The “violence” of being misrecognized
Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed wrote an open letter in response to Grace Lavery’s “Grad School As Conversion Therapy” which in turn was a response to a thing Reed wrote. I wouldn’t bother you with that labyrinth except that the Reed-Castiglia one is a fine read.
The reciprocity and collectivity of language seems like a good place to start in a debate about speech and censorship. For, although trans-theorizing and trans-activism have the potential to open onto many interesting and important issues, far too often on today’s campuses they are reduced to exercises in language-policing in which attitudes of outraged victimhood are used to coerce certain forms of speech and to justify aggressive forms of censorship.
Emphasis mine, because I like it.
[W]hat we too often face today in the academy is something that looks less like activism or scholarship and more like adolescent acting-out. Now that scientists have decided that adolescence — itself a recently invented identity closely linked to advanced capitalism — persists into the third decade of human life, perhaps we should not be surprised to find behaviors associated with adolescents proliferating, tolerated and sometimes even encouraged within educational institutions. To be specific, we identify as adolescent the furious response to the discovery that others do not perceive you exactly the way you’d like to imagine to yourself. Those who justify aggression as a response to the “violence” of being misrecognized fail to notice that everyone shares this experience on various registers of gender, race, age, class, professional status, nationality, religion, disability, attractiveness — the list goes on.
This is one of the things I keep saying (and saying and saying). Nobody sees us the way we see ourselves, and by the same token, we ourselves share that universal failure to see all other humans the way they see themselves. Duh. That’s one of the things you learn as part of growing up…unless you’re a narcissist. Don’t be a narcissist; it’s a bad thing to be.
Look at Donnie Two-scoops for the most glaring example most of us have ever seen. Don’t be like Donnie Two-scoops. Accept the fact that the you in your head is not the person other people see; accept the fact that the interior is different from the exterior; grasp that that applies to everyone and is not some insult special to you. Move on.
[T]he broader point is that we are all constantly perceived as someone other than who we think we are. Like (or as) language, social roles are systems bigger than any of us, and what we experience as misrecognitions are registers of other people’s perspectives. To try to shut down, rather than understand, those perspectives; to refuse to engage others as people who also have opinions (not to mention feelings) that might not be all about you; to arrogantly dismiss the past and the perspectives of those who have lived through more of it than you; to summon authorities to impose your will rather than trying to work out conflicts in a mutually respectful way — these are adolescent behaviors.
And adults should not be engaging in adolescent behaviors.
Apparently it has come to this: furtive acts of solidarity and melancholy retreats from teaching by gay, lesbian, and feminist faculty in the face of a vocal constituency that, enthralled by the spectacle of its own outrage, has substituted a “call-out culture” of buzzwords around sex and gender for any semblance of dialogue. Announcing itself as coalitional, this cohort seems eager to alienate those of us informed by years of feminist and queer scholarship and activism. Claiming to speak for diversity, this cohort rushes to intimidate and silence anyone who does not toe its ideological line. Imagining itself as standing up to authority, this cohort falls eagerly into quasi-medical discourses of diagnosis and cure and rushes to invoke juridical structures of rules and punishment. Calling itself progressive, this cohort presents an uncanny mirror image of rightwing politics with its exaggerated outrage, divisive us-and-them rhetorics, and attacks staged as self-defense.
Doesn’t it though.
There’s a lot more. I may return to it later.
Isn’t it just?
That is all very well-said.
thanks OB … theory of mind I guess
I have a penis. I grew my hair as a teenager. I got called ma’am by waiters.
It wasn’t a big deal.
I thought that adolescence described the transitional period between child and adult, or the time that an individual was going through puberty.
I guess one really does learn something new every day.
Well, who says there is any such thing as a “transitional period between child and adult”? Or for that matter as a “child” and an “adult”? There are differences over time, and different sets of people make different choices about whether and how to name them. The category “teenager” didn’t even exist until well into the 20th century, I think, and the social significance of the teenager exploded even later than that.
I’m not sure that invention of the word adolescent (late 18th century) doesn’t mean the concept didn’t exist, implicitly, before that. Certainly, at least in the upper classes, there was an educational level for children of that age range distinct from that of younger children. (“High School” dates from the late 15th century, for example). Of course, poorer children were just put to work at that age, if not before.
As to what capitalism had to do with it, I’m not sure. I guess the idea is that adolescents were a new market for products and services just for them (malt shops? 45 rpm records?) In many ways the creation of adolescence was a backlash against child labor and in favor or universal public secondary education, I think. Not exactly doing capitalism’s bidding. The cynical theory that capitalism co-opted the public schools just to train children to respond to the supervisor and shift bell of the factory is not without merit, though often overstated IMHO.
Yes, I think the capitalism thing is a bit automatic; at any rate that’s not how I would put it. But adolescence as a category – a “constructed” or “invented” or whatever you want to call it category? I don’t think that’s a daft claim. Sure, education levels varied, but that’s consistent with “there are differences over time, and different sets of people make different choices about whether and how to name them.” Education is cumulative and so is mental development so you teach 5s different things from what you teach 15s. But that’s not the same as having a specific, named segment called “adolescence.”
Biologists, for one, who talk about things like “Tanner stages” and brain development. Those scientists Reed and Castiglia mention. Adolescence is a synonym for puberty.
Social ideas about what is means to be “adolescent” vary between cultures and change over time, but that doesn’t mean the term isn’t a useful one, or that it doesn’t refer to something real. People who promote trans ideology love to play this language game with words like “male” and “female”.
No, actually, adolescence is not a synonym for puberty. It covers quite a lot more than puberty, and is correspondingly looser and more flexible than puberty. We don’t tell people to stop acting so pubescent. I didn’t say the term isn’t useful or that it doesn’t refer to something real, I said “there are differences over time, and different sets of people make different choices about whether and how to name them.” Puberty is one way of naming some of those differences over time, adolescence is another, and there are more. Language is social; that doesn’t make it not useful or not real. I know promoters of trans ideology like to play stupid games with words, but that doesn’t make the word “adolescent” a timeless transparent fact about the world.
I was responding to this:
“Well, who says there is any such thing as a “transitional period between child and adult”?
And I realize “adolescent” carries other meanings, but it is, also, a synonym for puberty.
“I said “there are differences over time, and different sets of people make different choices about whether and how to name them.”
And I agreed.
Ophelia, one of the reasons I fell in love with this blog is because you understand words, and the difference between signified and signifier, and stuff like that.
I think I’m just super sensitive right now because of dealing with trans sophistry. It’s a fucking nightmare, the way they abuse words and logic.
I know. There are bullshit ways to talk about constructed meanings, and there are non-bullshit ways, but it can be tricky. I’m just saying adolescence is not as crisp a category as, say, sex. As we keep pointing out, you can say sex is socially constructed all you want but men still don’t get pregnant. (Cue distant shouts about progress on inventing the male uterus.) Adolescence is more fuzzy than that, and historically it hasn’t always loomed anything like as large as it does now.