Puberty: A Playlist [Script]
“Puberty: A Playlist” is the script of a reading I gave for the End of Year Presentations of Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut) at de Appel, Amsterdam. The reading was accompanied by snippets of tracks, forming a playlist. The tracks I used are linked to the headlines of the chapters here.
For this End of Term Presentation I’m going to read a Playlist. The tracks come as snippets and the pace is a bit slower than restless. A look backwards makes a look forward. Let’s play.
So, how do we begin the playlist? Track 1 could be SoKo in 128 Kilobits per second. It could also be Akon, Beyoncé or an episode of Gossip Girl. Track one could also be the one to which the boys hit their first-of-the-day-joint behind the school. There are always multiple options for the first track, but it has to be heavily gendered. As we’re all wearing the same tight H&M jeans we need objects of distinction, objects we can build our gender identity around.
We want to be adults and we want to – Ma’am, Sir, would thou mind to fuck off please – lie to adults and the questions that accompany us on our unsteady run are all about timing. The beat that kicks in on the subway home, after getting a heart broken, skipping school or returning from running away, is super individual, of course, but mostly it is trying to be in sync with the hidden rhythms of chrononormativity. It is about making experiences in the expected timeframe; In white European Central Time in which my junior high is centered that means finding yourself, graduating from the years of predetermined adolescent fluctuation to becoming a real man or complete woman and giving racial capitalism some sense. Life before prom is life after prom, to some extent.
Dividing lives into segments of childhood, adolescence and adulthood is a rather recent concept. Until the 17th century childhood as a concept didn’t even exist in Europe. Children were tiny adults, only economically dependent on their parents. These little adults wrote minuets, traded on markets and worked in mines; they were doing more or less the same things grown-ups did. Most of them learned in groups with younger and older people and lived in all-age-inclusive communities.
Childhood was established when this communal way of living got replaced by the isolated nuclear family in the 17th century. It wasn’t only a product of this trend; from this moment in time onwards, childhood served as a means for legitimizing it. Since then children have been tied to the family unit financially, psychologically and emotionally until they get old enough to produce their own family unit. This renders the child – for feminist scholars like Shulamith Firestone – a central figure in feminist revolution.
School works as the tool to further differentiate young people into age categories and to make sure they only engage with people of their age. Teenagers who play with children are labeled “retards” or “creeps”. When the neighbor child who is only slightly older, talks to us about sex, a group of worried parents come together to defend our innocence and purity.
Adolescence, as the follow-up to childhood, emerges in medical and psychological discourse in the late 19th century. It gets constituted as the phase in life that still allows for parental influence; correction and normalization is still possible, undesirable social outcome that threatens the familial and societal genealogy, such as – I quote – “prostitution” or “homosexuality” can still be prevented.
Reese read as many blog posts as she could find on the topic. Her friend was right: The notion of queer temporality was comforting. Of course, she told herself, the flow of time and the epochs that add up to a queer life won’t correspond to the timeline or even sequence of straight lives, so its meaningless to compare her own queer lifeline to a heterosexual’s lifeline as though they were horses on the same race track released from the gates at the same moment. And that was just for the run-of-the-mill queer! Now imagine you were trans! You would have to go through at least two puberties! By age thirty, the financial ads said, you should have saved two years’ income for retirement. But at age thirty, the trans girls Reese knew held most of their investment portfolios in the form of old MAC lipstick shades they’d worn once; they spent workdays sending each other animated gifs and occasionally got trolled online by actual thirteen-year-olds.
This excerpt of Torrey Peters’ most recent and successful „Detransition, Baby“ shows how not only adolescence, but also its microbiological relative puberty, can be read as partially socially constructed. Instead of writing about the most obvious connection between transness and puberty, which would probably be hormone therapy, the protagonist of the book, Reese, reflects on lipstick as the link between the two topics. An everyday object for some, a tool for queer performativity for others. It could be a song, a magazine, a shirt or skirt.
But the struggle in puberty science to justify its discipline neither begins nor ends here. The age norms for pubescent people that have been set in the 1960s are contested by the fact that in the last decades its protagonists not only increasingly show indications of puberty earlier, but also for longer time spans. This trend weighs heavily on puberty science, as its object of concern plays such a crucial role in public moral discourse around what risks individuals in a society are allowed to take and when. Biopolitically, the antedated beginning of puberty characteristics constitutes a challenge to the government of the population. And epistemologically, puberty sciences have to justify their discipline under these new conditions. What follows is increasing intervention in young people's bodies and minds to defend the standardized practices of a whole medical profession.
Track 4: Ecstasy or: Puberty Poetics
When I sub myself to a song, give myself to the scenery it creates in a specific moment, I can see myself from above, from outside, another angle, from the standpoint of the song or the associations that come with it. Observing myself the other day, listening to the indie music my female teenage friends would cry to in front of their desktop computers, whilst teenage me sat next to them, overwhelmed, I realize I am visiting a puberty that wasn’t meant to be for me. It’s a journey into unrealized past potentials that Elizabeth Freeman identifies as able to trouble the present and as a driving force to unsettle what is referred to as straight time.
In this confusion of past, present and future it becomes apparent that the refusal to align to straight times’ straight line creates mixed feelings. Heidegger, contemplating above a photograph in Being and Time, identifies the unity of the three times as a moment of ecstasy. But for the heteronormative spectator this unity can be perceived as a shock. Halberstam writes on the Transgender Look that it reminds us that “whenever the transgender character is seen to be transgendered, then he/she is failing to pass and threatening to expose a rupture between the distinct temporal registers of past, present, and future.”
Given this evenings’ own temporal regulations, I have to cut the excursion into the also very spatial fields of queer temporality short here. What I would take away from Elizabeth Freeman’s turn towards pasts, though, is the drive to figure. Indeed, it is the alignment of discarded objects and its histories to form a persona that can make subjectivity, most visibly in drag practices. It could be a song, a thong, a lipstick or chick flick.
It could be a clock, a crowing cock, a sext, text, a poem. Through what I’d call puberty poetics, I would like to approach a concept of adolescence and puberty, that is neither an individualized one that runs risk of depoliticization, nor an abstract one that posits normativizing pressure on the young and the old alike. Authors like Stefanie Burt or Julia Kristeva point towards the entanglement of literary history and adolescence, hermeneutically, but most importantly, in terms of form. Writing can serve as a useful method to find out about the powers we have and the powers we cannot have and the shapes that our bodies and bodies of work can take – a way to figure and figure out.
Finding a way to challenge straight time, I’d like to propose poetics that consider those who are thirteen and waiting for their voice to lower and breasts to grow. Those who are forty-eight and assumed to be going through menopause by their co-workers, and those who are in their thirties, wondering what would have been, if. Those who suffer the racialized implications of the adult/ youth binary and those who are refusing to leave the stage of puberty, glamorous in the limelight.