The Child
Jules Gill-Peterson
At a particular moment in the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American culture began to sever the notion of children as an age-bound group from the romanticized figure of “the child.” That severance took a serious degree of violence to pull off. Paeans of innocence and sentimentality had naturalized dependency and property relations, and Victorians called this violent form of attachment love, whose site was the bourgeois family. This sanctification of modern, precious childhood was achieved in metropoles like London and New York City by unleashing some of the largest projects of death and alienation the world had ever seen. Poor children were worked to death in the factories. Black and Indigenous children in settler colonies were barred from the protectable status of the child through incarceration and planned genocide—a tradition that continues to this day. Little reaches more nauseating contradiction in the colonial and capitalist present than the putative care for children. The very notion of care naturalizes the material and psychic dehumanization of children as fundamentally inferior people undeserving of respect. Perhaps unbelievably, the many harms done to children in the name of care are conventionally rationalized as part of loving them. This historical domestication of children is a record of primitive accumulation: the sexualizing and racializing practices that have robbed them of their bodies, minds, and souls, covered over by the idolatry of that squeaky-clean thing we call the child.[1]
Childhood may be one of the only socially degraded statuses that, in theory, every person passes through. No wonder, then, that psychoanalysis should have discovered the apparent amnesia about it in adults. Somehow, once it becomes memory, we ironically cannot remember what it really felt like to be children in the present tense.[2] (To which we might respond, of course, who would want to remember that?) But in truth, we know that many groups of people are structurally deprived of anything like a childhood in the first place, or they experience infantilization throughout their lives. These are two of the many denials effected by the ideology of the child. Childhood is only shared retrospectively by those adults who made it out. Some of us face population-level killing projects directed intentionally at Black children, Indigenous children, disabled children, migrant children, trans children, and poor children because we are most vulnerable in childhood. From this position, we might reframe the psychoanalytic etching of trauma’s deferred structure as the practical matter of having survived childhoods that were not childhoods at all.[3] Call us un-children. It’s an ugly phrase, and I don’t know if the mark wears with age.
I have come out swinging on purpose, not out of a surplus of certainty or a defensive insecurity. The sentimental ideology around children has left critics of the concept of the child with the difficult task of convincing readers they should question deeply rooted inequities that have shaped them inside-out from birth, if not long prior. Perhaps I was primed to become a scholar of childhood because my own was so convincingly inadequate to its stated function of nurturing my growth into something desirable. Like many of the un-children I have invoked, I never much felt myself to coincide with the category. Precocity was first and foremost a response to the threats forming my environment even before I had language for them. Repeated flashes hardened my nervous system through the originary insult of being called a faggot, or a white teacher not letting my turbaned grandfather pick me up after school because she didn’t believe we could be related. With time, by sacrificing something I could not yet consciously entertain, I was able to jury-rig precocious exposure into an inverse escape velocity. In a comparably safer adulthood, I could finally say out loud the things I wanted, like womanhood. And in writing a book about the remarkable transgender kids whose childhoods many decades before mine were nothing like mine, I became convinced that the main feature of the child is to wish away the inconvenience that almost no children qualify for its embrace. Its arithmetic is the stuff of the 1 percent.
The contemporary crises of the present lay bare that inadequacy in painfully dramatic fashion. In the United States alone, we know Black children can be killed with impunity by the police. We know trans children can be forcibly detransitioned and encouraged to kill themselves; we know migrant children can be ripped from their parents’ arms and locked up; and we know grade school children can be gunned down with assault rifles. That horrific knowledge, however, does not guarantee anything will improve for those children. In fact, it seems more like each of these kinds of children must be harmed to sustain something deemed more important, like mass incarceration, the moral purity of the Christian state, the sovereign integrity of the border, or the right of white people to stockpile weapons. Buckling under the spectacular cruelty of these rationalizations, stymied by world-historical levels of income inequality and a planetary climate crisis, and fearful of the fallacy that anyone could possibly parent their way out of such a situation, the generation coming of age today is often described as trying not to have children. Meanwhile, another cohort, increasingly with the backing of the state, legally compels gestation and birthing. No one may withdraw their desire from reproduction to the inverse extent that un-children must be culled.
Such are the grim biopolitical returns of how modern childhood snaps into place in larger capitalist, colonial, and state-run systems of exploitation. What role can psychoanalysis play in deciphering and challenging this landscape? In its lush attention to fantasy, psychoanalysis could be read as the province of the child, rather than actual children. Its grafting of the romantic drama of the family form onto the social has been read by historians, for instance, as a consequence of the same Victorian grammar as the ideological figure I have indicted. Psychoanalysis seems to recapitulate history in perverse miniature, minimizing the scale of horror by confining it to the privacy of the home, the psyche, and the analyst’s office.
I would grant anyone those suspicions, having shared them at times. Yet some of the sharpest and most creative critiques of the child have been psychoanalytic. Jacqueline Rose’s exquisite study, The Case of Peter Pan, or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, for instance, shows better than any how the adult-child relation is structured by disavowal, given the former’s powerful investments of desire in the latter, “fix[ing] the child and then hold[ing] it in place.” If psychoanalysis plays a role in the mechanism of this disavowal of power and desire, we might say it furnishes its language. For that same reason, then, psychoanalysis serves the critique of the adult-child relationship from the inside, particularly by tracing its libidinal investments. There is an echo in this method of my child-self transforming her premature exposure to sexual and racial violation into critical tools for self-preservation: knowledge production as survival. Never underestimate the value of a good description of a problem. It’s just that this process, as Jacob Breslow has persuasively demonstrated, makes childhood as an object of study into something ambivalent.
