice (…)’. Brighouse’s claim shows the existence of a productive – and potentially subversive – interstice that would allow the child to exercise sexual (and gender) agency without being subjected to the same requirements of adults’ sexual politics. The ideal site for children’s expression of their corporeal and emotional agency would be that of daily practices and experiences, given the inherent political character of children’s daily lives (Kallio and Häkli, 2011).

One interesting illustration of the way in which children’s political agency in relation to their identity and corporeality may be said to ‘organically’ develop in daily life practices is illustrated by Kennedy and Hellen’s (2010) observation on trans children: ‘Although transgender children are subjected to considerable and sustained pressure to conform to gender roles assigned at birth, what is most remarkable is that in defiance of this they still develop a transgender identity’. Kennedy and Hellen’s point illustrates that, regardless of prescriptions and foreclosure to trans children of official venues of expression of their gender, these children nonetheless politically defy social norms on gender by doing the gender they assign to themselves in a sort of Butlerian way. These observations can be coupled with Valentine’s (2008: 1076) reflections on the fact that children learn throughout their development to ‘(…) manage stigma, (…) and cope with social, education and community environments where victimisation and harassment are normative’. Thus, in partial opposition to Arendt’s claim for the need for a sort of ‘sanitised’ schoolyard, it can be argued that (queer) children already confront themselves with embryonal political decisions in the playground where they might be stigmatised or marginalised. Current debates on ‘bathroom bills’ across the United States on which facilities gender-nonconforming children and young people should be using (Lee, 2016), as well as rising debates on homo/transphobic bullying in schools (O’Donoghue and Guerin, 2017), show how politicisation becomes a sort of ‘micro-politics’ in children’s daily lives.

Furthermore, Arendt’s opinion on the need for sheltering children from political battles was guided by the underlying idea of childhood as a time of innocence and radical detachment from the contamination of adult life. The equating of childhood with innocence is a well-rehearsed notion (MacDougall, 2004: 1065) and is contiguous with the characterisation of the child as a ‘victim’ (Nakata, 2008: 22). Ultimately, these characterisations of the victimhood and innocence of children contribute to the political disempowerment of children, particularly when the ‘fear of the queer child’ is the predominant prism through which children’s sexual and gender identities are read and constructed by parents and by society at large. In these cases, the ‘best interests of the child’ principle may seek to protect the ‘perceived community and societal interests’, as Eekelar suggests (cited in Oswell, 2013: 190), rather than putting at the forefront the genuine interests of the (queer) child in question.

Children’s political practices of corporeality, sexuality and gender should be considered by adults as being legitimate expressions of their needs. Simultaneously, these practices should not become the outpost of political battles on gender and sexuality fought by adults. Hence, there should be recognition of the commonality and continuity between the sexual politics of children and adults, whilst considering them as distinct subjects (children or adults). Here, the difficulty resides in rightly balancing ‘the micro-politics of personal experience and the macro-politics of the public sphere’ (Philo, in Kallio and Häkli, 2011: 3). The child, however, becomes the object/subject of (adults’) sexual politics even when sie is not ‘queer’ but lives in a household with queer parents, as the next section will discuss.

Raising children of queer parents: The family as an ideological battleground

Arendt argued that children should be free to develop in the private sphere of the home, as opposed to the public sphere of politics. As has been discussed already, Arendt underestimates the extent to which the family can truly be said to be a private space in which the child can develop freely its political consciousness. Arendt seems to imagine the family as an idyllic place of rest and sheltering (Benhabib, 1993: 107) where parents can freely choose how to raise their children as they wish. However, the emergence of families with queer parents shows that individuals can be subjected to a high degree of scrutiny regarding their fitness as parents, and children become the hostages of such scrutinising endeavours.

Opponents of same-sex marriage and/or adoption by queer parents have traditionally argued that children living in these families grow up to be lesbian or gay and/or ‘confused’ about their gender identity (Bernstein, 2015: 325). Gender and sexuality figure very prominently in discourses concerning the parenting of children (Averett, 2016: 191). Hence, the gender identity and sexuality of the parents may be deemed to ‘influence’ the gender and sexuality of the children, thus resuscitating the above-mentioned notion of the ‘fear of the queer child’. Here there is an important tension at play between children’s presumed ‘best interests’ of being raised as being ‘heterosexual’ and parents’ interests to raise their children as they wish in the private setting of their homes. Both these principles are mediated by normative introjections on admissible forms of sexual orientation and/or gender identity.

