Re-Queering Queer Youth Development: A Post-Developmental Approach to Childhood and Pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Contemporary reflection on queer-radical and queer-deconstructionist curricula has only marginally included a radical deconstruction of the principle of curricula itself. This article explores this “hidden discourse” by referencing the idea of curricular subjectivity and proposes a contextualizing perspective on the politicized interplay between psychogenetic (“developmental”) and socio-genetic (historical) notions of the “queer.” Taking the notion of the child as a proto-queer, it offers a queer ramification of maturity and its politicized calculus.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood sexuality
• curriculum theory
• post-developmentalism
• sexual development
• queer pedagogy
• queer theory

An earlier version of this article has been presented to the 3rd International “Queer Zagreb” Conference “Heteronormativity of Childhood,” September 9–11, 2005 in Zagreb, Croatia.

Notes

1. From a letter written by “an experienced master in one of the most famous English public schools” to Havelock Ellis, quoted in Auto-Erotism.

2. Havelock Ellis (1901) presented some of the very first sexual histories in clinical literature that were to delineate normative trajectories, while Von Krafft-Ebing's work with the sexual anamnesis commenced in the 1870s. The notion of normal sex histories was clearly modelled on the genre of queer and “perverse” anamnesis.

3. More generally, a propaedeutic system is a regulatory, disciplinary structure which recruits, steers, and delivers individuals in a way deemed productive by the contemporary ideological apparatus, commonly a ritualized succession of stepwise inaugurations. “Sexual propaedeusis” was central to what van Ussel called the “western anti-sexual syndrome.” A popular edition of his 1967 two-volume dissertation proved influential in the Dutch 1970s call for “free love” for youth (van Ussel, 1968).

4. Problems arise where Foucault, referencing Schérer and Hocquenghem's subversive work Co-Ire (1976) talks about “the child,” and also where the late Foucault refers to “veritable prisons”: (1) the referencing of life phases as “monolithic cultural categories” (e.g., Burman, 1995); and (2) Foucault's quintessential notion of disciplinary power which he developed in the mid-1970s.