Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post
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Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960s US Ethnic Literature and Culture DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By James K. Harris, M.A. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Martin Joseph Ponce, Advisor Dr. Lynn Itagaki Dr. Jian Chen Copyright by James K. Harris 2017 Abstract Adolescence has always been a cultural construction. The designation of a separate space apart from the presumed innocence of childhood and the myths of autonomy and responsibility that come to define adulthood is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. As such, adolescence bears the traces of the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation that attend so much of the period that calls itself “modernity.” My dissertation asks how writers and artists of color imagine themselves into the archive of coming of age narratives in post-1960s US literature and culture. In thinking about the importance of identity in the period following the advent of nominal civil rights, I offer the “long(er) civil rights movement” as a way of resisting the move to periodize the struggles through which difference has historically accrued meaning in the US nation- state. Each chapter centers around a “technology,” the academy, the body, the entertainment industry, and the internet, which is essential to the formation of adolescent identity in the post-war era, alongside a key term in the lexicon of American culture that accrues added meanings when filtered through the experience of difference. Ultimately, I argue for understanding the liminal space of adolescence as a dynamic metaphor for writers and artists of color to work out questions about the meaning of difference and the concept of progress. My first chapter, “Becoming Excellent,” places Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy: ii Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa side by side to unpack the racialized valences of “excellence” inside the American academy. I read these two memoirs as overlapping, and at times competing, accounts of the fraught and often invisible labor involved in becoming “one of the good ones.” The second, “Becoming Trans,” considers the advent of trans identity in the context of questions about desire, and metamorphosis. I turn to Octavia Butler’s sci-fi epic Adulthood Rights as eerily prescient in its understanding of both the increasing value attached to trans identity and the very serious risks of belonging simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The third chapter “Becoming Deviant” examines to two more recent films, Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow and Dee Rees’ Pariah to ask what currency terms like Independent Black and Asian American have on the marketplace of contemporary cinema. I argue that the emergent value attached to non- normative, or deviant, cinematic types can be understood as a part of a larger emphasis on the optics of multiculturalism and the performance of inclusion. For the final chapter, “Becoming Digital,” I ask what cultural labor the “digital” performs as a mediating concept in postwar understandings of adolescence and innocence. Here, I pursue a two- fold strategy of both offering a materialist account of the infrastructure underpinning the technological revolution often shorthanded as “the digital age” while also attending to literary and creative works, Sarah Schulman’s The Child and a computer program designed to simulate a virtual child for the purposes of soliciting potential predators, that ground these issues in human-scale stakes and consequences. iii Dedication For Lindsay iv Vita 2010................................................................B.A. Liberal Arts, Ohio University 2012................................................................M.A. English, Ohio State University 2011 to present ..............................................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: English v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iv Vita ...................................................................................................................................... v Fields of Study .................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ................................................................................................................... vii Introduction: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference..................................... - 1 - Chapter 1: The Academy: ................................................................................................. 30 Becoming Excellent: Inventing the “Good Minority Student” in Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy Chapter 2: The Body ......................................................................................................... 76 Becoming Trans: Desire and Metamorphosis in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites Chapter 3: The Entertainment Industry ........................................................................... 122 Becoming Deviant: Difference and Cinema in the Information Age Chapter 4: The Internet ................................................................................................... 165 Becoming Digital: Imagining Sex and Adolescence in the Information Age Epilogue: The Struggle is Long(er) ................................................................................ 211 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 221 vi List of Figures Figure 1 - "Sweetie" ........................................................................................................ 203 vii Introduction: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference “…You’re not asking yourself the real question that America needs to decide once and for all. And that question is: how old is fifteen, really?” -Dave Chappelle, For What It’s Worth By the fall of 2016, America’s Broadcasting Company (ABC) had finally hit on a winning ratings formula. Following a few years of steeply declining revenues,1 the network was finding its stride. The winning combination proved to be a healthy dose of the idyllic multiculturalism coalescing under the banner of “ShondaLand”2 and a kaleidoscopic array of family sitcoms, each centered around a distinct modality of difference. And so, that fall found ABC with a lineup that neatly packaged gay (Modern Family), Black (black-ish), Chinese-American (Fresh off the Boat), disabled 1 A situation surely not aided by the Writer’s Guild of America strike from November 2007 to` February 2008. For more on the Writer’s Strike, see Johnathan Handel, Hollywood on Strike!: An Industry at War in the Internet Age – The Writer’s Guild Strike and Screen Actors Guild Stalemate (Online: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011). 2 For signs of the arrival of ShondaLand into popular culture consciousness, one need look no further than the formation of the “ShondaLand studies” area of the National Popular Culture Association. While the term officially refers to the television shows created by Shonda Rhyme’s production company, ShondaLand, it has accrued a wider resonance as a way of talking about difference, desire, and the politics of multiculturalism and race in television. For more, see Treva Lindsey, et. al, “‘I woke up like this’: Desire and Respectability in ShondaLand” (presentation, ShondaLand Symposium, Duke University, Durham, NC, January 19, 2015). https://fsp.trinity.duke.edu/projects/shondaland-symposium. (Speechless), (white) female (American Housewife), and working-class white (The Middle) identity into lucrative consumable bits, separately but equally united under the flag of “network.” It was a strategy for incorporating difference that had already become familiar to ABC’s parent company, The Walt Disney Company, which had spent the previous two decades desperately trying to recast its image away from the anti-Semitic legacy of its beloved founder.3 Though retroactive posturing would find Disney claiming Pocahontas and later Mulan as having always already been part of their vaunted “Princess” lineage, in 2009 the company decided to go all in on injecting diversity into the lineup with the release of The Princess and the Frog, and to far greater fan-fare, Tiana, the first Black Disney Princess.4 These images of an increasingly diverse plethora of lifestyles remained a stark contrast to the network’s news coverage, consumed as it was by stories about the ongoing abuse and murder of black teenagers at the hands of police officers5 alongside those of 3 For more on the troubled history of Disney and difference, see Jason Sperb, Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence, and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), and Eric Avila, “‘A Rage for Order’: Disneyland and the Suburban Ideal,” in Popular Culture