# Intro Last episode - about what's happening in schools - long lasting marxist plan to destabilize children by sexualizing them. I've had academic papers on Queery Theory open in my browser for a year. I've been wanting to comment on them, and immediately after recording the first episode, I remembered that I had them and realized I should have talked about these. It worked out, however, because, as I read these papers, I realized that there's no better way to communicate what I said in the first episode I don't have time to read back to the 1940s, the long track of Queery Theoy, and its two big offshoots The long track of Queery Theory: Two big offshoots: - The grooming mentality - The destabilizing of identity in a politically actionable way - Transhumanism (Donnah Harroway) ## World Economic Forum Transhumanists who want to use our hi-tech medical gear and electronics with a metaverse and neurlink to plug people into internet. Live in a semi-digital-semi-analog world. You are in your pod, owning nothing, and being happy (The Matrix). Political/Sexual grooming: # Groomer Schools 2 The purpose of destabilzing identities - problematize childhood innocence to destroy it. This is part of the cultural Marxist program begun by George Lukach. Brought into the Frankfurt School. In the 60s became the sexual liberation movement. has spiraled from there and is now under the branding of "Comprehensive sex education", frequently, or gender education, and it's usually an included component within social emotional learning (SEL). How influential is this paper? An attack on childhood innocence - in the critically contructed way (the woke way) - it is socially constructed (false) and it is a contingent product of a culture, nothing to do with reality as it actually is, and it needs to be taken apart through Critical Theory methods because it carries with it power dynamics and reproduces the hegemonic social structure that if we understand why they wanted to attack the existence of our social civilization, as Marxists, it's so they can achieve communism, so they can get a functioning society out of the way and replace it with a Utopia that is possible if it is forced in. ## Lukach Lukach understood in 1919 that if you destabilize children by sexualizing them via Sex Education programs in schools (similar to what we see today, with graphic depictions and full-on display of sex-focused behaviour), you make them manipulable. You can make the younger generations hate and resent the older generations, and the way in which the existing society has been at a moral level - throw that off, and that's cultural Marxism. When they are sufficiently destabilized, the revolution will be able to begin to proceed on their backs. Any amount of abuse of children in the affecting of this is to their benefit (it liberates them, helps them to achieve authentic expressions of themselves). Bank on utopia, and it's a small price to pay, regardless of how it turns out for them individually (though we can assume it's better, anyway). Hanna Dyer at Carleton University published in 2016 - The Global Queer Futurity and childhood innocence beyond injury of development. Global Studies of Childhood. Futurity is a wokeword which means possibilities. What possibilities lie within the future, and which ones do we hope to actualize. Queer Futurity -> both within individual children, and in society. The goal is to deconstruct Childhood Innocence. ## Similar Research Paper Interrogating Innocence: "Childhood" as an exclusionary practice 2018 Julie C Garland Another similar research paper worth referencing to see how complementary it is to the one being examined in this essay. ## Queer Futurity and Childhood Innocence - analysis ``` Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer children's attention to ensearing debates on queer futurity offer something new and important to studies of childhood. Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer theory, I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child's asexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing sexuality within a discussion of children's education is constructive. ``` Dwelling on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child's asexuality (assuming that children are pre-sexual and, in fact, a-sexual as a result of being presexual. They are not focused on sex). She is saying that there is a cultural assumption that children aren't just asexual, but also that they are proto-heterosexual. They are going to become heterosexuals, so we treat children as asexual while indoctrinating them into heteronormative ideology. Treat them simultaneously as people who are not sexual beings, but who are being indoctrinated into a particular ideology of sex (heterosexuality). She says that the existence of this contradiction can be addressed by emphasizing sexuality (to fix this problem) in children's education - comprehensive sex education -> the modern end of a 100 year old project from Marxism to deconstruct the family and the institutions of society which they believe injure children psychologically. This is how they think about the worl d- everything is already injury, so we have to brute force a new approach. ``` In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children's psychosexual development, I offer a critical reading of the "it gets better" social media campaign - particularly its consequent critiques and revisions. I begin with engagement of Eve Sedgwick's 1991 seminal essay on Queer Childood: How to bring your kids up gay, and from there trace contemporary queer theory's use of the figure of the child in consideration of the impact of "innocence" on childhood.``` Eve Sedgwick was a fairy godmother of Queery theory. She's going to begin with engagement on the "seminal piece of work" about Queer Childhood and then use it to problematize the idea that we consider children sexually innocent. She's going to call into question and "queer" the entire narrative about childhood innocence (queering means the sublate (aufheben) to abolish but to keep certain essential elements while lifting up to a higher ideological level. To keep the thing and infiltrate it and transmogrify it into a Marxian ideological framework). She never mentions any of this specifically, this is why it's so hard to go through it. You have to understand many things to understand what they're talking about. There are professionals reproducing and referencing this without understanding what they're reproducing - just going along with the front end of the ideology. (Marcuse, for example, is felt in this paper but is not referenced). The truth is that most congregants are not paastors, and most pastors are not theologians, and if you don't understand how that works, you don't understand what's going on. A lot of theologians don't even know where religion came from (or their religion, at least). ``` In an effort to consider the contemporary residues of historical violence on the theories of "healthy" childhood development, I also consider how histories of colonialism and trans-atlantic slavery extend into the future, and leave traces on contemporary theories of childhood development. ``` We have to attach colonialism and slavery to queer theory and, as mentioned in previous essay, that's part of the project. Deconstruct national innocence - the idea that it's okay to be a member of a particular nation, or history, or culture, or part of the world, unless you're in a dominant one - challenge it in a Marxian Way - Post colonial theory - and take apart the idea of race - racial innocence - children shouldn't be allowed to be racially innocent or politically innocent. Geopolitically innocence. This has to be obliterated. Childhood sexuality LGBTQ and nation state are the keywords of the paper. ``` In 1991 Eve Sedgewick published an essay that may be said to have initiated contemporary queer theory's consideration of childhood as a site of heteronormative intervention. ``` They believe there is an over arching power dynamic called heteronormativity. It's been expanded to cisheteronormativity to include the T within the LGBTQ, or even the Q. Both run into cisheteronormativity, cisnormativity aspects, and so she says: It initiated queer theory's interest in childhood and it frames out childhood as a site in which heteronormativity is impressing itself upon people and therefore queer theory becomes a site in which there can be an intervention to stop that from happening. We won't impress heteronormativity, thta it's okay to be straight, which is actually true. The vast majority is straight. The standard moves of queer theory is to conflate normativity (bell curves and averages) with morals and values - the smallest part of the population or small parts of population being outside of what is considered "normal" is assumed to have a moral judgment, whereas the majority of people today look at gays and lesbians and bisexuals and say "okay, probably they were born that way, I think they are, and that's fine, get over it, it's a small percentage of the population, there's nothing wrong with it, `not that there's anything wrong with that - Seinfeld` - Not that there's anything wrong with being part of a numerical minority that have some differences compared to everyone else. There's a lot of human variation, and a lot of it is not morally relevant - you can be a perfectly great person even if you're outside of these majority views. But no, queer theory osifies the older view that most of us consider outdated today - that believes that these things are aberrations and are evil etc. It denies the fact that there has been broad acceptance, and it doesn't JUST deny that fact, it in fact HATES the fact that there's broad acceptance, because it needs queer activists - Radical Outsiders who are willing to take up that revolutionary energy. By bringing it into the moral normative range (LGB and some T?), by allowing for marriage equality, gay marriage, etc.. This, yet again, just like how capitalism stabilized the middle class and lower class, and stole away the working class' revolutionary energy - by making broad acceptance movements succeed for gay rights and gay equality, you take away their revolutionary energy. If you have a colourblind society, you take away the revolutionary energy of racial minorities. That's why they need to fight these things. They hate marriage equality, they hate anything that, within the moral framing of normative, brings their potential proletariat revolutionary class into the fold of "broadly accepted by society". They have to keep finding outsiders. It is a reactionary and hateful movement. A movement to keep those who are racial minorities, gender minorities, sexual minorities down. So we can tap their revolutionary energy, having made them feel alienated. Marxism is afraid most of the new working class, which has just gained solidarity through some coalition - might stabilize in society through capitalism and acceptance. They are afraid of this and they HATE that. In this case, the target group are children. To make sure that children aren't growing up in a situation where acceptance is viewed as Okay. It's a sick ideology, because you have to understand Marxism is not about economics. It's not about anything in particular, identity politics, consumerism, working class (never was). It's about achieving a revolutionary that reorganizes who gets to be in charge of society with the so-called class-conscious, soviet conscious, socialist conscious Marxists in charge. It will use whatever tool it has to use. From Marx's day it was economics, because industrial capitalism was rough. In our day it's identity politics, because identity is the most sensitive thing because, though we didn' tsolve economic problems (we have new ones that are new inventions from old economic problems), but they have to move it into a frame that works with people the way that they resonate and where the alienation is. The point is not to alleviate alienation, but to exacerbate alienation so that you can create a revolutionary force and get your revolution. In Neo-Marxism it gets supre sick because the goal is perpetual revolution. There is never a stable society. ``` "It's always open season on gay kids". - The late Queer Theorist famously quipped in an article that was audaciously titled How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay (Eve Sedwewick in 1991). ``` ## Homonormativity and to demonize heteronormativity. ``` "Desire for non gay outcome" was pervasive in how adults deal with the appearance of non-normative gender or sexual desire in childhood.