What Is the Now, Even of Then?

What are we to make of the unexpected future in which we find ourselves? With this open question, we framed “Child Matters,” a conference hosted by Indiana University in 2015, in celebration of the recent efflorescence of work in childhood studies. Across the twentieth century, of course, the child and the future circled each other with close reciprocity. Planning and conducting this conference, however, we came to realize that the concept of the future has changed in this century. In this age of potential extinctions, the question of the future is no longer primarily social or even exclusively human; in the catastrophe of climate change, the future can no longer be counted on to serve as a blank backdrop for human life. It asks us, instead, to reckon with new forms of temporal change. Will plastic objects “outlive” Time, if human time expires? Increasingly, the drama of the plastic water bottle projects its own futurities. Chronology falters. Time grows stranger.

The child, to be sure, has been a creature of chronology. Built on the assembly lines of the last one hundred years, the child now stands for a future out-of-date. Therefore, we propose that the study of the child find new concepts. The task of recalibrating our theoretical instruments and object relations is one that we undertake in this special issue. We offer the now not as a displacement or dismissal of the future but as a mutation of our attention: toward the unique strangeness of childhood as of today. Indeed, the most striking dimension of the “now” that titles this issue is that it has been anything but static or rooted in a stable present. When we first conceived of this issue almost three years ago, the gay child still felt oddly new, and the transgender child still ghostly. The utter disregard for refugee and undocumented children and the killings of African American children by police were not new phenomena—both have long and complex histories—but it was not a certainty these children would soon occupy such a central place in battles over definitions of the local and the global, the national and the international. Some question of the future inheres for all these children, but something else about their irruptive force inside the “now” commanded our attention a few years ago, as it does today. The children of the twenty-first century are making what counts as the now move ever more quickly, without much time for us to catch our breath. Through their play in the remains of rapidly obsolescing narratives, the figures of children we’ve collected in this volume deform what we thought we knew about the past as they forge new modes of speculation in the present.

Perhaps oddly, then, thinking the child now also means to move orthogonally from an emphasis on futurity to an interest in the historicity of the present. Here queer studies might engage more robustly with the fields of children’s literature, childhood studies, and the history of childhood. Anglo-American childhood studies has investigated the production of modern childhood as a form of idealized shelter meant to grow the gap between a person’s birth and their adulthood. By taking children in the Progressive Era off the streets, out of factories, and placing them into mass schooling or institutions for juvenile delinquency, childhood was constituted as an ostensibly empty innocence based in deferral and delay: of work, of sex, and of civil rights.¹ Children were then assigned the vital task of directing our consumption, of leading the economy toward a fully consumer mode of demographics and leisure. This childhood for the twentieth century was deeply, doggedly gendered, with the meanings of innocence for boys and girls shoring up the boundaries of domesticity and the desired, but difficult to induce, heterosexuality that was supposed to be childhood’s end. As early as 1970, Shulamith Firestone had identified the innocent child as the thin scrim of ideology covering the multiplex effects of dependency. Childhood, for Firestone, is just another name for heteropatriarchy. Robin...