Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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Transmaturities: Gender Trouble as Tentative Analogue for Maturity Trouble [1] / Diederik F. Janssen
<1> Recent contributions to queer studies have been marked by what can provisionally be called a turn toward time, specifically time's various normative condensations around issues of community formation, most notably with respect to the family and the subculture. While the specter of time often seems suspended between elite contemplation and public imagination, the emergent rubric of temporalities, explored in GLQ's special issue (2007;13/2-3), announced a possibly radical moment in which genders can be analyzed as breaking down "over time" politically and taxonomically, perhaps to the effect that deconstructive momentum realized in the context of gender/sexuality may facilitate an appreciation of maturity as a queryable paradigm of subjectivity and identity onto itself, that is to say—rather than as a mere politicizable complication of the idea of gender.
<2> This proposal is by no means an obvious one, although questions of maturity have always complicated queer theory's battles against categorization violence. Critical engagements with "psychological development" are importantly pioneered in contexts remote from queer objectives, if also critically addressing gender's roles (e.g. Burman 2008:7,8). However the notion of maturity, developmental arrival, can be shown to have a political character of its own, as well as to inform distinct forms of rebellion. As explored below I am thinking here of practical refusals to grow "up," to be distinguished from the more conceptual rejections such as Lee Edelman's book No Future (2004), in which he elaborates his earlier contention that "the universalized fantasy subtending the image of the child coercively shapes the structures within which the 'political' itself can be thought" (1998:19). Clearly, maturational categories directly (if always contestably) inform the demarcation of social themes in terms of their politicization; they play both delimiting and constitutive roles vis-à-vis the political, the sexual, and the social. Question is whether and how rejections of such regulatory demarcations may, however obliquely, partake in the kinds of cultural and intellectual industry around and about late 20th century genders. The difference may seem obvious at first sight: envision "maturity bending", "maturityqueer", "maturity trouble", "maturity drag", "maturity play". As gender, maturity pertains importantly to the deployment of oppositional or antipolar categories (young/seasoned, child/adult, minor/adult, boy/man), encoding a range of deliberate appropriations of "developmental" time, from conservative, complicit and legislative to radical and subversive. As in queer theory, the problem lies with the cultural life of categories: what, if anything, underlies, upholds or precedes the subjectivities and identities projected by categories? Where Edelman delimits his intervention by suggesting that "the image of the Child [is] not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children" (2004:11), one is tempted to object that we see such "confusion" perpetrated all the time in everyday life, and that it is this "confusion" that renders children historical. So can radical ontologies of gender, specifically as articulated by Judith Butler's tropes of performativity/citationality, model for those of maturity? This is a question answered affirmatively with regard to age/ageing across a variety of texts (Janssen, under review). Given the administrative face of maturity as a binary, can we then productively paraphrase Butler in engaging in maturity trouble, by interposing thus: "Is the breakdown of gender [maturational] binaries [ . . . ] so monstrous, so frightening, that it must be held to be definitionally impossible and heuristically precluded from any effort to think gender [maturity]?" (1999:viii). Maturities might well behave to aged/aging bodies as gender behaves to sexed bodies. Below I will explore the kinds of data relevant for this discussion, which will have to engage with time somewhat differently than queer iconoclasms of The Child, including Edelman's (supra). Edelman seems to be focused more on time's symbolic terrorism at the gendered sites of social legitimization (sociality, reproduction, and elsewhere), [2] than on lived and relational temporality as a site of subjectivation substantially analogous to that of gender.
<3> The suggestion of a theoretical "rubbing off" of queer studies on critical maturity studies (the silliness of labels seems diagnostic) will strike many as suspect if not outrageous. If contemporary ideas of sex are premised on a baseline (rather than an ideal) of "consenting adults," however, we face the same sort of problems that faced gender theorists in the 1990s: both gender and maturity have the potential of being deployed to contain human experience by rigid oppositions, facile exclusions, easy conclusions, and paranoid politics. [3] As a way of doing battle with some of these potentials, gender was divorced from biological sex, sex emancipated in turn from exclusively biological semantics, gender was re-read as citation, and genders were pluralized away from strictly polarizing applications. These suggestions did not dispense with gender, but brought its cultural efficacy to the fore; they freed up its narrative structure from the shackles of determinism and self-evidentiality.
<4> The "Queer" interlude, specifically, pivoted around literature scholars' appropriations of language theory to re-imagine the mobility of gender as a regulatory idea and as a constitutive, "citational" function. However, as I will explore below, gender is highly coterminous with the politics and rhetoric of development. As gender, metaphors of development underlie many of modernity's tales of privilege and exception. Even current critique of American masculinity is crucially situated at the site of boys not becoming men (e.g. Janssen 2009). We can also productively consider the Victorian child as an "innocent" Other, more generally the modern encoding of subjectivity as a delicate intertextuality of mature strivings and immature origins. The cumulative work by literary historians of this structural knot—among them James R. Kincaid, Catherine Robson, Kevin Ohi and, avant la lettre, Morris Fraser—highlights "the urgency for queer theory of formulating a critique of contemporary ideologies of innocence" (Ohi 2005:8). As Ohi explains, innocence often entails an eroticized tension between the mature present and "an improbable innocence [ . . . ] an origin uncontaminated by the vicissitudes of language and desire, a pure beginning of autonomy uncorrupted by commerce with its outside" (6). Thus, building on James Kincaid, Ohi sets out to examine "the punitive effects of erotic innocence on other marginalized sexualities" finding that "the articulation of erotic innocence structures contemporary sexual ideology in general" (7)—a finding quite similar to Edelman's, as well as Sylvere Lotringer's, where he observes: "Childhood constitutes the last anchor of our culture. If childhood is lost, what is morality to be based on?" (in Baudrillard 1993:111).
