Queer Theory Is Kid Stuff

QUEER THEORY IS KID STUFF: A GENEALOGY OF THE GAY AND TRANSGENDER CHILD by JULIAN GILL-PETERSON A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-Newark Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in American Studies written under the direction of Professor Frances Bartkowski and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ Newark, New Jersey May 2015 © 2015 Julian Gill-Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Queer Theory is Kid Stuff: A Genealogy of the Gay and Transgender Child By JULIAN GILL-PETERSON Dissertation Director: Frances Bartkowski This dissertation departs from a question generated by the present: how has the child become gay, or transgender? Its four chapters trace a genealogy of these two children that contextualizes their genders and sexualities in a broader recalculation of the political, legal, and medical value of children’s bodies to the United States since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While queer theory and transgender studies, limiting themselves to retrospective narratives of childhood, have been able to understand the child only as symbolic or as a proto-memory of an adult subject, this dissertation approaches the child as a living body and a contested national resource bound to histories of eugenic medicine, policing and incarceration, and the struggle between the state and the family over children as unfinished persons. The first two chapters broach the gay child through the history of bullying and juvenile delinquency, first under the law and in schools, before looking at cyberbullying online. The third and fourth chapters provide an unprecedented history of the transgender child that focuses on the 1960s, while scholars have assumed there was no transgender child before the 1990s. While the gay and transgender child have become recently visible through their apparent newness, “Queer Theory is Kid Stuff” makes the case for critically assessing how their bodies incorporate the horizon of value invested in children to define human life and its viable futures. i Acknowledgments This dissertation is indebted to an incredible network of mentors, colleagues, interlocutors, and friends. My dissertation committee has guided this project from its earliest stages: my deepest thanks to Ed Cohen, Jasbir Puar, and Whitney Strub. I am very lucky to have had Fran Bartkowski serve as chair. In American Studies I am thankful for support from faculty at all stages of this project and my doctoral studies: Susan Carruthers, Kornel Chang, Jason Cortes, Ruth Feldstein, Belinda Edmondson, Laura Lomas, Tim Raphael, Beryl Satter, and Timothy Stewart-Winter, in particular. Jyl Josephson and Rob Snyder, as Program Directors, have supported my work immensely. Thanks also to my expanded “cohort” in Newark: Asha Best, Taylor Black, Janessa Daniels, Sara Grossman, Stephen McNulty, Shana Russell, and Erica Tom, in particular. I will forever be indebted to the incredible Georgia Mellos for making American Studies possible. Dean Kyle Farmbry has strongly supported the work and professionalization of graduate students, for which I am grateful. I also want to thank all of the students I had the privilege of teaching at Rutgers-Newark. Elsewhere and everywhere, I would like to thank the many people who have taken the time to read pieces, think with me, provide mentorship, and give feedback on my work: Aren Aizura, Jamie Skye Bianco, Patricia Clough, Liz Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Rebekah Sheldon, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. I count many fellow travelers in graduate school and beyond as faithful interlocutors and good friends: thank you, especially, Marissa Brostoff, Benjamin Haber, Summer Kim Lee, Chrissy Nadler, Stephen Seely, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, and Hella Tsaconas. ii The research for this dissertation benefited from the generous assistance of the staff of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, particularly Marjorie Kehoe, Phoebe Evans Letocha, and Tim Wisniewski, as well as the staff of the Special Collections branch of the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA, the staff at the Harvard University Archives, and everyone at the Rutgers University Libraries. I want to thank Carlos Ball in the Rutgers School of Law for help with legal research and journalist Laura Wexler for generously sharing her time and research. Funding for this dissertation was made possible by a Graduate School- Newark Dissertation Fellowship, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women (IRW), the Program in American Studies, and the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies. A dissertation is a trace of a living body. My