The author at seven (stills from a home movie).
That ambivalence has generated immense returns for anticolonial and Black thinkers. Frantz Fanon’s sociogeny of the colonial subject is unflinching in its description of the power handed to the white child to dehumanize psychically and socially (in other words, infantilize) the adult Black subject. The white child shrieks libidinally: “Look, a Negro!” giving lie to the premise that the sheltered child is politically innocent. Fanon deploys psychoanalysis in Black Skin, White Masks to, among other reasons, demonstrate how the inferiority complex of the colonized subject is manufactured by rigging the game in advance from childhood, or better yet, as childhood. Implanting in the colonized child an ideal of Western subjectivity, from which they are materially barred, means any program for decolonization will, as The Wretched of the Earth elaborates, depend on inventing a wholly different political education.
Still, the political project motivated by psychoanalytic critique is not just another task for adults in charge of children’s care. Hortense J. Spillers’s monumental essay “‘All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race’” begins with the image of a seven-year-old Spillers sitting in church, misunderstanding a phrase with which the minister frequently addressed his congregation. The vibrant imagery she constructed around that misunderstanding as a girl, now, many years later, shows her distinct approach to the semiotic and psychic dynamic of substitution. Her theory of social transformation is not the replacement of one familiar childhood allegory for another—and her analysis activates something more than reduction to the merely psychical. Seven-year-old Spillers, in other words, doesn’t become figurative; she remains provocatively alive. “If we move back in the direction of a ‘prior’ moment, the seven-year-old in the front pew,” she writes, “we can then go forward with another set of competencies that originate, we might say, in the bone ignorance of curiosity, the child’s gift for strange dreams of flying and bizarre, yet correct, notions about the adult bodies around her.” This is neither a literal recovery nor a total fantasy. It embraces the duplicative effect of moving at once backward and forward—that signature vertigo induced by the child through its lamination of correctness onto strangeness. Spillers does what the culture that invented the child fears: she embraces that vertigo’s capacity to make by making strange.
One question Spillers explores is how, exactly, adults could meaningfully ally themselves with children’s “bizarre, yet correct, notions” instead of dropping back down the psychic rabbit hole of disavowal Rose described. Critical and creative psychoanalytic redescriptions of the child-adult relation prepare our return to the materialist project of family abolition for an answer. Sophie Lewis, one of family abolition’s most important contemporary thinkers, has observed how much the project has been abandoned by the left—no doubt because of the impoverishing internalization of neoliberal austerity. In the crass privatization of our lives, “we have hastened to reassure our distressed and outraged audiences that we aren’t anti-family,” writes Lewis. Shockingly, we say instead that “we want more family, not less!” This “capitulation” is perhaps a product of history. Although the family form continues to be the primary intimate site of patriarchal and sexual violence, it is also among the only institutions left to shield against the onslaught of capitalist crises and state violence.
It is precisely for that reason that now is the moment to reinvigorate family abolition by drawing on its strongest articulations, which, as Lewis details, are unsurprisingly those advanced by working-class queer, trans, and Black feminist movements. A central premise of that project, in her words, is that “family abolitionism puts children’s freedom at the heart of society.” That freedom would come not just through the disintegration of the bourgeois family, but through its active replacement with forms in which children (and women) are not property. Plural, communal, or collective affiliations would affirm children enjoying the right to be loved without being owned in return. This kind of uncoerced and nonprivatized care is premised on a redistribution of resources in which adults flourish, too, and in which, importantly, children’s desires and motives could actually find material outlets for concrete realization.
Dazzled by Spillers’s thinking on her seven-year-old self, I have only recently recovered enough from some traumatic dissociation to contemplate my child-self as more than the negation of who I have become. Recently, I watched a home movie of myself at the same age of seven (Figure 1). In watching, I realized that the young child I saw on screen was, to my surprise, me: loud, feminine, and impossibly confident, speaking and gesturing in exactly the ways I still do. I had been made to forget her, or to think that she never existed and had to be invented in adulthood, and I am grateful to have been reunited. But the political lesson I take from the example of my childhood is somewhat different and resolutely materialist. I had a good-enough family, with loving parents, grandparents, and a materteral network of aunties who took care of my cousins and me as a collective. But we were immigrants from India, hardened in our working-class suburb to the demand for model minority perfection and its degrading stoicism. My nuclear family unit was especially poor because my dad couldn’t work due to mental illness. And so, despite a robust family form, I didn’t grow up materially well and continue to feel the impact. What I needed, then as now, was not to get the family form right, or even to escape the ruse of the child for the knowledge of who Jules really was in her un-childhood. I needed what we all need: the abolition of the family form and its economy that infantilizes us all, not only by introducing property into our first relationships but also by forming our psyches for the task before we can say no. That need did not end because I am no longer a child.
[1] On the relation of the innocent child figure to the historical children harmed in its name, see James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); and Robin Bernstein, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2011). I invoke Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation here in the feminist and queer materialist senses developed by Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); and Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
[2] On the unanticipated meanings of the retrospective creation of childhood by adults in the wake of this amnesia, see Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
[3] For one in-depth case study of the production of an “un-childhood” as part of a broader political project, in this case the state’s targeting of Black kinship, see Dorothy Roberts, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (New York: Basic Books, 2022).