The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

Trans(cending)gender through Childhood

167 If one is not born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig so famously argue, then one is not really born a girl or boy either. In fact, one is not necessarily born a child. Ever since Philippe Ariès posited childhood as an invention of modernity, childhood studies has argued for recognizing the state of prolonged protection (and sometimes fetishization) generally ascribed to Western youth as relatively constructed, class bound, and historically varied. Most of the world’s young can’t afford what many in affluent nations take for granted as universal: early years of total dependence, security, innocence, extended play, and compulsory education. When we start to recognize the adult-serving ways in which youth have (seemingly arbitrarily) been constructed by an essentializing adult consensus, we can then look, as childhood studies does, at why and how we are complicit in a protracted segregation by age that allows us to idealize youth while appeasing our own dissatisfactions with adult social order. Though the romantic legacy of idealizing youth has for the past thirty years been blasted by skeptical guilt over self-serving nostalgia and over the desiring and wounding of “the child,” there are some qualities of romantic childhood that are worthy of preserving, especially the tendency to frustrate sexed and gendered binarisms. Gender, like childhood, is a social imaginary defined by secondary lack (child is not adult, female is not male). Existing solely as relative negations, each has the potential to frustrate the very binary they bring into existence. But unfortunately, the critical trend is Trans(cending)gender through Childhood Susan Honeyman 168 Susan Honeyman to continue binarizing gender even when its binaries have been potentially decentered—treating neuter positions as countergendered rather than as transcending gendering itself. Joan W. Scott has explained that gender was initially a concept that allowed the vocabulary necessary for recognizing social construction. As a “social category imposed on a sexed body” it “offers a way of differentiating sexual practice from the social roles assigned to women and men.” Likewise , childhood has emerged in scholarship as a cultural construct so that the imposition it represents for young people to whom it is applied can be more keenly discussed. Yet gender “refers to but also establishes the meaning of the male/female opposition,” and paying attention to the marginalization of childhood reifies adulthood. The very concepts meant to combat essentializing can’t seem to entirely avoid essentializing themselves. Diana Fuss asks, “Can there be such a thing as ‘free space’ in a strict antiessentialist view?” From one perspective, this is not possible because childhood , along with adolescence for that matter, is one of the most generalized social positions, usually essentialized by those who have long since been adults and cannot speak for the marginalized young with any verifiable accuracy or political neutrality. But from another perspective, which is more relevant to my argument here, it is possible because if we recognize the essentializing inherent even in constructivist views, then we must recognize that our discourse falls silent at its source of focus and that to inhabit that silent social sphere is at least to (knowingly or not) resist the self-deluded but well-meaning attempts of adults to buffer the forces of an ageist hegemony. As Sarah Chinn remarks in her chapter, by undoing binaristic thought, “the figure of the child can help us out of the nature/nurture, born/made debates that so often bedevil discussions of sexual and gendered identities” (151). In many ways, the romantic child prefigured the postmodern “end of gender” as an unproblematic, useful social category. If generalizable, the romantic child could be described as the neuter child. If not representing the end of gender, childhood at least makes a free space before gendering becomes imaginable. For centuries, childhood has been vicariously relished (by those frustrated with adulthood) as an opportunity to put the oppressive gendering of sexual maturity temporarily on hold, resulting in figurations that embody the absence of gender. One problem for feminist and postfeminist theory has been the seeming necessity of recognizing (and thus heteronormatively binarizing) gender in order to understand gendered oppression. But in res- Trans(cending)gender through Childhood 169 urrecting the neuter child from a romantic past, childhood studies, complementing transgender and queer studies, can theorize youth (albeit idealistically ) as a position without gender, transcending the pesky essentializing binary of male/femaleness altogether. Take, for example, Francesco...