<5> If we are to discuss maturity as a contestable classification practice, we will need to explore the troublesome interface of immaturities and maturities in psychology, arguably modernity's key text. While this exploration requires much more space than afforded here, it can readily be appreciated that sexuality fulfills the role of privileged grammar of modern maturity. This role can be studied from Sigmund Freud's seduction and Sándor Ferenczi's confusion of tongues to the late modern paradigm of sexual abuse. It seems that modern maturity figures forth both the idea of a necessary, constitutive sexualization and an unenlightened (variably: presexual, pregenital, precoital) subject to which any turn, or any return, produces the most acute state of disorder, confusion, and pathology. Recent theoretical work, however, is critical of this familiar emplotment. Where Ohi centralizes aesthetic rapture, psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche generalized seduction as a primal, "fundamental situation in which an adult proffers to a child verbal, non-verbal and even behavioural signifiers which are pregnant with unconscious sexual significations" (1989:126). In making sense of such significations, we find ourselves caught in an interpretative duality between delayed causality and retrospective attribution, between determinism and hermeneutics. Laplanche suggests that sexuality's problem invites a temporal distinction, a recognition of an epistemic distance between moments: between the moment of violent inscription of "enigmatic signifiers" and the delayed work of their translation. Signifying sexuality not only requires a look across time, it is itself profusely temporizing, it inscribes time. I agree, with John Fletcher (in Laplanche 1999:12), that Laplanche's generalization "may have the scandalous effect of building a structurally inescapable perversity into the adult-child relationship" (ibid.), a scandal as deserving of theoretical assessment as the scandalous Freudian child that perverted sex so thoroughly at the outset of sexual modernity (Foucault 1978:153; Ohi:5).
<6> By exploring the implications for maturity (the sedimentations of time) as a classificatory and identity-forging device, I do not seek a dispensing of its logic or its mandate, but a way of looking at its permutations, its substance, its histories, its uses, its technologies, its paradoxical politics. This novel project, as homosexuality in the 1980s, requires an ethnocartographic (Boellstorff 2007:19) basis—a looking for thematic emergence across cultures and scenes—before directions for theory building can be discerned. Hence, the direction taken in an early essay by Dillon (1987) on "erotic temporality," which prefaces many of the ethical problems hinted at above, strikes me as prematurely theoretical for lack of ethnographic anchorage. Dillon's phenomenological proposal entails discernment of "temporal horizons", ethically compelling "synchronizations" and what are called structures of anticipation and sedimentation, but ends up insisting on conventional maturational stages rather than unpacking them (41,43). Moreover, where comparative sociologists like Stephen O. Murray have worked extensively to classify worldwide "homosexualities" by their gender- and age-"structuring" (and end up with hundreds of pages of evidence on age-structuring: Murray 2000:23-211 and elsewhere), we can significantly extend this typological project by signaling that gender and maturity typically intertwine in cultural idioms (Janssen 2007, 2008a,b), and that a co-examination of cultural-historical idioms of maturity/gender and erotics requires both a broader and a more refined ethnocartographic view than that of "homosexualities" (however operationalized). I will pursue this argument in paragraphs 17-24.
<7> (How anthropology and philosophy should intertwine as theoretical commitments (e.g. Geertz 2000), or should allow dialogue with Laplanche's Lacanian interventions, is beyond the scope of this paper. I do stress that this discussion is necessary for an ethical assessment of "doing maturity" within the purview of critical sexuality studies.)
<8> First, how does maturity resemble gender? As does gender, maturity may encode "the erotic" ambiguously and simultaneously in terms of identity and desire, terms that are thereby wedded to the cultural mandates of the code. Whereas Laplanche warns that "The adult world is entirely infiltrated with unconscious and sexual significations to which adults themselves do not have the code" (1999:130, italics in original) we need to see how this plays out at the cultural level of sense-making. We need a complementary focus on time, then, not as intellectual or psychodynamic conundrum but in terms of a conscious situated presence, in terms of its being made conscious and made present. Lifetime, as gender, figures forth a powerful grid of human possibilities; it allows formation of politicized, again often binary, categories and their being deployed over universalist and identitarianist lines; and it aspires to conflation with biological categories, away from performative arguments. Social time is often studied as crosscutting or complicating the primary constellation of gender/sexuality, not as a discursive formation but as a biological destiny that can only be rejected, evaded or denied as such. For instance, according to Lynda Hart, "Daddy fantasies become increasingly prominent in lesbian pro-sex writing [while moreover] 'incest' has gone mainstream or [is certainly] making the scene" (2001:292). Insofar "incest" is to be read here as inviting intersectional perspectives "within" the field of lesbian/gay studies (generational time, kinship), intersectionalists rarely allow time to become at equal theoretical footing with coeval dimensions of imagination. Thus "lifetime" is used to specify gender/sex theory or expand its reach, not vice versa. Maturity/biographic time, however, often rivals, or at least complicates, the cultural primacy of gender in the semantic projection of sexuality: insofar as both sex"uality" and most applications of "queer" tend to refer to the erotic in terms of gender/sex (Brooker 2003:212-3;229-32) they articulate centrist constructions obscuring rival centrisms, for instance those informed by temporized constellations.
