To Be or Not to Be an Adult, That Is the Question

In 2015, the ballyhoo over the phenomenon of so-called adults reading young adult fiction prompted Mavis Reimer and I to co-write an editorial entitled "YA Narratives: Reading One's Age." I write so-called adults, because no one really seems to know what an adult is. If the remarkably weak arguments of those on the side of the "adults-should-read-their-age" debate are not evidence enough, the increasingly popular category of "New Adult fiction" as a genre distinctive from YA and Adult fiction signals further the uncertainty around the question of when childhood begins and ends, and where young adulthood fits into this picture. After all, New Adult fiction targets the late teen/early twenties market, the rationale being that individuals who fall into this age range are conspicuously missing from Adult fiction. The ubiquity of capital letters in both descriptors of target demographics and debates about reading one's age indicates that the dominant culture, at least in North America, where many of these debates originate, values the separation of people on the basis of whatever stage of life it might be possible to corral them into. With separation-by-age comes differential-treatment-by-age, and not just socially. When one breaks the law, for example, it is important to know which laws will be applied—those designed for adults or those designed for minors.

The aftermath of the school shooting that occurred on 14 February 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, functions as a reminder of just how political these kinds of differentiations are. When the young survivors of the shooting stood up to demand stricter gun laws, many refused to acknowledge them as young adults, dubbing them "children" instead. This discursive move on the part of those who considered themselves "adults" was meant to consign the survivors to a space that, in this context, defined them as ignorant and therefore incapable of exerting political agency. The moniker was effectively an attempt to disempower the survivors. "Children" became a derogatory label in the wake of a tragedy in which fourteen students and three staff members were killed and fourteen others wounded. Demonstrating an impressive familiarity with the ways in which the language of childhood is manipulated for political ends, the survivors turned the adults' strategy against them, placing the burden of the change for which they were calling fully on the adults. This is a remarkable move when one considers that children's and young adult literatures tend to place the burden of change on young people, as if older people bear no responsibility for the future.

In this editorial I approach moral panics around reading one's age from a different angle than Mavis and I did in 2015, reflecting on the precariousness of claims to adulthood. I then return to the child/adult divide through a reading of the tumultuous fallout of the Florida shooting. I argue that it was precisely many adults' belief in the rigidity of the line separating childhood and adulthood that the survivors of the shooting manipulated toward their own ends, showing just how fundamentally unstable both concepts are. Looking at the event from a very different angle, however, brings into relief the unequal distribution of victimhood, suggesting that whether or not one is deemed worthy of protection is profoundly complicated when one considers the role that registers such as sex, class, race, and ethnicity play in debates about gun violence in the United States.

What Is Adulthood Anyway?

Despite my age, and having successfully accrued many of the traditional markers of adulthood recognized in my culture, I wonder if I am an adult. As I often tell my students in my Field of Children's Literature course, I feel as though I'm still waiting for adulthood to happen. This raises the question: is adulthood something that happens to a person or is it something a person achieves? If it's something that happens, did I miss that magical moment when I crossed the threshold from childhood to adulthood? Did I cross over when I...