``` So, what Eve is saying is that the entire way in which adults think about children and sexuality is that we want to achieve a non-gay outcome, which maybe in 1991 there was more to it than there is now - acceptance has broadly been achieved, sorry about your new working class, MArxists, but it's not working out for you. Her very simple claim is that the pervasive way that adults dealt with children who are "outside of the very masculine male attracted to female" and vice versa norm had a primary motivation of avoiding a gay-outcome. Avoid things which make your kids gay. She goes on quoting Sedgwick: ``` Advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, parishioners, therapy clients, military subordinates, Sedgwick in 2004 jested: "is less ubiquitous than you might think".``` How do you help your kids turn out gay? Kids, students, parishioners, military, therapy, etc.. ``` She was concerned about the amount of interferences being made into young lives that aimed to straighten out their futures, was disturbed by large amounts of suicides, and brought the helping professions to task for their catastrophic for beliefs that queer childhood was not viable or healthy. How to bring your kids up gay Sedgewick foretold of queer studies' coming surge of the bitterness towards curative interventions into the emergence and sideways growth. She explained to her reader that the 1980 edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorder DSM-3, the first that did not classify homosexuality as pathological fault, was erroneously celebrated as liberatory for queer subjects. ``` Understand, acceptance and liberation are fundamentally different. The DSM no longer classifying in its 3rd edition gay as a mental disorder. Homosexuality is no longer a mental disorder, and this, you would think,is a huge milestone in progress for gay equality. And she says, no, this was erroneously celebrated for that. Because it was celebrated as liberatory for queer subjects, who can be themselves now, right? Yet, no, it's not liberatory. That's a mistake. ```In the same edition, a new category was indexed - Gendered Identity Disorder of Childhood. The establishment of Gendered Identity Disorder of childhood as a diagnostic classification assumed the ability to detect impulses not yet organized as Queer Identity and realign them with heterosexuality. In How To Bring Your Kids Up Gay, Sedgewick expressed word for the children who are being fixed under this classification.``` You can't win. They get a massive win in the gay acceptance and gay equality movement, and that was a TERRIBLE THING. Because it took way the revolutionary energy - they're not outsiders thus you can' talienate them as easily in a society that accepts them. Underlying Marcusian theory: this will stabilize them and make them a non-revolutionary force that will be usurped into the broader majority. Like Asians being stabilized into the Whiteness. ``` Sedgewick expressed worry for the children being fixed under this classification. Debra burtsman 2003 fondly referes to Sedgewick's loving hold on sissy boys and he-she girls when she remarks that the article is uniquely important for its submission, and that it "takes the loving reparation of the figure of the child's queer body who catches without reason the shadow of the mother's femininity or the father's masculinity - even if these were not the first shadings of gender offered to remind one of the changes nature can take ``` 25 years later, ensuing Sedgwick remarks. Queer Theory now includes a robust literature (LOL) that rethinks and rethinks and re-inhabits the child with an attention to its queer character. After Sedgewick, queer theory has mapped numerous temporalities under the future of the child, assurances of a better future, appeals for avoiding of the future, and the potential for metrics of human development that allow for sideways growth, or some. The child has become both a limit and a hope for Queer Theory. As the literature in this field has revealed, the child is a dense site of meaning for both Queer sociality, and alienation.``` You have to keep the kids queer - they cannot be accepted, because they have become both the limit and the hope for Queer theory. The literature in this field has revealed the child is a dense site of meaning for both Queery Sociality and Alienation. Alienation means the ability to agitate them to become a Marxist revolutionary. ``` It is a locus of anxiey for homophobic culture because it rests on the reproduction of a heternormative future. Queer theory is now bursting with debates about the status of the child in relation to futurity. Politics and sexual subjectivity, but the field of Early Childhood Education largely resists learning from and carefully attending to these conversations.``` Problematizing as a motive and as an ideological entry into the field of Early Childhood Education - you're resisting something and it's causing harm to gay people, you have to incorporate us. The same ideological entryist move over and over again. The field of early childhood education largely resists learning from and attending to queery theory. Unfairly exclusionary because the innocence of Childhood is a broad narrative preventing people from taking up queer things and sexualizing children. The context is we're still talking about what goes on in public schools, groomer government schools, with these people being put in charge through Social Emotional Learning and Comprehensive Sex education. ``` There remains a palpable nervousness and discomfort in this field of thought and practice when childhood comes into contact with sexuality. ``` Imagine being so divorced from humanity to think that that's not normal? Yes, the hegemonic narrative of childhood innocence that needs to be destroyed, so we can Queer early childhood education. Pre-k 3-4? Gotta sexualize them. Look at how bad you are that you're not willing to do so - you're nervous and have discomfort. White Fragility style Kafka trap at this point. Manipulate them into sexualizing children. ``` Despite embattled resistance, conversations about how queer and lesbian gay bisexual trans and queer LGBTQ studies might enhance childhood studies has slowly begun to emerge. Many of the arguments made in the field of childhood education concerning childrens' sexualities tend to stabilize queerness as identity (problematic) instead of preserving something contingent, a "site of collective contestation" (Judith Butler - bodies that matter 1993).``` What is Judith Butler saying here? Queerness should not be stabilized as an identity at all - it's an identity without an essence. It should, in fact, be understood as a) something you collectivize around and b) a site of contestation (revolutionary potential - Marxism - it doesn't care what the variable is - economics, race, queer - it's just about getting contestation so you can get to revolution). So we have to preserve queerness, induce queerness, embrace queerness in young children so they can be brought into understanding and not a naive way that they have a different identity that might be acceptable, but rather so that it can stay as something contingent that could be used for revolutionary potential. These people are psychotic and disgusting. ``` In this article, I move beyond commonly employed sociological techniques for securing the child's "right" to LGBTQ identity and assert that queer theory's growing attention to discourses of childhood offers methodological, pedagogical and epistemological advances to the provision of care for all children. ``` You don't have a right to have an LGBTQ identity that you'd be recognized against is the wrong way to think about it - we need to think about methodlogical, pedagogical and epistemological advances in the provision for care for all children - we don't secure rigths and move on, the liberal thing, expand to a minority group and protect those rights, what a liberal progressive would want - we actually use this to make it a site of collective contestation - group-based identity politics - radical revolutionary in aims, Marxian in shapes. ``` My argument begins with the premise that developmental theory and its attendant model of developmentally-appropriate practice can be destructive to some childrens' emotional and social capacities when not attuned to their possible queer presents and futures. ``` The idea that we're going to take into account developmental psychology and understand that children have a developmental arc that they follow as their brains mature, as they experience teh world going through that maturation phase, that extends at least well into their 20s (beginning from early life) - we're going to say that it's sometimes destructive of their imaginative and social capacities, unless we attune it to the possibility that they are queer in the present or that they will become queer in the future. Their possible queer presents and futures. ``` As many have noted, the rhetoric of innocence that envelopes normative theories of childhood development has the damaging effect of reducing the child to a figure without complexity.``` So, children are innocent - whoops - didn't take into account how complex they are, or take into account that they might be queer, or think about race impacts - we need to decontruct these! This is happening in our schools, and this is the purpose. ``` Some of the affective libidinal (emotional, libido-based, sexual, in the Freudian sense) epistemological and political insistences on childhood innocence can injure the child's development and offer a new mode of analytical inquiry that insists upon the child's queer curiosity and patterns of growth.``` We will find that she argues that every child should be treated as though they might be queer so that they can embrace the child's queer curiosity and patterns of growth. The assumption is that people who are of whatever type will just grow into, if they're heterosexual they'll grow into hetersexuality by default, if they're queer, they'll be nourished and validated to grow into healthier queer identities - sexual or otherwise. Developmental psychology is irrelevant - we can just open up the playing field and everone will develop into their appropriate identities without damage or problems. In fact, you are destabilizing identity growth during developmentally crucial phases and destroying children while opening them up to sexual grooming and abuse. This is horrifically and psychologically abusive because these people are crackpots and Marxists, which are, to repeat, specifically dangerous in that they believe the world works in a way that it does not. They want to nourish that "fact" so they can create revolutionaries out of your children in schools that you pay for with your tax dollras, that you should be able to trust that your elected representatives at whatever level, that they won't put these schools into these programs, but they have failed. ``` Forging more prolongued conversations between queer theory and childhood studies may deepen understanding of childrens' diverse educational needs and complicate assumptions that sexuality and its tendency to bleed outside the boundaries of knowable indexes of identity can be easily mapped onto a predictable future. ``` So we have no idea how people are going to grow up. We should queer everything and open up everything with no stability or boundaries. No structure. If "identity disorders" manifest, those were latent queerness that were going to come out anyway. That is their argument - to get rid of all boundaries and structure. How? Why? Because they said that the idea of developmentally appropriate practices is a problem. Developmental psychology is a scientific lie or a medicalizing lie about how children actually operate and want to exist. They want to exist outside of reality in complete ideology and to build children around ideology that's disconnected from reality. They reject the idea of developmental psychology entirely. They wnat queerness to be the centre object and believe that everything will work out. A child first separates the world into 4 identity categories. Adult vs child, male and female. For a child, especially a toddler, they're very rigid. Man woman boy girl mean a lot to a child, and they are locked deep into that for a very long time. It's probably not a socially constructed phenomenon, but a core developmental milestone for children to start forming a sense of identity. That's the thing that these queer theorists want to attack in Pre-K through development programs. Comprehensive Sex