<9> How marginal has time been that it now seems to surface with some prominence? Time, from a general standpoint, is not just about creeping "homonormativities" or the commonsensicality of age stratifications, but also about gender theory's accessibility for rival biographic and political plots—including temporal plots. As argued, discussions of time have mostly been delimited to gender mobility—as gender's developmental grid, existential obstacle or obnoxious normative ploy. Illustrative is UK's Section 28, a 1988 amendment to the United Kingdom's Local Government Act 1986 proscribing local authority to "intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended [sic] family relationship" (cited in Epstein, 2000:387). The debate was widely construed as being about curricular content, not about curricula as overbearing temporal frameworks and thus as interlocking with "family" and school as chronotopes: "points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse" (Bakhtin 1981:84). Kinship, gender and age, in this reading, are potentially domesticating vectors, where "category mistakes" in all three are construed as destructive to both domestic and psychic coherence.
<10> English vernacular and clinical lexicons demonstrate the distinct conservatism of classifying the erotic in terms of the physiology of complementary sexes, rather than obviously temporized factors such as fertility and generation. However, age now informs sexual pathology as gender once did. In many late modern readings age disparity is subject to a remarkable contraction of opinion, dissociating matters from avant-garde theory and restraining critique. The plot today should be analyzed in terms of a tendentious, constitutive reiteration and normalization of "sexual development." However time's sexualization is not always unambiguous, nor is its gendering always secure. Pedophilia, for instance, will strike many as interesting only where it is criminal and "sexual" rather than philic; what kind of orientation it is, is mostly considered resolved by contemporary determinateness in deciding what kind of disorder it is. Time introduces all sorts of (gendered) trouble, but there is a definite limit to what is being admitted as troubling. Interestingly ephebophilia, monstrous jargon but possibly helpful in mapping a phenomenon seen throughout world history ("age-stratification" according to 1980s anthropologists), is entirely ignored in Occidental psychiatry and legislation. The latest controversy is hebephilia, which seems intended to bring the definition of mental order in line with that of legal convention. [4] Paradoxically, any hint at its salience as a domain of human sexuality seems to be suppressed even by a rejection of academic protocol. [5] We are tempted to conclude that time as primary erotic signifier, in the contemporary Anglo-American order, is either absent or abject; even as a secondary signifier in fictive scenarios it is considered with ultimate suspicion. Time's eros, in other words, is massively disruptive to the 20th century paradigm of sexuality, so disruptive perhaps that anthropologists rarely theorized it as ambitiously as third genders, alternative sexualities, crossings between gendered categories, and indeed, incest in terms of kinship. Where they did, age informed "structural" and classificatory interventions, its "structuring" merely upholding primary political plurals ("homosexualities").
<11> Although the erotic and identitarian contemplation of the generational nonetheless clearly enjoys a mainstream appeal [6] it seemingly also pre-dates and rubs alongside the by now familiar itches of GL marriage and adoption—turning entire communities into potentially "real" Mummies and Daddies, thus generationalizing GL life. But reproductive futurity (Edelman's phrase) is only one aspect of a whole hetero-temporal order. Indeed a heavily overdetermined generational-sexual idea of maturity has proved essential to gay viability: homosexuality became politically sustainable by being normalized within a "consenting adults" paradigm. The 1957 Wolfenden Report envisioned a sexual agency conditional to consent which in turn was made conditional to ascribed maturity albeit a maturity initially scheduled later than straight maturity; full legitimacy was eventually delivered to a universalist chronometry (majority rather than adulthood) and thereby to a culture of representations that came to replace the anxiety-producing term sex with the responsibility-preaching adult (adult is obviously not the legal pendant of "a minor"). This sociological and medico-legal adult was to inform the Freudian paradigm of sex as a unilinear process of growth, however subjected to grandiose simplifications. We see here a privileging of a flat product of definition over precarious processes of (dis)identification. Another dimension of this appropriation is the early- and mid-20th century normalization of homosexuality as a "stage", and later, the somewhat frenzied sociological modeling of homosexual adolescence in the late 1970s and 1980s as a succession of "milestones".
<12> Homosexuality's opportune siding with often uncompromising developmental regimes of readiness and age-appropriateness to this day remains largely unpacked. This is not to say these regimes are dispensable, it does mean to say that their imperative status is rendered beyond discussion in whichever debate. To say that developmental psychology shows normalizing traits is not to say we need to get rid of it as soon as possible.
<13> Where most nosologists and radical theorists of homosexuality concur in recognizing developmental narratives as governmental crux, a tension exists between critiques of categorical logic and of developmental logic. In this light, is not analytically distinguishing adult doing gender from pre-adult "trying on gender" (Williams 2002) or from childhood "gender play" (Thorne 1993), in fact complicit with normalizing developmental models and timelines of subjectivity, or even introducing such timelines? Indeed, is thinking about time and maturity a mere late footnote to the contemporary business of re-deconstructing and pluralizing genders and sexualities, or may we be witnessing a hierarchical ordering of taxonomies in the process of being overturned?
