Wondering whether others had linked theories of postcolonialism with developmentalism I came across a paper opening with the following statement:
“Child psychology and children’s literature can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with childhood – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short, child psychology and children’s literature as an adult style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over childhood”
(Nodelman, 1992, 29)
Nodelman reassures readers that these are not his words but words he borrows from postcolonial theorist Said (1978) and inserted terms relating to childhood institutions. Nodelman (1992) argues that discourses of childhood and adulthood stand in binary opposition to one-another (Burman, 2008b). Adults confirm the difference of children to themselves through studying, speaking for, and gazing upon them, therefore exercising a controlling system of power-knowledge by creating a discourse of ‘childhood’
(Nodelman, 1992). These arguments resonate with Bhabha’s concept of ‘fixity’: creating the stable ‘stereotypical’ subject. Children are therefore construed, paradoxically, as both “wonderfully innocent and woefully ignorant” (Nodelman, 1992, 34). Nodelman
continues by making parallels between colonial and adult power, drawing on Rose’s (1984) critique of Peter Pan. Rose (1984) argues similarly, writing of the presumed ‘naturalness’ of children, which on the one hand results in a nostalgic discourse of creativity and lost truths, but on the other constitutes a population of uncivilised, lesser- evolved and irrational children. We see links with disability: similar assumptions made
93 of disabled people, contributing to infantilising discourse (Johnson, Walmsley, & Wolfe, 2010). The presumed ‘naturalness’ of childhood and disability are used to juxtapose visions of virtuous, rational ableist adulthood (all terms that can be recognised in relation to colonial discourse: the colonisers gaze upon the colonised). By making childhood wonderful, argues Nodelman (1992), we make children not-quite-human. A discourse of less-than-human applied to disability with devastating consequences (Wolfensberger, 1969) (investigated further in relation to disabled youth in Chapters Seven and Eight). By portraying other cultures, nations and people as ‘less civilised’, colonisers legitimise their colonisation.
Rose (1984) and Nodelman (1992) use children’s literature to further their arguments. Rose (1984, 137) states that in her critique of Peter Pan she is not asking “what children want, or need, from literature” but “what it is that adults, through literature, want or demand of the child”. In a more general analysis of children’s literature, Nodelman (1992) argues similarly: we assume and want children to possess characteristics we feel are intrinsic to childhood, therefore, we give them books to bolster these qualities. We assume children to be creative so we give them books to teach them to be creative. However, whilst we want children to remain the Other (i.e. children) and represent everything we expect children to be, we also want them to be less childlike and more adultlike (the moral ending to the children’s story). We find children paradoxically attractive and dangerous:
“What we choose to understand as childlike irrationality or lawlessness or carelessness is attractively lax, a temptation to be less responsible, less mature, less adult. If adults have a secret desire to act childishly, and if that dangerous desire is engendered by the childish actions of children, then we must protect ourselves and our world by making children less childish”
(Nodelman, 1992, 31)
Children’s books therefore teach them to be both ‘childlike’, but at the same time
‘adultlike’ (Nodelman, 1992; Rose, 1984). Books for children try to capture the ‘wonder’ of childhood, whilst enforcing adult morals; to be less irrational, less egocentric, more ‘grownup’. Like the coloniser, adults want children to stay firmly fixed as children, yet paradoxically, also act more like them, more like adults. As Childs and Williams (1997, 132) put it in relation to Bhabha’s work: “the stereotype functions as a fetish”; the adult
94 simultaneously recognises herself in the child, yet disavows it. The child as almost adult, but not quite.