education are re-modelled versions and post-modernized versions of George Lukach's ideas about sex education which he used to undermine traditional and Christian morality in Hungary so he could have a Marxist revolution in the eastern block. ``` Drawing on deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer studies, here I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child's asexuality and protoheterosexuality to show how emphasizing queer growth within a discussion about how children negotiate development is constructive. Ultimately, I suggest that Queer theory's growing interest in childhood as a site of analysis could be strengthened by partnership with the sociological study of childrens' education while childhood studies could be bettered by thoughtful engagement with queer theory. I am, though, apprehensive about Queer Theories of the child that do not account for its relationality and lived experience, and spend time engaging with critiques of Queer Theory that do not account for racialization or continued legacies of colonialism. ``` In other words, we need to think about this intersectionality and wedge everything that could possibly be an identity power dynamic into this same analysis. And anything that's a queer theory of childhood that doesn't also do this is failing something badly and problematic in some way. This is the dominant mode, now. The intersectional sensibility having conquered all within. People who think they're smart are doing this. ``` The small but powerful and expanding body of work in which child studies scholars critique through discipline for avoiding of queerness provides the groundwork for my inquiry into how and why studies of childhood education have generally been more keen on concerning knowledge and concerning developmental stages and building professional capacities for realigning childrens' growth that occur along calculated horizontal and heteronormative lines. My analysis of queer childhood is profoundly indebted to this literature``` The goal here is again to challenge the idea that developmental psychology has anything right at all. ``` David V Ruffolo's 2009 work, for example, is pointed in its address in the ways of in which heteronormativity appears in early childhood education. "The heteronormative underpinnings of ECE policy initiatives speak to the ways in which children are ab/normalized when they are faced with the challenge to purchase/rent collective identities that are unable to account for multiplicities of difference. The result of this is the establishment of minoritized subjectivities that are often disguised and/or disqualified"``` Jibber jabber. What he's saying is that we think of things in terms of being normal/abnormal (straight and identifying with the same sex and gender). We think of these things as being normal, so cchildren have that imprinted through this moral trickery onto them by those assumptions and, so, some children are made to feel normal, while others are made to feel abnormal. Purchase and rent collective identities that are unable to account for multiplicities of differences. We're going to be boys or girls, and you might not like the opposite sex now but eventually you're going to liek them, and vice versa. Proto-heterosexuality is being imprinted on these children. You aren't taking into account the multiplicities - the 200 genders, and 3000 sexualities, that are all lfuid to one another in parallel for every possible sexuality. This forces a minority status as a subjectivity. You understand yourself as a minority and an outsider. Those are disguised and/or disqualified? People hide the fact that they're gay, or try to deny it in themselves, or they're thought of as being invalid by the power dynamic. ```Like Ruffalo I am not only concerned with the erasure of queer sexualities in settings of childhood education, but also extend his line of inquiry to assert that queer theory can more expansively help to analyze how normativity is reproduced in relation to theories of childhood. ``` Theories of childhood will reproduce normativity. Normativity is the way that they blur the idea that something that is considered normal because of majority, normal for people to be straight or have th same sex and gender identity, etc.. Most people have that, it's a straight statistical statement (Within many standard deviations of the bellcurve of human experience). That gets a moral dimension mixed in with normativity - the moral component to understanding what is normal vs abnormal. We'r estabillizing - they have to go after the gays now, especially the gay men and lesbians, because we've normalized homosexuality enough that it doesn't bother people to know that some people are gay. The progressive liberal mindset supports it and believes that we're making progress on these issues. ``` Despite advances in conjoining LGBTQ studies and studies of childrens' education, much of the research in this area employs "Queer" as something of an identity that is knowable and measurable. There are large amounts of literature that takes LGBTQ teachers and parents as its subjects of enquiry. I am interested in these subjectivities, of course, but also suggest to the queer methodological approach to child development in education can more generally disrupt teleologically constructed narratives of growth that require a developmental sequence which culminates in normalcy ``` We're looking at developmental psychology and saying "there's a purpose to how humans develop, and at the end of the purpose, if we meet the developmental milestones and stay within the developmental framework, and are age-appropriate in how we approach sex, then we can come out with a normal adult. A health normal adult. They would say that "healthy" and "normal" are social constructs used to exclude people who fall outside of them, but this is nonsense. There is a normal range for human beings, and a range fo what can be considered healthy. Those are ideal states, and they deny that reality. If you recognize outside of the most common range, be it sexual or whatever, life IS more challenging for you to navigate, and there are steps that we can take to increase legitimate acceptance, but we know from the queer theorists that they don't want acceptance. They want to radicalize subjectivities and complain about everything in the system that they possibly can. A teleologically constructed narrative (a purposeful narrative). She is asserting a conspiracy theory about how we raise kids. ``` Queer as an identity that names and makes some people's sexually desires socially legible has helped in making important sociological studies of sexuality and homophobia as they relate to the child's education. Queer theory has also offered a method of analyzing constituative discourses of normalcy. Applying queer methods of analysis to studies of childhood can help to queer the rhetoric of innocence that constrains all children. And help to refuse attempts to calculate the child's future before it has the opportunity to explore desire. ``` Here's where innocence comes into the picture, which is the thing that they're trying to destroy. Echoes of MArcuse - the heteronomous interests enter into the mind and prevent you from knowing your servitude before you can experience it. There are queer kids, and by trying to use regular developmental psychology and regular approaches which don't sexualize children we end up constraining all children, and refuses to attempt to calculate the child's future before it has the opportunity to explore desires. The child hasn't had a chance, yet, to figure out how queer they are, and you're already sticking narratives of development onto them like "we can't explore sexuality at 4 years old, or 6 years old". They haven't even had the chance to see how queer they are, yet! A terrible injustice! ``` Later, I engage with Andrea Smith's 2010 response to Edelmen in order to demonstrate the uneven distribution of innocence in children.``` Some children are more innocent than others because the ones who are screwed over by the power dynamic are less innocent. They have to reckon with things being unfair, whereas otehr people get to rest in ignorance for longer, which is a form of privilege. (same as the narrative of white people enjoying white privilege, a white racial innocence, and they don't have to reckon with race, whereas racial minorities have race imposed on them by the white supremacist power structure). Uneven playing field of childhood race and childhood innocence/sex. ``` There is a paradox that arises when the child's rights to agency and participation in the world are secured while it is suggested that they are innocent and lacking complexity. I invoke this dilemma to highlight what's at stake when Queer Theory speaks about childhood as social construction, but forecloses the consideration of actual children. In not thinking about childrens' material rights, there are issues that get forgotten. As I write in Canada, I am considering the history of residential schools and their devastating effects on childrens' lives as one issue that might be elided or repressed when queer theory evades recognition of how the preservation of innocence in the name of rights has not protected all children equally.``` Parallels with Critical Race Theory where they say they rights are alienating because they're not applied equally. I can insult people racially using my first amendment rights in the United States - I could use a racial epithet or a slur or insult them and say "hey, first amendment! I have the right to free speech!". Because there's a power dynamic involved, they can't retaliate in kind. So the preservation of, in that case, racism, but here the idea that children are innocent when they're not actually innocent because of power dynamics doesn't extend to people equally, therefore rights are said to be alienating, even the right or expectation of innocence. If queer theory only focuses on the rights of sexual minority children and gender minority children, and only focuses on achieving their rights and securing their rights, then it misses something more important, which is that there's a power dynamic in place. (The same Maxian thing. They are obsessives about this one thing - there's a secret power dynamic ruining people's lives, so we have to upend the social order and give them all the power in order to fix it!). These are your children that they're doing this to. Remember, this is all about EARLY Childhood Education, and the purpose of sexualizing them. ``` In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning childrens' psychosexual development, this article later engages in a reading of the 2010 "It Gets Better" social media campaign (gay kids, don't kill yourselves at 13 while trying to wrestle with this). We're going to engage in a reading of that (problematize.) Emphasizing what studies of children's education can learn from the debates it caused (the ginned up fake queer debates around it to ideologically manipulate something that was net beneficial in the acceptance movement). The campaign and conequent its critics and revisions, and as provocation to theories of queer temporality offer much to the field of childhood studies (no they don't). To grow up queerly it demonstrates as a painful experience in a culture that does not validate your difference (the message of "It Gets Better" means growing up queer is painful. We can acknowledge it's harder and different, but we can also acknowledge that there are steps to take. But the key word in her description is "validate". Validate me, I am entitled to validation.). Both the campaign and its critics point out that there's not enough done to clear a path for children in youth to develop queer identifications and affective attachments (emotional attachments). Further, it gets better in the expansive analysis that has spawned exhibit that queer temporality is extremely important to a consideration of how to survive education when it does not nurture your desire (We're going to turn it into a Queer project - abolish it while keeping some of its essential elements and sublimate it into Marxist bullshit, instead of something that was Liberal and beneficial.