<14> These questions may be, with an eye on works such as Halberstam's Female Masculinity and In a Queer Time and Place, best examined in the sub-cultural experience. Halberstam's work is momentous in approaching the theme of temporality by speaking from countercultural niches, other than strictly from mainstream politics, canonical literature or the textual realm. Maturity importantly pertains to "taxonomical complexity in our queer histories" [7], as Female Masculinity attests for gender notions within these histories. I am thinking here of a supplementary perspective along those exact lines of criticism, a perspective that foregrounds continuities between 20th century identities and performativities as increasingly taking their cue from maturational and developmental lexicons and narratives. In part this is being realized in the very loosely demarcated field of queer pedagogy, where, generally speaking, "queer"-centered and pedagogy-centered theories are allowed to rub against the other. What may result are alternatives to widespread consensus over the idea, the stylistics, and ultimate rhetorical and cultural efficacy of maturity as a trope for identity, politics, and desire.
<15> Halberstam's 2003 article on "Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives" (reworked as a chapter in her 2005 book) hints at a number of analytic directions. Most productive I think is a proposed intervention into subcultural theory, specifically a reconsideration of the exclusive encoding of subculture as a temporally adolescent and functionally oedipal scenario. In sum, "This challenge to the notion of the subculture as a youth formation could on the one hand expand the definition of subculture beyond its most banal significations of youth in crisis and on the other hand challenge our notion of adulthood as reproductive maturity" (2003:321) Interestingly, Samantha Holland, while introducing her 2004 book, Alternative Femininities, seems to find herself at the same point. Coming from a focus on subcultures she documents "a notable silence on the experiences of adult women who continue to negotiate a[n adolescent] path between being 'alternative' and being feminine," which in this book translates to the (mostly un-queer) tension between "Growing Up and Staying 'Freaky'" (1).
<16> In short: subcultural alterity, gender deviance and sexual dissidence tend to be both restricted and conflated over temporal lines, but a restriction and a conflation realized in specific cultural spaces. I would add to this discussion the observation that beside inviting contestable functionalist and normalizing significations, transgressing normal time in many ways can also provide a structuring device—a syntax—for gendered and erotic dissidence. A familiar plot for instance describes stubborn claims to tomboy legitimacy when such legitimacy is surpassing its pubescent ultimatum. That is to say, tomboyism invites honorary labeling of young girls and mothers' own girlhood (e.g. Jones 1999:125-7) but it constitutes a source of unease if persistent after puberty. Immaturity, more generally, goes back a long way as the master narrative for the abjection of the entire spectrum of mundane masculinities—from the white lager drinking hooligan to Afro-American boyz, and from ladettes in Britain and tomboys to urban bachelors watching porn and playing videogames well into their twenties. The crime of gender is the crime of not growing up. From ethnopsychoanalysts to mythopoets and feminist macro-sociologists, the history of masculinity studies is to an important degree the history of maturity politics (Janssen 2008a). Maturity is militantly coextensive with the kind of masculinity hardly anyone can hope to live up (or grow up) to. Historical and ethnographic evidence for de devaluation and disqualification of women and other sexualities as immature is so extensive, that one wonders why queer theory has not interfaced more fully with the realm of critical pedagogical (beyond postcolonial) views of development.
<17> As with gender, maturity trouble will have to be traced along subcultural but also literary, popular and intertextual lines of distribution. Peter Pan for many seems the quintessential historical text for backtracking modern interpenetrations of sexuality, gender and maturity. According to Garber's chapter in her Vested Interests, asking for the many ways why Peter "is a woman," he may well be "a kind of Wendy unbound, a regendered, not-quite-degendered alternative persona who can have [not necessarily still have] adventures, fight pirates, smoke pipes, and cavort with redskins" (1992:168; cf. Wolf 1997). The Barrie story Garber and Andrew Birkin (1979), among others, present is as canonical as it is problematic—is P.P. (or indeed JM Barrie as its alias) a gender tale told in terms of the conundrum of growing up, or an ungenerous coming-of-age tale transfigured as, or simply turning out to be, a gender spectacle? In many ways of course this is the ultimate formulation of the queer nag: are the sexualizations and genderings of life-time, even its seemingly dissident sexualizations and genderings, ultimately a domestication of possibility or simply courageous attempts at passing time?