If all children exist under the colonial gaze of adults (and the Panoptic gaze of other children), then for disabled children, levels of surveillance are heightened. Ableist adulthood discourse means disabled children need keeping a closer eye on; they require more ‘work’ in order to ensure their conformity. Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2010) write that play for disabled children has become “a mechanism for assessment, diagnosis and therapeutic intervention” (500), first used to make normal/abnormal judgements, and then as an attempt to correct those falling into the latter category. “Disabled children’s play”, they argue, “has been colonised by adults seeking to support their learning and development at the expense of its intrinsic value”. Although to professionally judge certain forms of play as gender in/appropriate is perhaps now frowned upon as out of date (at least in a publicly overt sense), discourses about what is ‘age-appropriate’ remain strong (Burman, 2008a). Dis/abled children, playing in ways that do not ‘fit’ with their age (or, just generally, do not ‘fit’ with what children’s play ‘should’ constitute), are considered abnormal. Nodelman’s (1992) and Rose’s (1984) critiques of literature, and Goodley and Runswick-Cole’s (2010) interrogation of ‘play’ both point to similar conclusions; adults create discourses around phenomena and processes that frame them as intrinsically ‘childlike’, these processes can then be used to survey, judge and place demands upon children, with the aim of guiding them to normative adulthood. As Nodelman argues, and Bhabha’s theory of mimicry helps us to theorise, there is an adult desire to ensure that children remain distinctly separate, as children, yet, paradoxically, become less childlike and more adultlike; to remain as child yet mimic the adult. The child that is like adult, but not quite. As Nodelman (1992, 33) highlights, however, “what distinguishes our thinking about childhood from other discourses about otherness is that in this case, the other does quite literally turn into ourselves”, therefore:
“The irony… is as obvious as it is depressing: if our thinking about children is an act of colonization, then it is in fact ourselves we are colonizing, ourselves we are oppressing – albeit at one remove.”
(Nodelman, 1992, 33)
Ironic it may be, but depressing? Not necessarily. Re-enter youth. Re-enter disability. Re- enter queer.
95
Youth and mimicry
Developmental discourse teaches us that youth bridges childhood and adulthood. My arguments above link particularly with the concept of Youth as Passive: youth as a time to carve children, who will be passive in the process, into suitable ‘adult’ citizens (Kelly, 2006). In Chapter Two I began to addressed research question one by exploring dangers young disabled people face if a normative discourse of disabled Youth as Passive remain unquestioned. Yet, I also argued, and will continue to argue throughout, that discourses of Youth as Passive do not represent the lived-realities of young people’s lives. Rather, they are used at particular times, in particular ways, to do particular jobs. Today, notions of passivity are used to justify the destruction of the welfare state. Yet youth is not static. Discourses of youth are messy and contradictory. Youth as Passive is only one construct of youth. The anxiety aroused by active young people demonstrates young people’s ability to resist and define the categorisation that they are expected to slot into, as they inhabit a space between child and adult. The next chapter marks the beginning of Section Two where, through an analysis of the stories offered to me by young disabled people, I address research questions three and four: asking what disability and the lived-
experiences of young disabled people can teach us about youth, and what youth and the lived-experiences of young disabled people can teach us about disability. I explain now how Bhabha’s (1984) concepts of mimicry and mockery will help me.
Discourses of colonised populations result from relations between coloniser and
colonised (Bhabha, 1984). Therefore the colonised does not remain the static, knowable Other that the coloniser desires. With mimicry, Bhabha tells us, comes the danger of mockery. As the colonised subject realises her own inauthenticity within the colonial discourse she is able to pose as a caricature of the colonised. Bhabha calls this the ‘menace of mimicry’ (Childs & Williams, 1997):
“The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry – a difference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a difference that is almost total but not quite”
(Bhabha, 1984, 91)
Once the difference is noted, the colonised can pose as a parody of the coloniser. To the coloniser, this is a menace. There is a fine line between being like-us-but-not-quite and being too-like-us:
96
“With mimicry the authoritative discourse become displaced as the colonizer sees traces of himself in the colonized: as sameness slides into otherness”
(Childs & Williams, 1997, 130, original italics)
In ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, Fanon (1986) lists two alternatives available to the colonised person under colonial rule: ‘turn white or disappear’. Bhabha adds
‘camouflage’ as a third option: “the effect of mimicry is not to change [to turn ‘white’] but to camouflage” (Childs & Williams, 1997, 133) – to pose as ‘white’ in order to ‘fit in’. I would like here to pause a minute to think about the content of Chapter One where I voiced how on beginning my PhD I felt the need to ‘play grownup’. This was all done in a fairly tongue-in-cheek manner. Yet my attempts to ‘play grownup’ could be
theorised as a mockery of adulthood. I recognised my difference from ‘adults’, worked out what constituted this difference, and proposed that I could trick adults around me into thinking I was one of them. I.e. adopt an adulthood camouflage in order to fit into an adult world. It is a strategy, I argue in Chapters Seven and Eight that young disabled people employ in order to fit into a discourse of youth as becoming-adult/woman. “In Foucault’s terms, Bhabha speaks of ‘the process by which the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed’” (Childs & Williams, 1997, 131). Through my ‘theorisation of adulthood’ I was turning the gaze back from one on youth/childhood, to a surveillance of adults from the position of youth. At the end of Chapter One, however, I worried that, despite the joking, it would be all too easy for this role-play to become necessary and every day in order to survive in an ableist and adultist world. Worries I have in terms of the psycho- emotional wellbeing of my young disabled participants in Chapters Seven and Eight.