``` ## Queer Temporality How does time affect queerness? You grow up gay, it's hard for you as a kid, but it gets better - later, it's better, but now it's bad. There's a temporal dimension to experiencing growing up as queer, so we need to bring queer temporality into the analysis to understand how damage is being done over a temporal dimension. It gets better accepts the idea that it's bad for you as a child, so we need to rethink all of childhood education. ## Queering the Child's Innocence ```Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory's attention to ensearing debates on queer futurity and its reconceptualization of the stability of esexual and gendered subjectivity offer something new and important to the studies of childhood education. Informed by Queer Theory, my use of "Queer" is not only meant to register a child's potential desire for same-sex relations or LGBTQ identity, but also gestures towards more expansive ways to account for childrens' deviances from normativity.``` So what we're looking for isn't just gay acceptance, or to understand an identity, but no we have to understsand deviance from normativity. That's what queer theory is REALLY about: getting away from the normal - making good that which gets away from normal, and making bad that which maintains the normal, because that's a power dynamic that must be disrupted and dismantled ```My critique is not only concerned with the violent impacts of homophobia on queer children, but also suggests more broadly that Queer Theory offers Childhood Studies a critical methodology that can help loosen the parameters of normative development, so that a deeper and more capacious theory of CHildrens' sexual education can be built.``` ## Is that Weird? SNL skit in the past -> Sex Ed Vincent - Sex education - His whole thing was he's a weird little guy describing himsel fas a sex-ed enthusiast - is that weird? Who's to say. Is that weird? Who's to say? Sex Ed vincent! I"m a sex education enthusiast! Grotesque things like peeing in a birthday hat and pouring it on someone's back and collecting it again. I sthat weird? Who's to say? It's a perfect expression of postmodernism dipping into Queer Theory, because there's no position from which you could say that something is weird. That's the mentality that they want to bring into your children - there's no position from where you can say that some sort of sexual deviance is anything but positive and a moral good. You have to encourage and validate it, just in case it's latent and not willing to come out on its own, because of a prevailing power dynamic. You need to encourage sexual weirdness - sexual grooming is the real word for this - because of the logic that there's no position that one could accept that's not a power dynamic reifing position that says "That's weird" or "That's unhealthy an d damaging" or "Developmentally inappropriate". It's all up for grabs. This is what they're doing to your kids, through a state institution that has no business doing any of this. And it's a 100 year old Marxist program to destabilize parent-child relations and the child's sense of identity. ```By staging of a conversation between childhood studies and queer theory (she has mentioned this several times - the goal to turn Childhood Education into Queer Studies - adapted to children. The goal si to colonize, like a virus, Childhood Education (early) and turn it into an Arm of Queer Theory), is not a cynical acquiessence to queer negativity surrounding the figure of the Child. Nor is it a reinvestment in the child as a blank space on which to write uncomplicated resistance to homophobia. Hope and other positive affectivities associated with childhood are not always naive or unthoughtful romanticiziations of the child. I call into being a conversation between two fields of thought, often deemed at odds, in order to invite questions about the embodied vulnerabilities, educational impacts, neurological developments and narrative conventions of childhood innocence. I hope to inspire sociiological and educational theorists of childhood to insist upon a future of radical hope (Marxism - liberation) in a possibility for a child who feels the weight of queer wanting.``` Just an attempt in the usual academic leftist style to take over a field of study, Early Childhood Education, and turn them into arms of Queer Theory ## Refuse to Grow up ```I employ Queer to both a) classify sexuality and b) reference deviance from cultural norms, thus children who self-identify or are identified with LGBTQ culture may be considered "Queer", but Queer childhood should not be constrained to identificatory regimes (categorizing) or an assumption of the stability of sex and gender.``` Identity without an essence. It's all fluid and it all moves and changes and you're definitely not going to be able to developmentally appropriately understand who you are. So you're going to be a de-stabilized, politically and psychologically manipulable person who's also going to be easily groomed into sexual abuse, and that's your children that they're doing this to. ```I suggest that the queer contours of childhood rae the child's desires that refuse to grow up towrads normative ways of being a n adult, therefore also the residual adult desire to play and to be creative.``` ## Sexual Liberation This echoes Marcuse exactly - What does he say in essay on Liberation from 1969 (Universities radical): "The educational demands thus drive the mvoement beyond hte universities into the streets, the slums, the community, and the driving force is the refusal to grow up, to mature, to perform efficiently and normally in and for a society which compels the vast majority of the population to earn their living in stupid, inhuman and unnecessary jobs, which conducts its booming business on the back of the ghetto slums, an internal and external colonialism, which is infested with violence and repression while demanding obedience and compliance from the victims of violence from repression which, in order to sustain the profitable productivity on which its hierarchy depends, it utilizes the vast resources for waste, destruction in an ever more methodological creation of conformist needs and satisfactions, and the driving force is a refusal to grow up, to mature, to perform efficiently and normally in and for society." Sexual liberation movement that he spawned is now queer theory in 2016. Literally the same mentally, the consumerist economy transformed into the sexual identity economy. ```In this sense, I borrow from queer theory's insistence that queerness is that which undoes identity, not which holds it together. Queerness is that which undoes identity.``` Developmentally appropriate for children, who have to grow up and establish a stable sense of identity for who they will be as adults. Identity itself is a problem for these people. If somebody can't figure out who they are, they have all sorts of problems, it's easy to say that those problems come from the existing structure - don't you hate it? They're easily pushed around and radicalized. Pulled into a stupid cult. That's what they're doing to your children in government schools. ## To Know Oneself ```I'm not interested in only promoting queer as a category of identity that promises social cohesion. Rather, I am thinking with Dina Georgis' 2013 notion of queer affects as the return of memory in the desire discarded for its ability to undo social identity.``` There's a platonic you, a self that exists only in the metaverse that you can't possibly understand until you start to undo the socially imposed identity that you're performing. That's queer theory - you are performing an identity that society has told you you have to be (masculine boys, feminine girls - you're performing these to get social acceptance because society told you you have to pretend this role). For queer theorists' gender and gender identity comes into existence as a fiction which does violence to you as a form of categorizing you into an identity. ```Queer affect for Georgis is what agitates our ability to fully know ourselves, and its presence is a result of memory, fantasy and loss discarded because it is difficult to bear. In this formulation, queer is not what makes us recognizable to the other. It is what undoes us, and what, here, can work to undo the innocent Child.``` This is what they're doing to your children in government schools. ```Adults sometimes find it difficult to bear the child's aggression and negative emotional responses because these reactions are often in excess of narratives of childhood innocence. Childrens' rights are vehemently asserted in the field of child studies, but the child's negative affects, such as hate an daggression, often a result of insecurity and vulnerability, are generally under-theorized. I call these affects Queer emotional responses. I call these affects Queer in order to show how complicated the interior and social world of the child can be.``` ## Queer Hate and Aggression Hate and aggression are Queer emotional responses. They have huge emotions that they can't even be properly understood because we have these narratives of childhood innocence that prevent us from understanding why children are flipping out. They keep giving away the game. The goal is to use the process of sexualizing children to generate alienation and cultivate queer affects like hate and aggression for its society and predecessors. Under brand names of Social Emotional Learning - hate and be aggressive. A maliced program. A cultural marxist program put into practice, in your children, to turn them into tools that destroy society. ```I am thinking with queer childhood as an analytic with which to theorize how children narrate themselves beyond trajectories of normative development. They ignore the complex affects of sexuality in their understanding of self. So beyond referencing LGBTQ identity in children, queer childhood can rupture conventional schemas of growing up as it undoes anticipated congruency, the enforcement of strict borders between childhood and adulthood, in forms of affinities convened on grounds of mutual feelings of shame and difference. Queer growth does not always promise a teleological guarantee of progress, but may find pleasure in delaying the finitude in predictable foreclosures of developmental stages.``` Horrible because the way it's written, if you don't know a lot about of stuff and you read it, you wont' see how horrible it is. This is what they're doing to your children in government schools under brand names like social-emotional-learning. This is unbelievable child abuse and grooming. Invitation to pedophiles. We're going to "complicate the difference between adults and children". Why? So that that gross grooming adults can sexualize children? Bring them into a queer identity that they didn't know was latent by abusing them? Unbelievable that we have allowed this to take place, because we haven't done the work to understand what these people are writing in their complicated CriticalTheory language. ```My notion of queer children borrows heavily from Karen von Stockton's 2009 The Queer Child: Growing Sideways in the 20th century. Stockton shows how the belief that children are devoid of sexuality endures while at the same tim echildren are assumed to be growing up and toward futures defined through heteronormative sexualities. Stockton characterizes the queer child as a subject that hovers above and outside histories of childhood, troublign assumptions that the child does not and has not ever fantasized queerly. (groomers?) Stockton's work demonstrates that in many renditions the child there exist both the occlusion of children's sexuality and the tacit understanding that the child should grow up and toward heterosexuality. The gay child often has a "backwards birth" that solicits childhood as an adult work of reconstruction.``` ## Conceptual Death Complicated way of saying that gay kids grow up thinking that they're supposed to be straight, realize eventually that they don't have to be, and then have to go back and rethink everything about how they thought about everything as kids. ```When the straight adult is dead, decides that they are gay..