<18> In pop psychology, we are warned, Peter Pan quickly turns from being "a spiritual asset to a psychological liability," "all about white male self-pity" (Garber:183). Yet, signifiers like girl and boy reverberate across ethnic, geographic, sexual, gender and fetish spectrums interacting with white, reproductive masculinity. The use of boy/girl as well as grrl/grrrl in feminist, gay/lesbian, and pop cultural lexis is well established. In the gay/lesbian scene we encounter bois, boydykes, boidykes, dyke bois, grrldykes; in the trans spectrum we have tombois (Boellstorff 2003), ladyboys, tranny boys. In GL and SM / BD contexts usage of terms is most clearly relational, more often than not pseudo-generational: daddy/girl, daddy/boi, daddy/boy, sir/boy, mummy/girl, mummy/boy. The realm of Adult Babies/ Daiper Lovers (AB/DLs) only partially interfaces with aforementioned linguistic appropriations. On the whole literature on these scenes is often auto-ethnographic (written in what anthropologists are inclined to call the confessional genre) yet sparse (Hale 1997; Maltz 2002; Neevel 2003) if not exclusively clinical ("paraphilic infantilism," "adult baby syndrome"). [8] As with gender, it is a key challenge to see theatrical enactments and recitations of maturity as sites of effective parody of the "roles" it codifies. Within the intimate yet pervasive imperatives of identity, maturation often acts as a generic plot of reparation and redemption, a plot extending well beyond the marketability of clinical strategies and self-help slogans. The notion of age-play seemed to have been coined by an American hypnotherapist but was widely adopted as kink lingo. [9] Subcultural and clinical accounts of selfhood tend to concur in a therapeutic affirmation, by way of dramatic rehearsal, of what would be the architectural underpinnings of productive selfhood, its interior design and the "archetypal" messages it contains. The direction of this narrative function can readily be assessed by looking at the success of the "inner child" formula in 1990s American victimology, America's widespread nostalgia for "initiations" and their ritual efficacy, and at the extensive idiomatic resonance of "stolen," "reclaimed" and "nurtured" childhoods.
<19> A seemingly bisemic notion wedding genders to maturities, boy is a classic—if often transitory—redemptive signifier for lesbians, trans-men, and gay sex workers (cf. Janssen 2007). It seeks to articulate identities directly at odds with equations of masculinity as hetero-maturities and hetero-fertilities, informing claims to a boi lifestyle. Yet do tropes of youth and boyhood materialize into subversive practice? It seems at times fruitful to reference Halberstam where she mentions (with reference to Dick Hebdige's 1979 work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style) the possibility of stylization, in lieu of overt ideological narrativization, as cultural ideology (2004:159). Agrees Sarah Trimble (2005), the current linguistic appropriation of boy by New York bois (Levy 2004) is not based on age but on
a playful accessorizing that insists upon disrupting the teleological continuity between 'boy' and 'man.' The [lesbian] boi announced by New York [Levy 2004], then, is in dialogue with queer communities as well as with mainstream constructions of boyishness. As such, he is in complex negotiation with hegemonic masculinity. Bois emerge into the paradoxical position of subverting the ontological 'reality' of normative masculinity even as they negotiate its imperatives in an effort to remain/become legible as masculine subjects. (Trimble:75)
In a generous reading, notions such as boy and man (bisemic and opposites only in a restrictive reading) may seem to become freely floating, relational vectors not contained by any clear-cut reciprocal, temporal, sexual or gendered directionality. Or rather, as vectors they would continue to point to gender, sexuality and maturity, but not by appointing any one as a fixed topography of any other. After all, if the "good" maturity is authenticity rather than age/gender-"appropriate" agency, and the fashionable gender style seems to be boyishness, what authentic boyishness is there to reference? This would make my tentative suffix trans in terms of maturity, just as trans and cross in terms of gender, fundamentally contestable.
<20> Theorists so far have mainly excavated drag as gender play, while little can be found on age/maturity drag or age/maturity dynamics in gender drag, or implications for what we for the time being might call "age theory". A recent book on children's cross-dressing (Flanagan 2007) surprisingly does not explore this theme either, although a range of films lend themselves for analysis of cross-age dressing. [10] Still, drag may be a suitable context for studying the problem at hand. Ethnographies suggest childhood erotic escapades across cultures more often than not feature age role play (parental, mentoring and doctoring themes), while same-sex boarding schools have always provided the stage for passionate friendships that take age, kinship and gender as concurrent and eroticized plot elements. As observed above, temporized roles by classificatory adults take many forms in diverse scenes, some requiring a well-defined counter-role, others allowing many counter-roles, while still others seem to prefer therapists and psychiatrists as eligible counter-roles. Psychiatrists have long argued that age-role play may befit courtship routines, at other times it is theorized as an expression of regressive tendencies, at still others it would be symptomatic of over-identification with past life stages, or else suggestive of sublimated or transposed libidinal tendencies. We are looking at a fundamental indeterminacy in how time beckons the analyst: whether one should be theorizing some alter-persona, some "adaptive mechanism," some preferred scenario, or some preferred engagement with a scene or subculture. There are also problems of legal status. Sexual ageplay is one of the most controversial aspects in digital environments such as Second Life. [11] It was reportedly widespread until Linden Lab cracked down on it in 2007 (Duranske, 2008:205-6). Needless to say the issue complicates a range of issues from representation and social ontology to the policing of apparent life stages, abject scenarios, avatar agency, virtual mobility and post-human landscapes. [12] These issues of virtual personae and pseudo-embodiment importantly interact with ancient debates over pornography as criminogenic, "sexualizing", and "objectifying".
<21> In yet another guise, Hebdige's stylization-as-cultural-ideology may be present in a specific form of age drag: Japanese Lolita (gosurori) borrowed eclectically from historical European styles of juvenile clothing, arose from a late 1970s fringe but rapidly went mainstream and now even feeds into Euro-American lesbian/queer fashions. In the early 1970s, young female students began experimenting with different styles of handwriting, infantile slang, cutesy fashions, which left theorists suspended between considering it as generational, adolescent symptom of social decompensation, as deliberate, ironic commentary to the demanding constructions of mature womanhood, or as catering to a Japanese male fetish. Lolita, very briefly, exists in dialogue with the wider phenomenon of kawai'i or Japan's eroto-aesthetics of cuteness, a decidedly interesting cultural paradigm with obvious art historical, feminist, gender theoretical, and queer anthropological stakes (e.g. Kinsella 1995; 2002; 2006). Kawai'i has been theorized as a Japanese way of "a collectivization" (Aoyogi 2000:313) of maturational struggles, but equally as "a method that young women employ to put off the inevitable adjustment to their roles as wives, mothers and family caretakers" (Kinsella, Cuties in Japan:242-3), and again elsewhere, as a commercial structure of "feminine," "maternal" consumer empathy, a structure that "blurs identification and commodity desire" (Merish 1996 quoted by Yano 2004:56).
