My Hot Toddler

Abstract

This is a commissioned attempt to think-about the intense and intimate reactions my hypertypical toddler, Jasper, evokes with his capable and beautiful body and mind. It is a short meditation on desire, sexuality, gender, and maternal love through the dialectical frame of feminism, queer sensibility, and the dreaded essentialism.

Notes

¹Linda Baker (2005) had a good piece in The New York Times on muzzling her sensual desire for her children. The desiring maternal gaze is always at risk of being interpellated into the cultural archetype of the Manchurian Candidate's mother, a perversely possessive female/maternal gaze that castrates rather than charges.

²The truth is, masculinity, and especially Jasper's masculinity, unravels me. I do not know what masculinity means or is. It deranges my to-the-bone belief that we are polymorphously male, female, and the many variations in between those binaries. When I am not referring to Jasper, I think of masculine and feminine as categories that typically quietly serve top:bottom or win:lose paradigms and power distributions while foreclosing the variegations that come with multiple identifications.

I do not know how to organize myself in response to Jasper's roars of war, his intense pleasure in imagining killing living creatures, or his attacks on my body. Is my resort to thinking “gender” an offensive mistake? Am I better off to engage the language of Kleinian phantasies?

Whether a Kleinian or masculine toddler, I want to send him for conversion therapy. I want what David Brooks (2012, p. A23), protested against: a “nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious” little prince. I am so deeply aware of my responsibilities as his mother: there to support him, contain, mentalize, and interpellate whatever he is going through in the hope of a solid base of self-definition.

³Kristeva's (2005) maternal passion operates a transformation of the libido in such a way that sexualization is deferred by a tendency toward tenderness.

⁴The parental gaze charges the young unconscious with enigmatic meanings. Here the $30 million lawsuit against Warner Bros., AOL, and Associated Newspapers over Toddlers & Tiaras comes to mind; portraying the 3-year-old Isabella Barrett as “gyrating” to “I'm Sexy and I Know It,” they were accused that “the presentation of a child's sex appeal was libelous insofar as it was malicious or reckless to post articles about a child who couldn't understand the concept of sex” (Gardner, 2012).

⁵This is tinged with, but different from, the kind of maternal desire de Marneffe (2005) talks about. de Marneffe attempts to bring into discourse about mothers and children the mothers’ wants, focusing on the embodied, aching desire to be with their children. I swoon with Jasper. But it's a state of being possessed, not a state of self-expression.

⁶The bonobo is popularly known for its high levels of sexual behavior. Sex functions in conflict appeasement, affection, social status, excitement, and stress reduction. It occurs in virtually all partner combinations and in a variety of positions. This is a factor in the lower levels of aggression seen in the bonobo when compared with the common chimpanzee and other apes. Bonobos are perceived to be matriarchal; females tend to collectively dominate males by forming alliances and use sexuality to control males. A male's rank in the social hierarchy is often determined by his mother's rank. Along with the common chimpanzee, the bonobo is the closest extant relative to humans.

⁷My daughter used to also want to dismantle and cut me to pieces. Her love and aggression were some sort of passionate mix. When I try to distill what feels different there was both less movement in space and plenty of other ways of relating too. Or perhaps I feared her aggression less? Liked it more? Wanted it for her?

⁸What Kristeva (2005) terms maternal “de-passioning” that enables the child's language acquisition might be what helps me resume easier maternal functions, or a thirdness that keeps me a safe guardian for Jasper. The mother must sublimate her own loving and hateful passions to allow and take pleasure in her child's capacity to create his own language.

⁹What Corbett (2009) compassionately describes as “invitations toward complementary bigness” (p. 203).

¹⁰Of course the boys will be going crazy for him too—but that is a different chapter in this story.

¹¹Is sexualizing a boy a way to manage his aggression? I know that maneuver too well, being a woman objectified by men exactly at the moment when power is at play. Will gendering a toddler make their aggression more seductive? Or perhaps it's when he is so seductive that I can't help but gender him? The sexualization of Otherness is another question to ponder, a way to colonize with desire what is perplexing.