``` So if somebody is gay and they grow up and realize they are gay as an adult or teenager, accept that fact about themselves, then the straight adult is dead. What a weird way to think about things. Like we are taking one body away from the other side. This whole vision for themselves of how to grow up and be straight and it has to change because they couldn't make it work. All of a sudden, that set of beliefs about the self dies - the straight adult is dead - the adult reconstructs their childhood to conform witht he contemporary understanding of what it must have felt like to have had a queer childhood. Does everyone really have to do that? Reinvent their childhood to be queer or gay? ```Stockton cites Freud's 3 essays on the theory of sexuality to show how his seminal text linked the appearance of adult homosexuality (often identified as inversion) to childhood sexuality. In Freud's foundational text on the child's possession of sexual wishes, he imparts a queer temporal schematic. The invert adult searches for the moment that a "sexual impression occurred which left a permanent after-effect in the shape and the tendency toward homosexuality (what happened to me to make me gay?). Working with Freud's work stockton writes: "Making room for an invert child. Though only through adult memory, Freud states clearly that the trait of inversion may either date back to the very beginning as far as back as the subject's memory reaches. The homosexual adult, then, must return to childhood and rework his or hrer memory. Eating of the tree of knowledge, we again become innocent. The homosexual adult, then, must return to childhood (eros and civilization) and rework his or her memory ot childhood to clarify the appearance of inversion. In this schematic what is at stake is the adult's remembering of childhood, not the child's present. Stockton moves from Freud to the 20th century to show that queernes and childhood are not often paired. Importantly, she is not simply interested in the idea of a gay child, but also in the queerness of all childhoods. (Homonormativity / queernormativity - all childhoods are queer) which results from the perpetual delay of reason that insures adulthood does not come too soon (perpetuation of childhood innocence).``` All children are queer - we have to create conditions in which that can be brought out. That's the operating assumption. They're doing this to your children. ```Unlike the normative idea of the child whose future we must save, the queer child promises nothing. Although it may hint at contingent and provisional futures, queer childhood is that which haunts normative descriptions and temporal positionings of what it means to grow up (Derrida's ontology). Asking how the queer child grows despite the possibility of growing towards social legibility is a generative inquiry and in Stockton's hands revleas part of how cultures that organize themselves around theories of childhood innocence often hurt children's curiousity and imagination.``` ```Addressing the child as always already queer may be one way of supporting their imaginative inquiries about their sexuality.``` Kernel of truth? MAybe they do need something which helps them understand who they are - maybe they need a grooming book in their school. But 2 sentences ago, it said "every child" is to be seen as Queer. All childhoods are queer. We're not simply interested in the idea of a gay child, but in the queerness of all childhoods! Always already queer is one way of supporting these imaginative inquiries about sexuality. So now we have to treat all kids like they're queer, address them and act like they're queer, to try and bring out the fact that maybe they are queer and to encourage them to explore if they're queer. Again, we're talking about the rejection of identity. Not just helping them understand themselves as gay. Understand yourself as absolutely unstable in any identity - grooming identity disorders. ## Pairing Childhood with Homosexuality ```Stockton points out that the child and the homosexual have historically been positioned as oppositional, and so the consideration of queer childhood becomes categorically provocative. The schematizing of childhood innocence and mutual rhetorics of vulnerability and its exploitation have devalued the the child's sexuality and ensured that the traumatized child is a figure hard to meet in most historical renditions of homosexuality.``` This is grooming children. They hold out kids who might have gender dysphoria or who are homosexuality, and say that we have to sexualize children to save them. ```James Kincaid and Braumer hurley show how an easy collapse of all childhood sexuality into definitions of trauma (rape) forecloses careful considerations of teh child's agentic relationship to perverse and queer sexuality. We classify this as trauma. We consider it child abuse. ``` They are literally groomers. Social Emotional Learning. ## Whitewashing ``` Their work, like my own, is not interested in minimizing the corporeal or emotional impacts of sexual trauma experienced in childhood, but in understanding the possibility for children and youth to recruit amounts of bodily pleasure. We admit that this this isn't good for children, but we want to inform early childhood education through an understanding of the possibility children recruiting bodily pleasure. With them, I am sure that the child can be hurt by theories of precious innocence that punish curiosity and assume the child's status as victim. This literature does not elide or contest the psychosocial damage done by molestation, rape and other forms of sexual abuse. (rather, it shows how making childhood sexuality a taboo subject is one way to protect the child's assumed protoheterosexuality ``` Why are they doing this? War against innocence? Because they believe childhood innocence is a narrative constructed by people in power to maintain power, and in this cas heteronormativity becomes the key thing - or cisheteronormativity. Making sexual childhood a taboo subject is one way to protect the child's assumed protoheterosexuality. ```Queer theories of childhood are often brave in the ways in which they wade into taboo territory in order to show how is considere dperverse is often a mode of securing heteronormativity.``` Look at how stunning and brave we are. Grooming. Of children who will be sexually abused and emotionally abused into becoming trans and non-binary and not knowing who they are becuase they've been given an identity without an essence and had developmental psychology thrown out the window. In order to show how what is considered perverse is often a mode of makign sure you will grow up valuing or thinking that it's normal to be heterosexual. This is what they're doing to your children in public schools. ## Opportunities for Sexual Materialism with Children ```Queer theory can be helped in its desires to prove that children are capable of possessing complexity and sexuality by exploring work done in the fields of early childhood studies and sociological studies of childhood. This is because these fields and their associated methods of inquiry prioritize a child's possession of knwoledge and agentic relation to the world. Hal Verstems (Trans queer theorist of great repute 2011) Theory of Childhood Tendered in the Queer Art of Failure is an example of why queer theory might learn to appreciate these disciplines' encounters with material children``` Encounters with material children? ```Although the text carries persuading examples of what can happen in the fucund import of philosophies on childhood, the Queer THeory hal verstem's depiction of childhood also relies on ideas of what children do and like, which seems a little too groundless and purposefully hollow. "Children do not invest in the same things that adults invest in. Children are not coupled, they are not romantic, they do not have a religious morality, they are not afraid of death or failure, they are collective creatures, they are in a constant state of rebellion against their parents, and they are not the masters of their own domain``` A queer theorist, HalVerstam's summary of childhood. This author is saying "no that's too simple. It's groundless and purposefully hollow". Because it relies on ideas of how children like things that are not sufficiently developed. Queer theory needs to go further into grooming children sexually. Social Emotional Learning! YAY! ## Adult/Child Binary ```A more thorough reading of teh literature published in childhood studies may have demonstrated to halverstam that children are, for example, afraid of death, demonstrate anxiety of social failure, and sometimes have great difficulty workign with others. Halverstem's theory of children claims that they are not romantic, but int he Queer Art of Failure there is a romantic notion of childhood (purposeful misunderstanding..) in which a binary between childhood and adulthood is reified.``` Halverstam doesn't know what what he/she is talking about because it claims that children rae not romantic, but the book has a romantic notion of childhood. This has nothing to do witht eh children - it's about the book. It's something you could read as a joke in this paper - a purposeful non-sequitur miss in terms of linking one idea to another. In which a binary between and childhood is made real? There is a binary between childhood and adulthood. It's a little blurry durring adolescence, but that's why many societies include rites of passage -Barmitzvah, etc... Graduation. These things distinguish that "you are no longer a child, time to put childish things away and act as an adult". Biologically it's not a quick close division, although there are some markers, but there is a binary between childhood and adulthood. We understand an emerging adulthood and adolescent phase where it's a fuzzy line, but there's no blurriness between an 8 year old and a 30 year old. It's obvious that they are very different things. Adulthood vs Childhood is certainly a binary. The fact of there being blurriness at the line between child and adult is not sufficient to cause us to say "it's all nonsense, there's no difference between Child and Adult". ```Trying not to think of the child as a site of pure resistance to normativity, as Halverstem arguably does, I'm interested in what Queer Theory, while it lucratively continues to debate the terms on which the future is realized, can do when it is also interested in the quotidien lives of children and of structural differences. In the same vein I've been asking what childhood studies could do differently, which, as Robinsin and Tobin appeal, it was more interested in queer theory or queer affect that circulates in spaces where children move. In the next section, I counter queer theories of childhood such as Edelman 2004 That empty the child of matters related to its physical embodiment in order to interrogate the forgetting of vital evidence of children's remarkable experiences. I suggest that Queer THeory might consider giving the child's body back in order to recognize the ways in which its form is animated by histories of race.``` ## Race Let's twist the knife by saying that you're racist if you hold onto ideas of childhood innocence. The bridge is here. ```Racialization and violence and Queer Theory of Childhood. Edelman 2004. In no Future, Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Our culture is obsessed with the child as the entity for which we build a future without conflict. For edelman, the fantasy of the child as innoce-nt futurity and as the object for which society is organized disciplines LGBTQ individuals.``` We care about raising childhood well, so we exact a socially-imposed discipline on LGBTQ individuals to conform to heteronormativity, and that does injury to them. ```In order to be legible an dproductive subjects in the social imaginary, we must be operative members of what he terms reproductive futurism. He explains: "Queerness names the side of those not fighting for the children, the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism (wanting to have babies, and thinking that's good). The cult of the child signals an always ready impossible future for which futures are promised potential belonging if they uphold the contract of futurity which assures that the culture is repeated without a difference.``` There's a cult of the child, we care about children and want them to grow up well, safe and well. Normal and healthy. This is a cult (Iron Law of Woke Projection) signals an always already impossible future. Queers can only be involved in this accepting future, and they are promised belonging in it only and only if they uphold a social contract that they're going to keep being heteronormative. The sexual liberation will be limited and kept out of children. ```The reproductive body and the schematic becomes an emblem of achieved adulthood that signals the loss of childhood.``` Your body becoming reproductively capable becomes an emblem of adulthood (no, it IS adulthood. You can reproduce - the biological definition) which signals the loss of childhood (yes). You are reproductively an adult. Are you producing and ejaculating sperm? Menses? Rites of passage are often at the age of 12 and 13 for this very reason. Even the separation between primray and secondary education - childhood and adolescence - on track to being adults. Having a celebration or event as a demarcation point to really materialize th enotion of being an adult is very important. ```Those who do not reproduce cannot be privileged in a symbolic order that celebrates life producing sex as paramount to contribution of humanity.