<22> The radical moment seems lost at least where paraphernalia such as Hello Kitty are being marketed to women with the prospect of becoming "better office ladies (O.L.s)" and better mummies, promising stress reduction and ways to consumerize mother-daughter and corporate kinship relations. Performance artist Denise Uyehara doesn't pass judgment. In her commentary Hello (Sex) Kitty, her interest was in "playing with the notion of cuteness and not label it as weak, or totally good or bad. It's one of many facets of who we are" (Inoue 2002).
<23> Most apparent may be the contestability of any singularizing politics of maturity, certainly of ethnopsychoanalytic and feminist models that almost unanimously agree on Oedipal and post-feminist anxieties of Japanese salarimen (blaming their overbearing mother) or else on mundane female adolescent anxiety as the ultimate historical motors behind kawai'i. Kinsella concludes that even when reducing Lolita to male representation, "a convincing theory of the phenomenon in its entirety has not been forthcoming" (2006:66). Kinsella does offer an audacious analytic excursion to the cross-racial drag of black minstrelsy in pointing to common elements of the grotesque, of caricaturized infantilization and sexualization, arousing both anxiety and fascination. The Japanese Lolita seems to align with manga characters such as bishōnen [pretty boy], their fandom variably theorized as allowing female escapism as well as lesbian refuge through cross-embodiment in a utopian fantasy space that is anywhere-but-here (Welker 2006; McLelland 2000). Both are phantasmagoric creations, delivering the frisson of the oscillation between identifications and complementations, be they phallic, maternal, puerile, sororal, or somewhere in the interstitium.
<24> I am reminded here of the "boy actresses" from Greece, imperial China, Edo Japan and Renaissance stage (Garber 90; Peterson 1991; Volpp 1995:2-3; Johnston 2004; Barbour 1995:1007; Bryan 2005:iv, 11). While there are palpable differences across historical stages [13] cross-dressing boys were Playing with the Beard (the title of one dissertation on the subject) in both the gender and the age connotation of the word beard—both connotations imply prosthetic properties, put-on characteristics, a heuristic of display. Frequently, also, boys were considered to out-perform women in staging desirable femininities/feminine im/maturities, or embodying liminal genders/maturities. Unfortunately, other than the boy's proficiency to deconstruct, inhabit, emulate or impersonate comic or tragic genders his skill in dealing with maturity remains undertheorized in this body of literature. Gender and maturity are hardly close competitors for critical attention; rather, maturity is almost always used to accommodate and "position" analytic, historical or public configurations and politics of gender. Just one of many questions: can maturity allow layering of identities, as Michael Shapiro (1994) argues happens with regard to gender when boys impersonate women?
<25> In paragraphs 17-24 I have hinted at a variegated sample of practices around often hyper-canonical images of maturity, or rather, maturity's various and variably sexualized relational poetics. Some take place in distinct contexts of (cyber-)subcultural signification; and more often than not we seem to be encountering the same range of paradoxes and ambiguities we see staged and realized in drag subcultures that are historically identified primarily as gender-focused. I would argue these ambiguities ultimately constitute the possibilities for play, identities, roles, and desires to coalesce beyond the analytic reach of singular theorems of linear development, theorems that say that I can't be what I never was, or that I can't abandon what I embraced yesterday. However, as argued, dissident temporality is often reduced as taking place within the analytic territory of gendered sexualities, replicating the gradual Western divorce between gender and age pivoted politics, and rehearsing the momentous subjugation of life staging to gender as an index of sexual variance and social viability.
<26> We see this suggested in the ways the more obviously sexualized play with generational themes are rationalized and the often paranoid ways in which they are made legible to uninitiated outsiders. In all (ostensibly white) cyber-scenes organized around aforementioned maturity/gender practices, interestingly, one encounters an apparently pressing need to psychoanalyze, demarcate, legitimize, and normalize age players' focus on temporality away from "any historical child" as in any way implicated or signified in the affair. As suggested, "child" in these exculpations is strictly admitted if historical, through a reliance on pop psychoanalytic (even pop musical) notions ("father figure", "absent father") and white feminist tropes of "trauma" and "healing." The always central and often singular disclaimer that age play "has nothing to do pedophilia", however, seems as unproductive as it seems untenable. Both crystallizations of modern sexuality obviously depend on maturity as emplotment device, thereby confirming a range of historical observations that identify maturity as constitutive of the modern rubric of sexuality and of what it allows as its legitimate "expressions" (see also Janssen 2008b).
