Minor Troubles: Racial Figurations of Youth Sexuality and Childhood’s Queerness

In Minor Troubles, Erin J. Rand investigates a series of controversies about youth sexuality and queerness from the early twenty-first century: adult concerns about teen sexting, the bullying and suicides of queer kids, trans youths’ access to gender-segregated bathrooms at school, and sex education. In the public deliberation and mediation of each of these controversies, the imagined qualities of childhood--innocence, vulnerability, nonsexuality, and, crucially, whiteness--are deployed by adults to justify the protection of children. However, these rhetorical figurations of childhood often produce material precarities for actual young people, especially youth of color and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth. Rand foregrounds the fundamental role of racialization in forming ideas about childhood, arguing that the image of innocent white childhood depends upon the dehumanization of racialized youth. Moreover, the rhetorical process of figuration produces vulnerability and constrains agency for real young people and creates cultural ideas about childhood that come to justify policies, discipline behaviors, regulate identities, control knowledges, and determine interventions that shape children’s lives, bodies, and experiences.

Erin J. Rand (she/her) is Associate Professor in Communication and Rhetorical Studies and affiliated with Women and Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of Reclaiming Queer: Activist and Academic Rhetorics of Resistance.