Furthermore, in my own deceptive (camouflaging? menacing?) mission I found that the ableist and normative rhetoric of adulthood means for disabled young people adopting adulthood camouflage may be harder than it is for me. Childs and Williams (1997, 129) write that for Bhabha, as well as a technique of colonial power, mimicry is “also a strategy of [colonial] exclusion through inclusion that purports to accept the ‘good native’ all the better to exclude and denounce the majority ‘bad natives’”. To pass as adult I assume the role of ‘good native’. Arguably for me to take this position is at the expense of others, such as disabled youth, who do not have the option of conforming. The language of ‘good/bad native’ is used within neoliberal rhetoric. In order for the ‘correct’ answers to be received, tokenistic consultation takes place with only the most ‘adult’ young people. This can then be used to legitimise service cuts as ‘what the people
97 want’ (Fuller & Loogma, 2009). We are further bombarded with individualistic,
neoliberal ‘overcoming’, ‘if I can do it, anybody can do it’, ‘achieving despite of’
rhetoric. These are good active youth. The result: an excuse to dismiss any form of youth activity that does not fall into the ‘correct adult channels’ as irresponsible and dangerous (discussed in Chapter Two). The dangers of mimicry warn me to be careful when faced with the desire to ‘play grownup’. I argue in Chapter Seven, that there may be strategic times when disabled youth need to mimic ableist adulthood, for the purpose of survival. Yet such deception comes at the expense of other things. Therefore, I maintain the need for readdressing of youth and theorising adulthood, and the vitality of adopting a
‘critically young’ position which challenges adulthood normativity. I also argue in Chapters Seven and Eight, however, that disabled youth’s mimicry of adulthood, can make a mockery of adulthood. This helps me rethink both youth and adulthood.
When discussing Chapter One I have continually received the same response: “I think we’re all just playing grownup – I don’t feel like an adult!” I have already asserted the impossibility of meeting up to the ‘adult ideal’ and I reassert it now: those appearing most grownup (our Mr Reasonable) are merely those sporting the best camouflage. Here I want to introduce Bhabha’s concept of hybridity. In a later essay, The Location of Culture, Bhabha (1994) theorises the tension felt by colonisers as cultures meet and as coloniser and colonised become less distinct from one-another: a concept he terms ‘hybridity’. He again uses the example of English missionaries, this time their
distribution of the bible. Whilst the English sat at home waiting for the civilising work of the bible to take effect, its use had become hybrid: used as fuel and traded as a
commodity (Young, 2003). Hybridity “works in different ways at the same time, according to the cultural, economic, and political demands of specific situations”
(Young, 1997, 79). I am reminded of an appropriation of the bible in my own household. As a nine-year-old I was sent home from school with a bible and confidently told my atheist Dad that I was going to put it in the bin. Expecting praise, I was surprised when he instead asked if he could have it. Seeking further explanation, I was informed that bibles make brilliant doorstops. Bhabha argues that colonialism relies on “rules of recognition” and the belief in a “natural authority” that cannot be “allowed to be ‘distorted’ or ‘disturbed’” (Childs & Williams, 1997, 134). It relies upon right/wrong, true/false, self/Other distinctions. However, as cultures meet hybrid forms “[break] down the symmetry and duality of the self/other” (Bhabha, 1994, 116), leading to questions of what constitutes the original, untarnished, unhybridised form. In a quest to Anglicise, it
98 must be clear what it means to be English, and what are imitations. Hybrid forms prevent clear duality; which came first, the bible or the doorstop? Returning to youth, with its hotchpotch definitions and contradictory discourses, I ask whether it could be reframed, not as a developmental post-child/pre-adult period that ends at adulthood, but a hybrid that disturbs child/adult binaries and that even the most ‘grownup’ of us embody if we allow ourselves to be ‘critically young’. Although I see danger in mimicry and mockery of accepting normativity, with hybridity, I see space for resistance.