<27> Pedophilia's function as the horizon of intelligibility, at least in the vernaculars of outrage and vigilante mobilization, breaks down if we insist on its partaking in this constitutive ploy. If anything, sexual viability has a hard time analytically containing its horizons. At least those hailed by pedophilia's psychiatric ramifications seem to be cast in a-cultural taxonomies halfway between those of sexual orientation and those of mental disorder, while even medical consensus maintains pedophilia "ultimately" entails dysphoric developmental selfhood, an identity issue, an "overidentification" with a past Self, a transmature core and an unfortunate (usually "compulsive"), "sexualized" expression of that core. [14] Here we seem to have the same interplay of temporal scripts, the same impasses and taxonomical struggles, as in the age disparities considered to take place within the legitimate niches of gendered sexualities. However, and understandably, where the issue received some lip service (Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia among others) in early negotiations of LGB inclusivity, it has been almost entirely ignored in the queer 1990s. [15] Instead it is usually reduced to a management problem, through an alarmist politics over consent. [16]
<28> This has left "sexuality" with morally absolute discontinuities, for instance between homosexual pedophilia as the utterly unthinkable moral antipode of heteromasculinity, and homosexuality as an identitarian option that has become so complicit with hetero-productivity it required queer analysis to resuscitate and revalidate its past articulation of dissidence. This schism was in fact in place (although in reverse) in ancient Greece, and again where "Uranian" pederastic poets opposed Karl Heinrich Ulrichs' call for "androphilic, homoerotic liberation at the expense of the paederastic" (Kaylor 2006:xiii, n). [17] Martha Vicinus however has suggested that the figure of the adolescent boy (defying both second-wave-feminist constructions of pedophilia as well as mid-20th century "consenting adults" ontologies) once articulated no less than "the coming of age of the modern gay and lesbian sensibility: his protean nature displayed a double desire—to love a boy and to be a boy", the boy being "the defining, free agent who best expressed who they were" (1994:91, 92, 94, 100). This episode of identification with (rather than mere idealization of) boys would occur because in the framework of Victorian fertility and biology, anxiety-producing sameness over lines of gender necessitated an "accentuation" or "exaggeration" of difference elsewhere—age differential for men, while "for lesbians it was the visual difference encoded in the 'boyish' androgyne". The boy articulated "a superior, spiritualized disdain for contemporary materialism and progress" and by implication rendered "happy, long-term relationships" immaterial (94).
<29> Surely, the boy as an object of investment is hardly marginal in what in the 1980s was explored as worldwide "types of homosexuality". [18] The myriad of ethno-historical cases all seem to defy the labels of ephebo-philia and of homo-sexuality although they are almost always categorized as informing the latter. Guiltless scholarship requires strategic typologies. We might venture that the record thus compiled amounts to a demonstration that no single Victorian genealogy of the boy may be necessary or sufficient to account for the seeming universal interplay between gender/sexuality and maturity. During the 1970s the Western boy continued to be aggressively claimed, variably as a project of sociological rationalization rather than Selbstdeutung [self-analysis]: an occasion for theory, developmental models, "critical pedagogy" and "inspired" political mentorship rather than constructing "a spiritual self-portrait" (94). Gay recollections came to constitute personal and political momentum rather than a psychological model of the self, a politics of origins and belongings (Probyn 1995). Interestingly, the narration of queer sociogenesis or "history" proved of powerful metaphorical utility for the narration of post-Stonewall gay psychogenesis, notably in recapitulationist terms (Gordon 2005;1999). The personal trajectory of the gay adolescent would rehearse the struggles of "the queer" throughout the centuries and decades, with identity and rights providing both historical and personal closure and fulfillment. As Savin-Williams admits, "Gay adolescence came to be what we researchers wanted it to be - what we were" (2005:23).
<30> Infant/child/adolescent/boy/girl/teen have variably been considered reclaimable tropes for the Self. Late-Victorian and Edwardian queer readings of the youthful "Urning", some of them contemporary to G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence (1904), deployed Hellenistic images of boys with the prospect of educating and regenerating a corrupted heterosexual culture, as Da Silva documents in his 1998 dissertation entitled Transvaluing Immaturity. Comparably in the 1970s French philosopher René Schérer called for a puérilisation of adult sexuality (Schérer 1974). For Guy Davenport young sexuality amounted to a postmodern utopia—variably "as a bucolic interval; as a core human experience; as an idyll the adult must endeavor to recover; as a means of interrogating ideologies; and as a stage of vitality primitive to the conceptualization of taboos" (Furlani 2007:124). However, childhood and adolescence are surely also concoctions of the developmental-psychological industry even today used to sort, infantilize and disqualify genders and outlying scenarios of identity/desire (here we re-encounter Edelman's iconoclasm). The same problems are in fact at work for contemporary New York's lesbian bois; as Trimble notes, boi's radicalism as yet exists in the realm of the potential.
