The Anti-Child
Temporal shattering and the liberation of children.
There are many things I am currently extremely sick of, most notably, I think, disclaimers — those surrounding feeling, breathing, being, articulating, and above all, desiring. I want to think about children but I mustn’t think too hard because I can’t have them: the circumscribing of choice (construct upon construct) painted as its necessary and physical limitation (upon construct). I think it was Celine Nguyen’s piece on research as leisure that pointed to the strange tendency of encountering an idea once and then noticing it everywhere, the natural-feeling gravity of longing for more, more of the same, finding and ravishing saturation by mutating it into clarity, which, of course, it is. I have been thinking a lot about children lately, which I suppose I always am, but I suppose more specifically, I’ve been thinking with and reading texts that specifically frustrate and distort the forms in which I have been imagining children and the Child.
Most (un)surprisingly, Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto, about humans’ relationship(s) with dogs, upended my own understanding of our (adults’, society’s (insofar as ‘society’ itself is constructed only as a matrix of participating agents, from which children are often deliberately and/or presumptuously, at best, excluded)) children. Particularly, drawing from Haraway’s interrogation of what we owe to dogs, I’ve been thinking more about my own previously-presumed longings (desires) on the behalf of children, which necessarily means on the behalf of my past (whatever that means) self — an impossible presumption, and a kind of impossible solidarity. This definitional lacuna in imagination, in liberation is perhaps not necessarily a hindrance in the path to children’s (and everyone’s) liberation as such, but more accurately in and of itself a neutral (though not lacking in weaponization) condition of struggle. We might refer here to Avgi Saketopoulou’s admittance (description?), in Sexuality Beyond Consent, of language as necessarily faulty as a container of every liberatory aspiration, every creative progression — a condition of its nature that need not be an obstacle more so than a unique landscape to be traversed.
The thing with childhood is that every one of us has experienced or is experiencing it; this universally direct stake is however overwritten by its inherently temporary nature. When a condition of subjugation isn’t immovable, one is tempted to simply wait it out, especially when that’s what one did themselves — the kind of urgency experienced by first-hand suffering is usually delimited by physical restriction, biological limitation, financial-economic subjugation, legal prevention, and the age-old magic of patriarchal-capitalist naturalisation, which leaks into every individual’s thinking and forms a seemingly never-ending osmosis with their self-formed matrix of exchange, each producing itself and each other with the violence of coercion and submission in perpetuity. In short, children cannot liberate themselves in the conditions the world has created for them; those who (primarily) produce and maintain these conditions are largely not interested in doing this liberatory work for them.
This is evident across every kind of discourse, but the one I’ve been interested in lately is an inclination towards discarding the (imagined) desires and preoccupations of children as inherently trivial and unnecessary, alongside a refusal to engage with any seriousness with questions about delegitimizing the tools that are used in their oppression. Schools of thought like anarchism that question institutions such as schools are met with increasingly ungenerous interpretations, accused of wanting to make populations illiterate, while discussions about childrens’ desire to choose their names, their clothing, and how they are perceived are dismissed as self-evidently unimportant when they clash with contradictory desires of their parents’. Children raised with more up-front choice about their gender since birth (the use of gender neutral pronouns, the encouragement of fluctuation and openness around clothing and other forms of presentation) are diagnosed as unquestionably facing harm — the idealised Child, described deftly by Samuel P. Catlin as “an object of custodial, political, ideological, and finally libidinal contestation between parent, teacher, employer, state”, then, becoming a scapegoated ideal victim that embodies what’s at stake across all right wing discourse and ambition, whether or not it’s claiming to be based on “left” ideology.
In Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, the narrator grapples with a kind of inevitability that she’s trying to time out of — and eventually does. I wept at parts of this book, especially the passage on how anti-depressant medication reshaped her perspective and remodelled her way of feeling, and I flinched at others, where the narrator went seemingly in circles, over and over, asking herself the same questions through seasons of her life, railing against the conditions that made her do so but submitting to them to some extent regardless, in a kind of permissive kindness to the self, the sort that can quickly and easily turn rotten.
I found Motherhood’s characterisation of this particular preoccupation as a feminised (if not inherently feminine) way of thinking and being thought of somewhat abrasive, but the book’s push and pull of deep subjectivity and its inwardness made me forgive myself the lapse in submitting to it. Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now, in contrast, discards gender almost wholesale as a mode of analysis in the theorising of gestation, its products, and its consequences, and she does so without compromising the heteropatriarchal and, importantly, nationalist and casteist ideology as a primary subject (or target) of her interrogation and imaginings-against.