``` If you are gay, and not reproducing with your pairbonded lifepartner, you can't possibly be privileged in a symbolic order (nonsense) that celebrates the idea of making babies. This is horrific nonsense. Homophobia in a sentence: she's operating from an assumption that those who do not reproduce cannot be privileged in a symbolic order. Life-producing sex is paramount to contribution to humanity - its impact ensures the continuity of humanity. Edelman asks that we learn to find pleasure in the sights and acts which do not secure a future. (Hedonism). Queer is on the side of the death drive - never finding solice in identity, only ever disturbing the social categories that try to make us legible to others. Being honest about queerness is - on the side of the death drive - never finding solice, only disturbing - disrupting, dismantling, deconstructing social categories to make us legible (understandable) to others. ```Edelman's assertions are critical of liberal movements in queer communities towards replicating normative structures of kinship and progeny, which he understands as forelong pleas for recognition from a culture that privileges those who secure repetition. No baby, no future, and thus no sincere privileging int he symbolic and political world. Edelman hopes for a queer renouncement of loyalty to the child. A loyalty he believes rushes toward a future made of equality while ignoring the past and present conditions that create violence for LGBTQ individuals and communities.``` ## Undertones of Marcuse A queer renouncement of loyalty to the child. Marcuse is felt. Marcuse's project was called "The Great Refusal" of everything that is. The protestation of everything that is. Edelman hopes fo ra queer renouncement. A renouncement rushes towards a future made of equality. Equality isn't good ,because it ignores the past and present conditions that create violence for LGBTQ individuals and communities. No reparations for past damage. Symbolizing teh children as inherently LGBTQ oppressed. Heterosexual relationships are equipped to make children most of the time. So it's the child's fault. James was told he should be ashamed of being born because he stole his father's youth by being born. It's a psychotic argument - he thought it was hilarious, since it makes no sense. This is the same thing. ```This rush towards the child is the disavowel of the persistent hum of the death drive.``` We are just avoiding death by producing the next generation - it's just us avoiding the reality that we are going to die. They are so caught up in complicated bullshit theories that they don't even understand basic things. ```Better, he thinks, to understand queerness as that which is destructive to the social order and in contradiction of reproductive futurity. Edelman capitalizes the Child as a conceptual figuration - an effort to distance it from material embodied children. Edelman's work has not been taken up in a sustained way by the field of childhood education.``` It's psychotic and anti-child. Because he capitalizes Child as a conceptual figuration? No. They're mentally ill on their own theory. ```This polemical text cannot account for the child's queer existence, and although its provocations to the rhetoric of childhood innocence, they might be bettered by collaboration by scholarship which embracs the child's agency. Edelman's now seminal effication of teh child as innocent futurity is not relational or able to hold space for a theory of flesh and blood children, and I awill now discuss what is lost in its ability to account for the traumatic loss of statelessness genocide or war. Andrea Smith 2010 - Convergences and distrust between Queer Theory and Native Studies - responds to Edelman's production of a subjectless critique of childhood innocence. She posits that Edelman's anti-oppositional politics in the context of multinational capitalism and empire ensurs that the continuation of the status quo by disabling collective struggle designed to dismantle these systems. Smith's request that a theory of queer childhood makes room for recognition of the genocidal foundations of nation states in north america deepns my understanding of child rights as contingent on relationality, natioanlity and access to knowledge. Smith notes that "While Edelman contds that the child can be separated from actualy children", an indigenous critique of his text reminds us that in the context of genocide "native peoples have always been determined by settler colonialism to have no future". "If the goal of Queerness is to challenge the reproduction of the social order, then the native child may already be Queered. For instance, Colonel John Chivington, the leader of the famous massacre at Sand Creek, charged his followers not only to kill native adults, to manipulate their reproductive organs and to kill their children because "nuts make lice". ``` She's trying to tie the idea that we value children to the idea that we value children of our own race most, and therefore that we need to genocide other races (because there were assholes in the past who viewed races that way). And so the dialectic progresses. ``` In this circumstance, the native child is not invested with assurance of futurity and cannot cohere in Edelman's privileged portrayal of cult of the child. The native child for smith is Queered because it "is not a guarantor of the reproductive future of White Supremacy, it is the gnit that undoes it". Smith makes her ambivalence toward Edelman's project clear, she finds "the idea of reproductive continuity as homophobia" useful. However, she also makes it clear that she finds "Edelman's analysis lapses into a vulgar constructionism by creating a fantasy that there can actually be a politic without a political program, which does not always reinstate what it deconstructs, that does not also in some way reaffirm the order of the same". ``` The same intersectional turn happening. Just to make it clear "Vulgar constructionism has been replaced by Critical Constructionism that always sees the power dynamic relevant to the construction of the social construction. ```That is it seems difficult to dismantle multinational capitalism, settler-colonialism, white supremacy and hetero patriarchy without some kind of political program, however provincial it may be". Smith invokes Jose Minose and her assertion that "relationality is not pretty", but is required in the context of genocide and its enduring violence.``` This is just normal Critical Theory insanity, now. Bad things happened in the past, we can link them to this, we get a huge moral pull to take on all this crap, so now we have to sexualize children (because otherwise we are somehow reproducing the genocide of Native Americans). That's what's happening here. These people are nuts. It's all just moral and emotional manipulation and terrible arguments to justify the pathology at the heart of this, which is that they want to groom children in government schools under the name Social Emotional Learning. ```Edelman and smith's texts help us to clarify that there is a dilemma in administering education and rights to material chidlren whil rvosomg a theory of childhood that encompasses its Queer dynamics. I trace Edelman's and Smith's conversation here with the aim of demonstrating the difficult necessity of making conceptual and figurative references to childhood relate to concerns about how material children are treated. After no future, and attentive to Smith's critique, I wonder if and how thought surrounding childhood might be sufficiently Queered so that it resists being constrained by normative developmentalism, and productively challenges how national, racial, classed and gendered affilitations and identifications impact the distribution of rights and administration of education to Children. Holy smokes. Normative developmentalism - developmental psychology which actually descibes human reality, productively challenges the interrelated issues of national, racial classed and gendered affilitations and identifications and challenges it at the level of how rights are distributed differently to children depending on who they happen to be through an identity marxist lense. ``` ```This query, though related, is not accounted for in Edelman's polemic because he juxtaposes queerness to children. Although Edelman aims to deposit his critique in a post-political world, his analysis has been critiqued as an effort to ellide collective narratives of struggle.``` ## Critical Concentration Critical Theories only concentration: The only kind of critique of a Critical Theory that's allowed is a further Critical Theory. Critical theories only concenrration. They only get worse. They only establish circular firing lines as a result. No outside critique is considered to have engaged geuinely, so there is no possible critique of a critical theory which does not make it a worse critical theory. There's no critique that can exist that it will accept to repair it. There is no limiting principle and there's no reparative principle to bring a Critical Theoy back from the brink. They can only slide further down the slope. Every woke slope is slippery - this is why. ```In cruising Utopia, the then and there of queer futurity, Jose Minos, 2009, the revered queer theorist offered a critique of Adelman's theory of childhood. Munoz revisited his own childhood, to apprehend how he developed an understanding of himself as a sexually non-normative. In the book he calls a moment where he learned his gender as shame, which he felt Queer, and began to prudently conceal his difference, while reflexting on his own origins he considers recent murders of Queer, Racialized youth in the UnitedStates, to ask how thinking the child as only abstraction elides the impact of racism.``` This is just a hodge podge of ideas and buzzwords crammed together to make all the Intersectional levels pulled as fast as possible in one place. Why? To Groom Children in Government schools. That's the point of all of this. So we have to talk about racism and murders of queer youth so they can continue to groom children. Justification for their pathology. ```Minos' book is in part a response to Edelman's polemical attempt to unfasten queerness from humiliated optimism and refuse compulsions to refer to the future. Against futurity, Edelman takes down the cult of the child in shrewd and deliberate jabs at breeders and futurists. He knows on a different path points out that the child which Edelman builds as his thesis' target devalues the impact of structural disparities such as race class and gender. ``` Make it all intersectional, so the dialectic for us "not all kids are wanted in the future, or receive the state's protection". Iron law of woke projection. In 2009, nobody even was thinking this way. This is BS. Ridiculous for this time. Iron law of woke projection. He is telling you there are lots of kids in the future that we don't want. The ones that are not "us". Not our political tribe (genocidal language - why do you think it's invoking genocide? It's what we have to appeal to in order to say we need to sexualize children). ## Paranoia Problematica ```Tavia N'yongo has made similar statements about how the rhetoric of innocence permits its own sorts of violence: "Black popular culture, with its painted awareness that privileges of children are unequally distributed has long held an ambivalent stance towards this dominant culture of the child. We can be as sentimental as anyone else about imagined childhood purity, but our culture also contains great reservoirs of skepticism toward the ideology of the child, whose vulnerability and value in American culture are so often restricted to the White child, with the black child serving as a sort of foil - always already streetwise, tough and precociously independent. ``` Nobody thinks this way except this weirdos, who only think this way because it's useful - they're using these people as props so they can push their theory, which is ultimately Marxist, so they can continue in their dark agreeement with the children to groom children sexually, so they can do all the damage that they do to create enough disaffected alienated radicals to be able to have their revolution, because all Marxist ideas exist only to get to their revolution, and