<31> We note, to summarize, an almost total restructuring of, shall we say, the boy as ultimate maturational Other (however sometimes equated with 'the adolescent' or 'the child'), from elite poetic reference point in ancient Greece, to a Victorian metaphor for the self, and onto 1970s gay/lesbian theories of, and 1990s queer narratives and metropolitan appellations of, the Self. It came to operationalize nonconformity as a psychosocial trajectory, forever oscillating between 'developmental' Other and 'developing' Other, that is to say: variably catering to discursive and ethical strategies that define maturational disparity (the pedagogical, the generational) as the ultimate erotic text, and identity as coterminous with maturity, and same-maturity as the nemesis of Eros. To be a boy, to play boy, to love a boy, to teach a boy, to be a boy again, and to be again the boy that never was—these various interpenetrating possibilities present an idiom of studying the erotics of both gendered and pedagogical/generational vectors within the Occidental, certainly also the Oriental, landscape. I see this confirmed in a number of recent works that take up boyishness rather than manliness as an heuristic of cultural agency. [19] A replacement of "boy" with "girl" in the foregoing sentences seems historically problematic; still, girl has certainly been an insistent trope across modern and contemporary political, "racial" and erotic registers. Regardless, examples offered above may suggest that transmaturational practices more often than not interpenetrate transgender practices, and/or vice versa; more specifically, they consistently complicate distinctions between identities and desires. To approach the various subcultural strategies (only mentioned here) one may want to take note of the caveats offered in historical, ethnographic and cultural research (only sampled here).
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Notes
[1] An early version of this paper was read at Recent Trends in Queer Theory, Seminar with Judith Halberstam organized by the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, March 25, 2008. Discussants are hereby acknowledged for their input. [^]
[2] The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory, panel held at the MLA Annual Convention, 27 December 2005, Washington, DC. See PMLA 2006;121:819-28. [^]
[3] I will have to refrain from discussing the notion of consent here, which is a historically pivotal matter, but inessential to the present theoretical exploration. However, for observations, see Janssen (forthcoming). [^]
[4] Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2009;38(3), 317-350. [^]
[5] In the case of Bruce Rind, peer-reviewed work has triggered "congressional condemnation" in 1999. [^]
[6] According to another mid-1990s observer incest is "our [American?] latest literary vogue" (Roiphe 1995). Compare Micciche (2004). [^][7] Interview with Halberstam ("Masculinity Without Men"), Genders 1999;29, at http://www.genders.org/g29/g29_halberstam.html. [^]
[8] I scanned the following corpus for the mentioned dynamics: the 2-volume Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (Dynes, 1990), 3-volume Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America (2004), Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture (2008), 4-volume MacMillan Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (2007), 2-volume Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (2003) and Continuum Complete International Encyclopedia of Sexuality (2004). Apart from such subjects as "pederasty", "ageism" and "aging", the harvest of on-topic entries is 1 ("Daddies" by Dennis Allen, Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, 2:361-2). [^]
[9] "Age play" was reportedly coined by hypnotherapist Sybil Holiday working on "erotic age regression" for "paraphilic infantilists." See William A. Henkin, 1997, American Academy of Clinical Sexologists Clinical Monograph 4 on 'Infantilism: Clinical Diagnosis and Practical Explication'. See also a chapter in Gates (1999). [^]
[10] Including Ang Pagdadalaga Ni Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2006) and Wild Tigers I Have Known (Cam Archer, 2006). More complex usage of age is found in The Tin Drum / Die Blechtrommel (Volker Schlondorff, 1979) and, more obscurely, Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Shuji Terayama, 1971). [^]
[11] http://secondlife.com [^][12] In a communiqué Linden includes among "objective criteria" to decide whether an avatar "appears to be a minor": "whether an avatar has child-like facial features, is sized as a child, has clothing or accessories generally associated with children, and whether, based on the circumstances, an avatar is speaking or acting like a child". Ken D. Linden, 'Clarification of Policy Disallowing "Ageplay"'. blog.secondlife.com, November 13th, 2007. In 2005 a separate "teen grid" (ages 13-17) was introduced. [^]
[13] Comparative studies include Pronko (1998), Hyland (1987) and Liao (2004). [^]
[14] Arguably the first and most penetrating analysis is Fraser (1976). Compare the various arguments put forward by Kincaid (1992) and Robson (2001). [^]
[15] An arguable exception however may be the work of Australian historian Steven Angelides. Yale university's 2004 event, Regarding Michael Jackson: Performing Racial, Gender and Sexual Difference Center Stage, even though its title would suggest otherwise, did feature some recognition of the King's apert temporal transgressions. An illuminating challenge of images vs. tales was the legal and media ramification of the 1960s work The Boy: A Photographic Essay (Eds. Georges St. Martin & Ronald C. Nelson, 1964, New York: Book Adventures) found to be in the possession of MJ (possibly an early 1980s gift by a fan), which was seized from his Neverland bedroom in 1993 and reassessed in 2005 in terms of its possible "propensity toward child molestation" (MSNBC, April 29, 2005). [^]
[16] A recent example of this is Lisa Ruddick's talk, "When Pedophilia Calls Itself Queer", Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago, November 18, 2008. [^][17] Kaylor opposes an approach to the Urianians as subculture (v-vi). [^]
[18] A passing note here is reference to the centralization of the boy in Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae (1990:111, 115, 117, 118) and in Germaine Greer's more recent and underadvertized art historical work The Beautiful Boy (2003). Indeed, and to repeat my earlier argument, why homo refers to symmetric genders and not for instance to age parity is an historical, and increasingly interesting, artifact. Maturities (the plural) are only secondarily mobilizing in the historical scheme of taxonomizing Occidental sexualities, which seems oblivious to a wide variety of Middle Eastern and Australasian contexts, and to medicolegal priorities seen today in the Western articulation of this rubric (i.e. "the minor"). [^]
[19] Examples include Mavor (2007) and Turley (2004). [^]
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