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Breslow, Jacob. Ambivalent Childhoods : Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child, University of
Ambivalent
Childhoods
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Breslow, Jacob. Ambivalent Childhoods : Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child, University of
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Breslow, Jacob. Ambivalent Childhoods : Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child, University of
Ambivalent
Childhoods
Speculative Futures and the
Psychic Life of the Child
Jacob Breslow
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Breslow, Jacob. Ambivalent Childhoods : Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child, University of
Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as
“Adolescent Citizenship, or Temporality and the
Negation of Black Childhood in Two Eras,” American
Quarterly 71, no. 2 (June 2019): 473– 94; copyright
2019 The American Studies Association. Portions
of chapter 2 were published as “‘There Is Nothing
Missing in the Real’: Trans Childhood and the
Phantasmatic Body,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 4,
no. 3- 4 (2017): 431– 50; reprinted by permission of
Duke University Press.
Copyright 2021 by the Regents of the University of
Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmited, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior writen permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
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.sse Library of Congress record available at
rP htps://lccn.loc.gov/2020058491.
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Breslow, Jacob. Ambivalent Childhoods : Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child, University of
Contents
Introduction: The Wish for Childhood 1
1 Disavowing Black Childhood: Trayvon Martin,
Adolescent Citizenship, and Antiblackness 27
2 Transphobia as Projection: Trans Childhoods and the
Psychic Brutality of Gender 61
3 Desiring the Child: Queerness, Motherhood, and
the Analyst 99
4 Undocumented Dream- Work: Intergenerational Migrant
.d
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introdUction
The Wish for Childhood
Four portraits of black children hang on a wall plastered with pink
and white polka- dot wallpaper in a gallery whose plush pink car-
pets and pink ceiling are punctuated by a scatering of multicolored
marbled balloons. In one of these portraits, a fourteen- year- old girl,
playfully crossing one of her eyes and curling her botom lip, is sur-
rounded by a highly saturated panoply of gliter, sequins, buterfies,
and foliage. An arched array of pink and purple beads encircles her
head like a halo as she simultaneously returns and avoids the view-
er’s gaze. While each of these children are practically subsumed by
the vibrant collages that embrace them like saints, her childhood vi-
vacity contrasts her with her more earnest male peers. It draws you to
her. As the subject of Ebony G. Paterson’s 2016 installation for the
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gir llA and larger- than- life life images. These ellipses, however, are not just
.sse flled with glee and exuberance. Their palindromic open- endedness
rP marks both a statement and a question. When they grow up becomes
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vin Afro- Caribbean cultures, tread the line between eulogy and a pro-
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2 introdUction
the joys and pains of childhood. It is a wish, that is, for childhood it-
self. But what is childhood? Who gets to be a child? Paterson’s work,
in all its colorful buoyancy, is responding to these very serious ques-
tions. Produced in direct riposte to a culture of antiblackness that, as
I show throughout Ambivalent Childhoods, routinely disavows black
childhood, these portraits simultaneously pose this line of inquiry
and ofer an important response. “We somehow seem to deny these
children the same sense of innocence that any other child would
be aforded, as if somehow they’re diferent,” Paterson says, as she
explains the importance of representing black childhoods at this par-
ticular time in history, “because of their blackness, they’re not allowed
the possibility of humanity” (Paterson quoted in Felsenthal 2016).
Asserting this young black girl’s childhood in abundance, Paterson’s
portrait is thus not a neutral act of representation.1 As an afrmation,
it is an act of refusal and survival. Paterson’s representation of this
girl’s childhood thus contains within it an awareness of something
that I argue is vital to an analysis of childhood in the contemporary
United States: There are structures of power whose harmful efects are
interrupted by the rearticulation of someone’s location in childhood.
As many scholars have documented, the importance of reafrming
childhood has a long history.2 Robin Bernstein (2011), for exam-
ple, writes that during the Civil Rights Movement the invocation of
black childhood was a key strategy for countering the longstanding
violences of white supremacy directed at black children: “When U.S.
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gir llA began asserting that black children were, of course, children and did,
.sse of course, feel pain” (2011, 55).3 Across various social and political mo-
rP ments within American history, claiming childhood for one’s self or
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fo
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vin of the dehumanizing and adultifying of young black girls.4 While
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Breslow, Jacob. Ambivalent Childhoods : Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child, University of
introdUction 3
and unevenly carried by transfeminist, queer, and antideportation
projects that work to mitigate the efects of racism, transmisogyny,
heteronormativity, and border making. As such, critically engaging
with this question of who gets to occupy childhood is of vital impor-
tance for children who are girls, trans, queer, undocumented, poor,
and of color— children, in other words, who are, and have historically
been, precariously understood within the frame of childhood itself.
However, implicit within this necessary assertion is the assump-
tion, or rather the wish, that childhood’s very confrmation can counter
power’s subjecting force. In Ambivalent Childhoods I argue that this
wish— this psychic and political investment in childhood as a straight-
forwardly productive object—i s structured by a twinned fantasy. This
fantasy assumes that childhood, in its contemporary political life, is
itself separable from the very things we have come to understand as
race, gender, sexuality, and nation; and that the persistence and force
of racism, transmisogyny, heteronormativity, and the violences of the
border are not themselves co-p roduced with childhood as well. Inter-
rupting these assumptions, Barrie Thorne writes:
Diferent types of power— of kings over subjects, slave owners over
slaves, and men over women— have been justifed by defning the sub-
ordinates as “like children,” inherently dependent and vulnerable, less
competent, incapable of exercising full responsibility, and in need of
protection. (1987, 96)
.d
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gir llA a tactic by which their position within hierarchical, constraining, and
.sse violent structures of power is justifed and maintained.5 Childhood,
rP that is, functions as an exclusionary frame of protection and priori-
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vin tilization as one of the mechanisms through which colonial and racist
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