they'll pick whatever scab they have to in order to get there. Economics, race, sex. ```Queer theories of childhood, that do not account for histories of nation states, slavery or genocide can not help effectively a reimagined pedagogy of and for children. What does holding "childhood" queer seemingly opposites in some productive tension achieve (dialectical concepts) if cannot also consider the devastating effects of racism or colonialism? ``` Here we are distracted thinking about colonialism and racism, but the point of Queer theory is that we have to consider Queerness and childhood as dialectical concepts that must be somehow sublated. We must put them on a collision to create a synthesis. Children made to be queer, just like how Russo had savages to made in cities. Slave-master dialectic that inspired Hegel to rename his entire program dialectic, which inspired Marx to call his program Dialectical materialism, which inspired the NeoMarxists to get back to the dialectic which inspired all these theorists to talk about how the dialectic progresses. So here we are tucked into this statement about racism and colonialism - what good is it to recognize that queerness and childhood are dialectical concepts in opposition of one another, in production tension - the attempt to make Queer Children. Children meant to be Queered. That's their goal. Where? Government schools. Who? Your children. Under the brand name of Social Emotional Learning (that will change when this gets exposed. Comprehensive sex education, etc). ```The "it gets better" social media campaign as summarized below offers an account of Queer futurity that does not carefully attend to the corrosive force of racism and its colonial antecedants so the way that social class can erode one's ability or desire to transgress the location in which they are embedded ``` It doesn't even get into racism. It's not even about race, or colonialism. Listen, don't kill yourself if you're a gay kid, you're going to grow up and understand yourself better. Transgress the location -> have a revolution. ``` Making childhood education get better. In 2010 an American initiated, though internationally responded to, social medial campaign It Gets Better was created to show children and adolescents that it's okay to be gay because a kinder future hangs in the wings. It's full of advice on how to turn out gay, which in 1991 Cedric pointed out was not meant to show young LGBTQ people that there is a future beyond mandatory schooling, where homophobia can feel stifling and constant it gets better is a strategy to prevent the higher rate of suicide in this population. Initiated by Dan Savage, a white american media personality (a very liberal man who came up with lot sof research, whether you agree with him a lot, he is a thoughtful person who has put forth some very good ideas and it Gets better is a very good idea. he's very real, you may disagree with his conclusions, but he's put fowrard some very good ideas, and they hate him because they call him a White American media personality and author. They always have to throw in that little bit of slight) and his husband Terry Miller, It Gets Better began with a youtube narrative in which the men describe how their lives improved after school and when they became adults. Savage says that because it was unlikely that the schools would allow him to speak about sexuality to children, he used social media "to speak directly to LGBTQ kids". The very format of It Gets Better Then is informed by aknowing assumption that schools will be resistant to discussing non-normative inquiry into sexuality. ``` Notice that that implicitly questions whether or not that is okay. They want non-normative and queer sexuality to be centered in schools. They've already said so. The point is that the whole campaign is saying "we're not going to talk to kids about sex in schools, we're going to talk to them in other ways, we'e going to form other mentorship type relationships and I detect nothing so far in any of my engagement with Dan Savage's work that would lead me to call him a groomer. But these people want to be groomers, in gov schools of your children. ``` The campaign became a widespread phenomenon inspiring 50,000 user created videos - the walk away program ? reminds us of that also came from Brandon Straka a gay man - and 50,000,000 views. ``` This thing that's not queer enough and not race focused enough. This thing that engaged in the way in which we didn't want to see children engaged, because it's not queer enough or have the conclusions we wanted - it had 50 million views with 50 thousand videos OH NO it's another message other than theirs and it's influential. ## Anti-resilience ``` Quickly the internet became populated with digital narratives of queer adults, self-described resilience in the face of discrimination. What could exist in the aftermath of heterosexual failure is a ccording to it gets better potentially livable, even desiable. So it's gong to be tough, but you'll be stronger becuase of it, it gets better, you have a great life as an adult, it's not going to be the end of the world. Nope, can't have that message. Queer theorists have to turn this down . They have to constantly alienate everyone and children. This is Herbert Marcuse's program filtered through Queer theory. In relation to my concern for the seemingly innocuous but effective damaging impacts of normative theories of childhood development as a consideration of how the advice provided in this campaign does not even lay support queer and youth here we go. The campaign has been highly critiqued (by queer activists?) for its inadequate consideration of how race and class are for example elided in savages in miller's characterization of recovering homphobia. (Because they're other variables. Asian gay, black gay, latino gay, all in the same boatin terms of struggling with homophobia, but they have to go intersectional because it doesn't have the queer conclusion taht they want. The conclusion taht they wnat is that that want to be able to groom your children in Government Schools). ``` ``` A contentious dialogue surrounding Savage's project to surface (creating their won contentious dialogues - just a form of activism they do on purpose) spurred by divergent approaches to queer futurity. There is a growing amount of activist response and allied scholarly publications that both critique the campaign for its shortcomings and sort through the psychological conditions which have compelled so many to participate in it. ``` What's happening here? Savage offers a message of resilience and it becomes very popular. Queer theorists freak out, create a huge stink, people argue with them about it and they say there's a contentions dialogue and a growing amount of activist response in allied scholarly publications (to attack this thing). In particular, the psycho social conditions which have compelled so many to participate with it (stabilizing the class). System of normativity that's compelling people to desire acceptance. Stabilizing the class that would otherwise become revolutionaries. They're literally mad about a message of resilience for people who could arguably be said are experiencing a more difficult and unjust situation. They're mad about a message of resilience. Paulo Frerira said they should resent their state of dependency, instead of getting rid of the dependence. Marcuse argues that we shouldn't celebrate the stabilized working class, but become angry that they didn't become a counter revolutionary force. We should agitate the other groups, racial minorities, feminists, sexual minorities, outsiders, unemployed to help them become radicals. The goal is to create radicals to have a revolution because it's a Marxian theory. It's not a problem solving apparatus. They critique a message of resilience which did a lot to improve the issue of gay suicides. It probably helped a lot, and this is the exact same thing they invoke (these sick hypocrites) when they say 'we have to groom children in schools, because otherwise they will commit suicide'. Resilience bad? NO resilience! He didn't engage with racism! He didn't engage with Native Americans! That's queer theory, for you. Look at how they're going after him - many critics insist (many critics? Like all 29 Queer Theorists who lost their mind over this) insist that the psychic and corporeal survival that is nurtured in dreams of afuture that hodl smaller amounts of homophobia and gendered violence should not trump considerations of race, gender, disability and other markers of difference (problematize!! Go to other identity categories! Ruin ruin the message of resilience). Why do they do this? So they can continue to use government schools to groom your children sexually and politically under a brand name of Social Emotional Learning. ## Liberal spite ```JasbirPuar (2010) suggests that Savage's IGB video is a mandate to fold into urban neoliberal gay enclaves, a form of liberal handholding and upward mobility. Puar appropriately asks "But how useful is it to imagine troubled gay youth might master their injury and turn blame and guilt into transgression, triumph and All-American success? IGB aims to repair a world broken by homophobia's injuries, but its liberal underpinning is devastating in its inability to submit that maybe things don't get better, but we learn to live in the wreckage of Queer damage.``` This is exactly the same argument that Marcuse gives about the working class being stabilized. Don't you realize there could be communist utopia? It's alos a statement of the other aspect of Iron Law of Woke Projection. We are listening to the pathologies of someone who doesn't know how to live with themselves, or who imagines that others can't learn to live with themselves by proxy. 50thousand gay people say it gets better, but you're going to throw that all out because it's the wrong political message - wrong gay! Not queer! Instead of things getting better, they submi "we learn to live in the wreckage of queer damage". No you don't know how to deal with the fact that your life got better and we won't all be revolutionaries and that we do want acceptance and a stable society. Turn blame and guilt into trasngression? We want all-american success. We want upward mobility, a functioning society. But no, they want to live in the wreckage of Queer Damage - bringing it to as many children as possible, through grooming SEL. ```As a case study, IGB offers a valuable and complex examination of how LGBTQ identities get sutured to and evicted from educational settings and how expanding the terms fo Queerness to analyze a contemporary residue of colonailism and slavery in the US and Canada is necessary. A major criticism of IGB is that it does not aim to correct injustice in the contemporary moment, or increase resilience towards oppression within schools, but postpones better feeligns to the achievement of adulthood. The campaign could be improved by a thoughtful commitment to reducing homophobia and heteronormativity as it occurs in the present and childhood educational settings.