Shifting the abject: Examining abjected adolescence in teacher thinking

ABSTRACT

Teachers’ efforts to re-consider adolescence as a historically-situated social category exposes how dominant biological and psychological discourses of adolescence position youth who do not fit “proper” expectations of adolescence as abject. In this seven-month study with experienced White and Black teachers working with poor youth of color, I employ Kristeva's notion of abjection to show how teachers’ recognition of their own complicity in the abjection of youth in their school offered them an opportunity to re-consider dominant conceptions of adolescence in their curriculum. Understanding their participation in larger discourses that aim to regulate abjected adolescents/ce, teachers’ views of specific students in their school who suffered as a result of teachers seeing them as abject created opportunities for re-thinking adolescence as a category.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescence
• abjection
• discourse
• teacher development
• multicultural/diversity education
• educational research

Acknowledgments

The author greatly thanks Rachel, MacyLou, Amelia and Larz for their thoughtful time and commitment to this research project and their insightful responses to the texts and ideas shared together. The author owes tremendous gratitude to Rachel, especially for the warm and courageous invitation to launch this study at Rachel's school. The author learned so much more than she expected to during their year together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Working in the field of composition and rhetoric, Greenfield's (2011) analysis in Writing Centers and the New Racism discusses how White people's repulsion – and claims of not understanding – non-“Standard English” actually reflects a repulsion of the body speaking and attached to that language (e.g., African-American Vernacular English). Though Greenfield's analysis focuses primarily on race, teachers’ comments about these abject features of the youth in the young adult novel that includes poor diction similarly function to repel the characters and their narrative as inappropriate subjects for school reading.

2. Even though teachers vehemently objected to characters’ sexuality and parenting at a young age in Weetzie Bat, one has to wonder whether the teachers’ ultimate shift in abjecting adolescence in this novel would have happened if the novel's characters were non-White given the ways that youth of color tend to be hyper-sexualized in White society's views. For example, Ferguson explains the “adultification” of youth of color with regard to Black female sexuality: “A notion of sexual passivity and innocence that prevails for white female children is displaced by the image of African-American females as sexual beings: as immanent mothers, girlfriends and sexual partners of the boys in the room” (p. 84). In addition, scholars have shown that even in young adult literature designated as fantastic realism, youth remain constrained to social expectations bound by dominant discourses of adolescence (Waller, 2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides

Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides is associate professor of English education at Westfield State University. Research interests include the effects of conceptions of adolescence on youth, in teacher thinking and in representations of youth in young adult literature. Recent and forthcoming publications focused on these topics can be found in the Journal of Youth Studies, the Journal of Literacy Research and in Educational Theory.