Research has widely explored possible differences between parenting by heterosexual and homosexual parents, and traditionally depicts a positive picture of family relationships (Tasker and Patterson, 2007). Nonetheless, the concept of the ‘fitness of queer parents’ is particularly ubiquitous in most studies. Studies have shown that queer parents are very self-aware of the scrutiny to which they are subjected (Weeks et al., 2001). Here it is important to acknowledge that queer parents can themselves use the language of ‘the best interests of the child’ in order to justify their family arrangements to opponents. Research by Kane (2006) and Berkowitz and Ryan (2011), however, suggests that queer parents express anxiety over how to correctly ‘socialise’ their children in terms of sexuality/gender, for fear of being subjected to principles of accountability and assessment (Berkowitz and Ryan, 2011: 332). Sometimes, these parents tend to socialise their children (whether consciously or unconsciously) as close as possible to heteronormative, cisgender societal expectations (Kane, in Berkowitz and Ryan, 2011: 339). Furthermore, studies have also shown that children raised in queer households possess tools to navigate the disclosure of their parents’ sexual orientation (or gender identity) in different settings (Tasker and Patterson, 2007: 19–20), but do not generally appear to be more bullied than other groups of children raised in heterosexual households (Wainright and Patterson, cited in Tasker and Patterson, 2007).

In recent times, this moral panic over whether queer individuals are fit for raising children has been transfigured in the recent rise of so-called ‘anti-gender movements’. In the last two decades, these movements across Europe have catalysed the development of arguments against same-sex parenting. Originally conceptualised in the 1990s by O’Leary (Garbagnoli, 2016), the ‘anti-gender’ rhetoric has found wide resonance in the Catholic Church throughout the 2000s. These ‘anti-gender’ movements reaffirm the biological determinism of sex and gender and insist on the promotion of traditional male/female gender roles. Whilst pursuing different agendas in different countries across Europe (Kováts, 2016: 175), these movements’ questioning of queer individuals’ fitness as parents has been quite potent. The cases of the mobilisation against marriage equality in France and Italy (Garbagnoli, 2016: 194) well illustrate this point.

One leitmotif of anti-gender movements has been that of ‘protecting children’ from the incursions of non-traditional conceptualisations of ‘gender’, with successful results in the context of debates on marriage equality in France and Italy. In France, in particular, anti-gender movements have refrained from casting LGBT parents as being unsuitable, and have, instead, insisted on the naturalness of the heterosexual family (Garbagnoli, 2016: 197). In these accounts the child has been depicted as the ‘(…) innocent victim of the hedonism and egoism of LGBT parents’ (Garbagnoli, 2016: 197). During the various protests against same-sex marriage in France in 2013, children featured quite prominently in slogans, depictions and other forms (Garbagnoli, 2016: 197). This relentless focus on the ‘protection of children’ seems to display the features of what Cohen (2002) has defined as a ‘moral panic’.

Paradoxically, the more closely the presumed ‘best interests of the child’ are scrutinised by members of the so-called ‘anti-gender movements’, the easier it is for the true interests of children to be lost in the midst of a purely ideological battle. Thus, bringing Arendt back into the conversation, whilst predominantly about children, these conversations between the ‘anti-gender’ front and queer parents are really about adults’ respective conflicting conceptions of ‘family’, ‘gender roles’ and so forth. Children’s rights and interests here only appear tangentially and instrumentally.

As Averett (2016: 192) has argued, it is not the ‘[queer parents’] identity itself, but their experience of their identity in a heteronormative society, that shapes how LGBTQ people parent’. The queer family seems to become a litmus test both for queer parents’ own reassurance of their fitness to raise children, as well as for societal external scrutiny of the parenting practices of queer parents. Seeing the family as the domain of the private is almost impossible, as the very conceptualisation of ‘queer parenthood’ is an inherently political act. Here a partial parallel exists with Arendt’s argument in ‘Reflections on Little Rock’ on the idea of sheltering children from politics. In her analysis, Arendt had overlooked black parents’ strategies of resistance against institutional racism in the US in the 1950s (Morey, 2012: 103). Ralph Ellison had pointed out (cited in Morey, 2012: 103) that black parents wanted their children to attend de-segregated school not to penetrate into white American society, but to make their children aware of the life of African-Americans in segregated 1950s United States. Echoing Averett’s (2016: 191) argument on queer parents, it can be argued that the experience of these black parents’ identity in a racially segregated country crucially shaped their parenting practices. In proposing this observation, of course, one must avoid the risk of depicting queerness as inherently ‘white’, thus obliterating the existence of black queer parents who may simultaneously need to familiarise their children both with racial and sexual inequality within the society in which they live. Nonetheless, children very often become the objects of broader political battles precisely because of their unique status as presumably vulnerable members of society and also, simultaneously, in spite of this very status. Parents (be they heterosexual or queer, from an ethnic majority or minority), project their own expectations onto children and express these concerns through the rhetorical prism of ‘the best interests of the child’. Ultimately, it appears imperative to bring forward a radically new notion of ‘the best interests of the child’ which simultaneously acknowledges the inescapable political nature of parenting, as well as the necessity of providing safe spaces for children to become political agents beyond the political practices of their parents.