joy and gratitude, then, and always, to my Mom, Dad, and Sebastian. To Erin. Yes, the dog and the cat, too. And without comparison, to my fellow J. By way of dedication, I mark my very special debt to Jiwan Singh. iii Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation iii Acknowledgements iv-v Table of Contents vi-vii Abbreviations viii INTRODUCTION Queer Theory Is Kid Stuff 1 Queer Theory’s Sexual Pedagogy of Children On the Genealogy of Children’s Sexuality Queer Childhood and the State of Nature The Growing Body of the Child: Race, Gender, and Sexuality Chapter Outlines CHAPTER ONE America, the Bully Society: Race and Sexuality, Punishment and Prevention 43 Bullying as a Form of Juvenile Delinquency The First Generation of Gay Millennials Safe Schools and the Prison to School Pipeline The Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights and Bullying Prevention Programs Conclusion: From Subject to Population, From Figuration to Data-Set CHAPTER TWO The Unruliness of the Cyberbully: Governing the Sexual Child Online 83 The Invention of the Cyberbully The Cyberbully Under the Law: Modes of Punishment Facebook is a Mall: Spying on Children Online Conclusion: Transactions of the Child’s Body CHAPTER THREE Assembling the Transgender Child Since the Nineteenth Century: Sex, Eugenics, and the Endocrine Body Introduction: Reframing Two Cases 118 Biology and Hormones: Life’s Bisexuality in the Nineteenth Century The Political Body and the Body Politic of Endocrinology The Foundation of Clinical Pediatric Endocrinology in the United States Conclusion: The Racial Memory of Sex CHAPTER FOUR The Technical Invention of Gender and the Postwar Transgender Child 156 Hermaphroditism and the Acquisition of Core Gender Identity Treating Children as Transsexual in the 1960s Conclusion: Reframing Puberty Suppression Therapy iv CONCLUSION About That Kid Stuff 192 Works Cited 197 v ABBREVIATIONS ACMA The Johns Hopkins University, Alan M. Chesney Medical Archives, Baltimore, Maryland HV Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts MSA The Maryland State Archives, Court Records for Baltimore City, Baltimore, Maryland UCLA The University of California Charles E. Young Library Special Collections, Los Angeles, California vi -1- There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became —Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass -2- INTRODUCTION: Queer Theory is Kid Stuff This dissertation departs from a question generated within the historical present: how has the child become gay, or transgender? In making the question untimely, it asks after the value invested in children and childhood, as well as how forms of value are precisely incorporated through and as the body of the child, and the concept of childhood. How are values understood to condense naturally, or perhaps with great difficulty, into measurable categories like gender, sexuality, and race, grown and cultivated, with immense optimism or anxiety, in and out of the flesh of juvenile life? The field of transgender studies has yet to broach the question of the child beyond the descriptive or sociological, and still less to theorize it as a concept.1 Queer theory, on the other hand, has so far largely produced one kind of child, really a proto-gay child, beholden to a sexual pedagogy and a fantasy of a queer state of nature. Both of these projects need to be problematized in the present, when, increasingly, children are understanding and presenting themselves to the adults in their worlds as gay and transgender in the present tense of their childhood. The child figure, to which any discussion of the child is 1 Defining what constitutes “the field” is already to risk imposing more order than is perhaps in keeping with transgender studies’ critical disposition. Nonetheless, transgender studies does seem to be undergoing a moment of unprecedented field formation—this dissertation is certainly self-consciously included within that process. There is to date no in-depth study of the transgender child in the humanities. There are one or two social scientific articles that look at transgender children in the present day (see the third chapter for more on them). However, they are not preoccupied with theorizing the child in relation to the category transgender. As the third chapter explores in greater detail, moreover, they have too readily assumed that the transgender child is an incredibly recent offshoot of adult transgender subjectivity. The genealogy presented in this dissertation completely revises the assumptions of that work. Since there is not an available literature on the child in transgender studies beyond the descriptive or sociological, this introduction focuses on the child in

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