The production of individuals is of course the deepest necessity for the (re)production of ideology: the source of why each ideology of power-seeking fascism seeks a counteractive, if not equal then opposite, genocidal technology of eradication, a counterweight to its imaginative expansion, a supposed purifying of its circulatory waters. This centrality of newness (personified as the mythologised Child across cultures of domination, from white supremacist to Hindutva enthnonationalisms) to conservative ideology, from which bleed the very institutions that circumvent the agencies of children, then complicates the procedures of its production. Genetic purity (an analog for caste-based purity), as it is understood by these institutions and their defenders, is not simply a tool for prescribing lineage, belonging, and endogamic wealth-sharing, but a method of producing reality itself: a house for ideology to be embodied within, a body that holds both meaning and perception in its very being, a personhood so wholly committed to the rules laid out before it (by virtue of the totalising appropriation of control of children’s agencies conferred onto their socially-appointed caretakers). In children lies the potential for and realisation of the literal expansion of ideology, a process that both contains and reproduces the mechanisms with which this ideology acquires expansionism (biological, social, political, geographical) as its core tenet.
Mothering is gendered labour. The production of children is a social imperative, a biological possibility perversely rewritten as destiny. Desiring, of every sort, occurs within this framework of limitation. Children are limited by temporality in this same framework: preoccupied with their oppressions and their imperatives before being absorbed into capitalism under the new name of “worker”. And then made to occupy a purgatorius position in the absence of their ability to fulfil this task — as the infantilization of adult subjects (the widely overlapping groups of students and young women, perhaps most notably) proliferates, I’m constantly pushed to ask, if it’s bad to treat adults “like children” (and it is), then what are the conditions that make it permissible to treat children in this way? What subjectivities allow for the removal of agency, for the paternalistic dictation of moral codes, for the ceaseless, naturalised appropriation of decision-making power?
One of the most visible modes through which this line of questioning has come to public light is the increasing extent to which children in the US are being denied healthcare. This includes trans children being denied access to puberty blockers and other lifesaving medical care, as well as bans on abortions, which affects people of many ages, but, like most oppressive legalistic structures, affects children more. It is not a new observation that those most interested in placing these limits (put generously) on the wellbeing of children are conversely also interested in protecting a certain kind of wellbeing for a certain kind of child (or Child). This includes the forced violence placed upon children born to parents who would have preferred to have abortions, to parents who die in or after childbirth in direct results of neglectful and eugenicist medical conduct, children forced to carry pregnancies that they don’t want and/or are not physiologically capable of bringing to term, children who are forced into horrendous danger through the denial of medicine — all so that the idea of a specific kind of (white, affluent, morally produced) child can be ‘protected’. The Child, after all, contains the future. And it is worth noting that the thing that actually contains and provides any potential future is the natural world, which is of course reduced by this ideology to a caricature of moralised decoration.
A beneficial struggle for children then must resist a converse or similar kind of imaginative hegemonization around a particular mode of childhood. In contrast, however, a more fractalled, resistive, expansive understanding of childhood (and its many meanings) might provide a useful compass to its agendas — a kind of anti-Child that resists classification, a familiar touchstone of modern feminist thinking, in that it posits a socialisation that upholds its very self-agented mutability as the core of its subjectivity, and the core of its liberatory potential.
My fervent, deeply held commitment to the protection of and commitment to children is both abstract and not: I was abused as a child, in a way that was less harmful than what a lot of child abuse victims have faced (another disclaimer), and yet I carry it with me everywhere, no matter what. I was in many ways the kind of Child that people want, and yet the marginalisation of childhood itself forced the anti-Child outline onto me — someone messy, unwilling to uphold the ideology forced onto them, resisting, in whatever limited form possible, the lies they were fed about what the world is and how it must work. This anti-Child is also both appropriation and not — I am not them, and there’s no future in which I will be, but there is a past in which I was. This temporal shattering of prioritisation and limitation must also hold the center of movement — on that rhizomatically shifts across more than just time, but backwards and forwards, sideways, inside, outwards, upending more than just power and belief, but the things we (and it is us all) uphold and nurture and fetishize as truth.