Potty politics and pedagogies of resistance: HB2 and the merits of “childish” protest

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Notes

1 In this paper I am using the term “child” and “childish” to indicate both a social location and a set of techniques. The “child” is that which is dependent, without power, subject to discipline, and in need of correction. “Childish” refers to sets of behaviors and modes of being that we tend to regard as belonging to a poorly behaved child—uncooperative, pouty, disobedient, the child that goes limp when the parent tries to discipline them in the grocery store. “Childish” tends to refer to that which is negative about children in contrast to “child-like,” which is often read as positive—cute, innocent, etc. “Childish,” in this paper, also references play and other activities that are not considered “productive”: the use of imagination, and the lack of a strong differentiation between the real and the pretend. These are modalities that would be considered out of bounds for adults. The educational process has historically been about disciplining play and imagination out of children and replacing them with the tools of the adult. Youths are depicted as lacking the ability to make independent decisions and as having a proclivity for reckless decisions. While children and adolescents do differ cognitively and physically from adults, what is important here is the way childhood is positioned in direct opposition to adulthood. Adulthood is discursively positioned as the stable location in which even “rash” decisions are “authentic,” and “childish” actions are obscured by the shield of being “grown up.”

2 Zuboff’s work represents an important recent engagement with the consequences and trade-offs of an increasing digitization of culture—including forms of activism that occur on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. Zuboff shows how interactions between people across vast distances and locations, aided by the use of digital technology that can serve as important new sites for activism and collective action, buries the costs to democracy that come every time we click to “Accept” the privacy policies of the online sites and media we use. The very platforms that are providing new locations for connection and activism are simultaneously mining these interactions to track behavior in the interests of the market. Although this paper is not engaged in a detailed analysis of digital technology and activism, the culture of surveillance capitalism that Zuboff describes, with its challenges to democracy, privacy, and uncanny success at mining our acts of communication, is a key context in which the “childish” resistances examined in this paper take place.

3 It is important to acknowledge that using Baudrillard to gain leverage into an issue related to trans politics can be problematic because of the ways he has written about trans. In his essay, “Transsexuality” he uses trans as a way to think about postmodern political conditions (Baudrillard [1990] 1993). The essay offers moments of both promise and disappointment. In one sense, he offers an understanding of “transsexuality” that can be biological and semiological and suggests an understanding of trans identity as inclusive of a wide range of trans expressions. He also, however, states that “transsexuality is underpinned by artifice,” suggesting that trans is an imitation or bad copy of the real and replicating the trope of transgender as fundamentally “deceptive.” Moreover, his word choice affirms transphobic and racist assumptions (e.g. “mutant,” “miscegenation”). He positions “transsexuality” as symptomatic of a social world that lacks “real” differentiations and where all identities/bodies are hybrid. He uses “transsexuality” in several ways that are difficult to untangle. On the one hand, he uses the term to refer to a wide-ranging “trans” state of sexuality, which he argues is characteristic of the postmodern condition, for instance, when he writes, “it is logical enough that our model of sexuality should have become transsexuality” (p. 20). In other sections of the essay, however, he seems to understand “transsexuality” in terms of specific body morphologies. What is clear is that Baudrillard wants to suggest that “transsexuality” represents a betrayal of the “real.” His essay is a tough pill to swallow because he uses trans as a political metaphor when his latent transphobia is anything but metaphor throughout the essay. I nevertheless find his theory of “object status” of great use in rethinking the ways we think of activism in post-capitalism.

4 The idea that being together can be a legitimate form of activism has also been argued by Judith Butler (2015) in her recent book, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, which draws on her notions of performativity to argue that assemblies of bodies are a form of activism that cannot be reduced to speech.

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Notes on contributors

Michelle Powell

Michelle Powell is currently a visiting scholar at Indiana University. She researches and teaches in Cultural Foundations of Education and Philosophy of Education, with particular focus on race, class, gender, and disability, LGBTQ + youth, and feminist and queer theory.