Recasting children’s political agency in the field of gender and sexuality: Challenges and opportunities

In this article, the author has sought to analyse the modalities, within the context of queer childhood and/or queer parenting practices, in which children can acquire and exercise political agency beyond the constraining framework of adults’ politics. Firstly, the author has looked at how the notion of ‘the best interests of the child’ is inevitably shaped by parents’ understanding of viable or unviable forms of sexual and gender identity and how, within this framework, children’s capacity for political agency and expression may be curtailed or compressed. Secondly, the author has moved onto considering how closely queer parents are scrutinised when raising children (whether they are queer themselves or not) and how expectations around proper parenting practices permeate and inform the understanding of what is in the child’s best interests. Seen together, both the queer child and the child raised by queer parents directly interrogate the delicate interplay between children’s political agency and parental authority, forcing a reflection on the production of acceptable forms of childhood that are profoundly shaped by heteronormative and cisgender canons of identity. This acknowledgment, in turn, requires putting at the centre the child with hir phenomenological experience of sexuality and/or gender, rather than privileging adults’ normative frameworks.

The question of children’s political agency in relation to sexuality and gender is mediated by adults’ own conceptions of what is in the child’s best interests. The focus here is on children’s political agency in conjunction with the ‘politicisation of childhood’ enacted by adults. Arendt’s dismissal of the political nature of the family leads to a characterisation of her contribution as theoretically inadequate to account for the necessity of finding a balance between parents’ responsibility towards their children and children’s own right to self-determination. Furthermore, Arendt’s argument against the ‘politicisation of childhood’ does not take into account how parents may have profound political motivations in raising their children that are in anticipation of the obstacles that their offspring may face.

Acknowledging parents’ (political) motivations in deciding on behalf of their children means that when legal cases involve the protection of queer children and/or children raised by queer parents, it is possible to consider children’s involvement in adults’ political struggle by bearing in mind the intersection between different forms of discrimination, oppression and institutionalised racism and/or homophobia and transphobia. Hence, whilst recognising parents’ conception of ‘the best interests of the child’ as being infused with the canons pertaining to the previously cited compound of heterosexuality/cisgenderism/biological sex/ableism, advocates, legal practitioners and social workers may be able to address the root motivations that cause parents to develop those anxieties with respect to the well-being and future of their children. Parents may tailor their parenting practices, as Averett (2016) has suggested, on the basis of what they perceive is expected of them or, as pointed out by Ralph Ellison (cited in Morey, 2012: 103), in order to prepare their children for what they perceive to be a difficult future situation in which they will find themselves. Either way, while carving out a safe space for children to develop their own political identity and agency, one should simultaneously act on the social structural issues, such as institutionalised racism, homophobia and transphobia, that permeate young lives and that may lead parents to create ‘sheltering environments’ which could reduce experiences of discrimination and/or bullying. In sum, one could argue that lessening parents’ own anxieties around their children’s lives could lead, in turn, to an opening up of the opportunities for children to truly experiment with their identities, be they sexual, gendered and/or ethnic identities. At the same time, however, parents should refrain, as much as possible, from burdening children with unnecessary political, emotional or physical challenges that colonise the child’s own political space. In this sense, reflexive practices of parenting may help adults to reflect on their own motives for producing specific narratives of their children’s ‘best interests’.

Another important aspect relating to issues around the sexuality and gender of children is how to subtract them from a type of paternalistic gaze that uses the currency of ‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 2002) as its major propellant. The pluralisation of the principle of the ‘child’s best interests’ in intersectional terms relating to race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, religion and nationality may require a more profound re-articulation of childhood beyond ideological schemata fostered by adults. A productive creation of autonomous spaces of political experimentation for children should go, therefore, hand in hand with addressing social problems that create defensiveness in the way in which parents exercise their parental authority vis-a-vis social structures and formations.