``` Does anyone disagree with that last sentence? The ideal situation IS that there would be no bullying of this kind happening, or injury etc. The fact is, however, life is not always so Neat and Clean. You can't end all terrible things, and at some point you go into force and create more terrible things, like grooming children and breaking things because you think you can save somethign which can't actually be saved. ```Although the primary impulse of it gets better was a response to queer youth suicide and feelings of distress made from sexual difference, the application of its resultant cultural criticism to the fiel dof childhood studies in ECE provokes a deeper understanding of what is at stake when children are not supported in queer explorations of sexuality (in government schools by groomers). The campaign and its ensuiing critiques admit that queer affect and homophobia damage circulate in classrooms and site of education and are thus valuable to a reowrking of curricula and pedagogy for children. Tavia Lungo reminds us that IGB is a response to the trouble that arises when Queerness enters the site of education. Its message insists that surviving school is possible. In respones to the campgaign, Lunaogo has written thatthey think there is a bit queer salvific wish going on. Scholarship in the 20th century in Queer Theory. I think there is a bit of queer salvific wish going on in the IGB videos which exhibits a similarly melancholic refusal to work through the grief that it might with the recognition that it doesn't get better ``` Broken broken, and we have to live in their psychopathologies, rather than embracing a message of resilience and saying to people "look, you were born in a certain way, and it's not just and we wanna fix this but for the moment, wyou have drawn a short stick, and don't let that get you down. We'll still keep working for a better future that we want you to be a part of. Don't kill yourself, be resilient and triumphant, and we want you to do that and benefit because it benefits society. Togehter as we go forward, embracing incremantalism, not only can you live a more fulfilling life, but you can also take what you learned and apply it to this problem in a realistic way rahter than in a revolutionary way. Queer theorists hate this. ``` Maybe the secret truth that we repress is that school sucks, even when we find a way to make it work for us. Lungo's suggestion that school could be better, and that it's not enough to daydream of a future in which the students' desires may be realized might inspire ECE to construct a more welcoming environment for the child who is growing sideways. Considering IGB, lungo's arguments remind us that the psychic machinations at work in the adult's compulsion to suggest that the world holds less amounts of homophobia for adults are reslutant from refusal to recognize the unequal distribution of justice and rights to children in the present. ``` *Reminds James of ethnomathematics and they literally say "I was terrible at school, school sucks, blah blah blah" Maybe the secret truth that we repress is that school sucks?* ## Developmental Psychology Basically, what's not going recognized here is that children are assholes to each other, they bully the crap out of each other, they are quite rude and vicious to one another in some cases. There's going to be this, I don't think you can stop bullying etc. THeir solution to this problem, which of course is a perennial problem (insufficiently developed children / cruelty of underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex) is sexualize all children and question the utility of developmental psychology. In government schools. We know, for example, that schizoid personality disorder often arises specifically from the condition that a romantic or sexual relationship is developmentally inappropriate for children (usually between the ages of 7 and 10, it causes personality disorders). Critical Theories exist to induce personality disorders - no wthrough sexualization of them. ```To summarize, the IGB campaign is an effort to ensure LGBTQ children and youth that their future will hold less violence. As L'gongo and Smith demonstrate, though, that the future is not as kind to those whose bodies are imprinted with the legacies of colonialism or transatlantic slavery, for example.``` Tacit admission that they're right, of course. It does get better when you're an adult and we have this liberal society that's tolerant and accepting, now. It does get better, if you're gay or lesbian or bisexual or trans or queer. It does get better when you're an adult and people are understanding and get it, and you can talk things through. The resilience actually works, is what they're saying. That's why they have to say "well, not for ALL kids, though." Not for the transatlantic slave imprinted kids. They have to invent new categories because the problem doesn't exist. They're actually wrong, and they're admitting that they're wrong, so the new categories allow them to continue doing the thing about which they're admitting they're wrong. They're intellectual swindlers. They're literally con artists, usign a bunch of complicated gobbledygook to pull their con. What's the result of their con? To continue to groom children at government schools. Groomed into sex, completely age-inappropriate, which they admit because their target is developmental psychology. ```The queer theory of childhood that I have been proposing would not find the campaign IGB a suitable intervention because it does not address the present conditions in whihc children live and learn``` It's not completely radical, not a revolutionary ideology, it's a liberal ideology that can create real meaningful progress, incrementally and in steps. No, instead we need to have the revolution that these freaks will continue. They think they own your children, so of course they want to do that. To the point wher ethey're saying that developmental psychology is a hegemonic narrative that we should reject and queer. These people belong in prison ```The analytic possibilities made conceivable by theories of the child's queer existence can only offer a better future if they turn back towards colonial pasts. In my attempts to address homophobia's impact on childhood development, I've hoped to queer the damaging rhetoeric of childhood innocence by suggesting that we as adults clear a path for children to symbolize negativity, queer affect and sexual curiosity.``` Yeah, we as adults should make children sexually curious and queer, by making sure they don't stay innocent, because it's a damaging narrative. ```Because for queer theory, gender and sexuality are porous and mobile. A queer theory of childhood education should not be invested in predicting the child's future identity, but rather attend to the child's present curiosity about sexual difference. I spent time with Edelman and Halverson's theories to show that the limitations arise when queer theories of childhood cannot bear the weight of the material child. Conclusion toward a queer future for childhood studies``` The goal is we're going to take It Gets Better and problematize it and anything we keep from it has to be queered. Eraly childhood developmental psychology has to be queered. Early childhood education has to be be queered. Now we're going to queer childhood studies. It's always to twist the ratchet into direction of the ideology. All of the critical ideologies are ideological colonization projects. They're attempting to colonize every possible aspect of society, culture and institutional apparatus so that they can become organs of the ideology. It's a takeover. Ideological takeover, in otherwords Marxism. ## Dialectic Synthesis of Queer Children ``` A theory of the child by way of detour through queer theory can help to clarify the damage done when children's curious investigations of sexual difference and agentic responses to structures of social violence are punished. There is, on the one hand, a necessity of supporting LGBTQ children, and on the other, the related need to reimagine our theories of childhood so that they are not constrained by rhetorics of childhood innocence, that invalidate the child's potential queer desires. I have traced some of the convergences and antagonisms between the disciplinary studies of queer theory, and the sociological studies of childhood education in order to assist in cementing a methodological bond between childhood studies and queer theory. Familiarity with debates about childhood in queer theory spun out of adult opinions on what the future should hold and how innocence should be distributed may help childhood educators to better support LGBTQ children, but also more broadly remap theories of childhood development so that all children can be better supported in their curious and creative resistances to injustice. I have advocated that our adult theories of childhood are compelled by our adult affective remembered and unconscious experiences with education, family and sexuality (hegemonic and artificial) and underwritten by histories of race (the whole kitchen sink, of course). Strengthening a conceptual relation between Queer and Childhood (a dialectical synthesis - children made to be queer) can help to cultivate a culture of critique concerning the interruptive force of heteronormativity on the child's development and more broadly expose asymmetries in how children are treated in rhetoric of innocence is distributed. Queer theories of childhood may operate as analytics with which to make arguments about social relations between children and the adult world to which they must respond and in so doing invite questions about the embodied vulnerabilities, educational affects, neurological impacts and narrative implications of discourses of childhood innocence. ``` Among all the context of all the fancy words that they still want to sexualize children. ``` A vast majority of research on childhood development rescussitates liberal individualism as it does not consider the sociality of pain caused by the communal experience of violence wrought under racism and genocide. Building a queer theory of childhood may be a project in which histories of race and racialization are better understood for their continued impact on schooling adn education outlining an emergent discourse at the intersection of early childhood education, sociologicalstudies of education and queer theory, I have sought to broaden queer theory's angle of analysis to include a consideration of the material child who must live through childhood. This collaborative formation can, I suggest, be a space in which methodologies and concomitant practices of childhood education can be made better. ``` ## Conclusion Psychotic paper that frames out what they want to do in order to continue grooming children into sex at schools. They are grooming children into queer sexuality in order to, in the very Russo Hegelian Marxian frame, make children who are made to be queer by grooming them in our schools, and this is a robust, if you will, defense of that from the perspective of queer theory. So you can understand what's actually happening. In previous episode, we talked about th egrooming schools we now face with various graphic novels and I talked about the links to Lukach's program a hundred years ago in hungary in the eastern block and how this manifested clearly in Marcuse and here we hear tonnes of echoes to Marcuse. Ultra weird and quirky genius was tutoring us for a qualifying exam. He would write these complicated things and say "so the blahb lah blah math statement" and at the end of every statement he would say "I'm right". So I'm going to start doing this now, too. I'm right. I referred to him as "I'm right". I look back at my previous podcast and think "I'm right. The project in our schools is to groom our children into a Marxist destablization project at the level of their identity and this is being facilitated by groomers who are in a symbiotic relationship with the theorists and the negative externality of this agreement in project is your kid. Your kids and their psychological wellbeing and their ability to get to know themselves and grow into a healthy and mature adult which now has to be queered and their stability in understanding themselves as a sex gender and sex identity that has to be queered and probably the psychological, emotional and even physical and sexual well being that will be exploited in more cases than we want to think about, by groomers who rae going to take advantage of that situation. Pedophile groomers, even. This is what's happening, again. To your children. In our government schools. With your tax dollars. Under brand names like comprehensive sex education and social emotional learning. This is why I said, as I'd said a couple months ago, that I would turn away from Critical Race Theory, and turn to this. I fully understand why Alex Jones gets so pissed off because when you think about what this really is and what's really going on, I'm sorry about what this episode will do to people, it will make people so fucking mad when you realize that it's happening and it's intentional. You have to purge the schools - form a parents coalition - set aside your differences - and fight for your children. Republican and Democrat doesn't mean anything. They're grooming your children and psychologically abusing them so they can sexually abuse them. So hey can destabilize them. So they acn have red guard. So they can have a cultural revolution. So they can achieve whatever program they have. Because it's a Marxist theory. White Black Latino Asian race doesn't matter. Vax unvaxxed doesn't matter. Religions don't matter. You are parents and your children are being wrecked by this crap having dominated our schools. You must understand this and creat a coalition that transcends partisanship, transcends identity in every category except parent. You must understand this and fight back as one unified voice as parents who wan tto clean this crap and all the other stuff that doesn't belong in our schools.