The Politics of Childhood: A Conversation with Sophie Lewis and Jules Gill-Peterson

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the Salvage panel at the Socialism conference in Chicago in 2023. Jules Gill-Peterson and Sophie Lewis were interviewed by Salvage’s Editor-in-Chief.

Salvage

Many people have noted that the Right (in the US in particular, but also elsewhere) is focused on attacking reproductive rights and bodily autonomy; seeking to criminalise both abortion and gender-affirming healthcare. It’s obvious to many people now that we need to coordinate a defence around questions of bodily autonomy, reproductive justice and self-determination.

Today I’d like to talk about one aspect of the present clusterfuck, which is the way that children are the focus of reactionary politics right now. We see this in the attacks on Drag Queen Story Hour, in the criminalisation of parents who affirm their trans kids’ genders, the attacks on gender-affirming educators using children’s preferred pronouns, and in the moral panics around puberty blockers and around gender-affirming healthcare in general.

It’s interesting to me as someone from Britain that what we’ve seen in Britain has been more of a moral panic on behalf of cis women – or, as the TERFs insist on calling us, adult human females (which I think is relevant to this conversation) – mobilising feminism and accusing trans women of a range of perversions. And one notable result of that is that in Britain the folk devils are trans people themselves, almost always trans women, and the people who are being ‘protected’ are ‘adult human females’. Children have almost been an afterthought.

In the US, it seems like it’s the opposite. It’s gender affirming parents, educators, healthcare professionals – themselves not usually trans – who are most often positioned as responsible for corrupting the children, as well as drag queens, who are also not necessarily (or even usually) trans in the contemporary sense. I’m not drawing a hard distinction here, of course. Both schools and healthcare professionals are increasingly being accused of colluding with and encouraging children’s ‘fantasies’ in Britain. And, of course, trans people are accused of the same perversions in the US. But the dominant, the most vocal, moral panic seems to be of a slightly different character, so there’s a really interesting difference to be explored in how these two related but different moral panics have developed.

So, my first question is: how do we make sense of all of this? I want to start here in part because it reveals that the mobilisation of the protection of children is not in some way inevitable. It’s not necessarily how this moral panic had to play out, even though it might sometimes seem that way. So why has it been focused on children? And why is the protection of children such a powerful rhetorical move in the US public sphere?

Sophie Lewis

I find this question of specifically why the child is at the centre of the moral panic in the US right now – and why it’s mainly, by contrast, the predatory adult ‘unwoman’ in the discourse on TERF Island aka the UK – quite perplexing. Does the non-cissexual child represent the most eloquent symbol of a felt demographic threat to the American empire’s secure future, while the British specter of the non-cissexual woman lurking in the ladies’ toilets represents something more directly related to the xenophobic border animus expressed in Brexit?

Several different things come to mind. Why, for example, is it that the US is the only country in the world that still hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? There’s something about the figure of the child in contemporary American discourse that suggests a need to look into the deep history of parental rights, qua property rights, in relation to settler colonialism and chattel slavery. After all, the child in the US is a piece of quasi-property. Perhaps, then, the slogan ‘Save the Children’ has to be understood as a defence of a particular racial regime of private property. Recall how this phrase animated the homophobic campaign spearheaded by Anita Bryant in the 80s, and then, more recently, was the rallying cry of QAnon. The basic structure of the sex panic qua counterinsurgency echoes again and again across the twentieth century. Every time, it draws on nativist fears about the dilution of citizenship, white birth rates, and uncertainty about the stable reproduction of an ‘American’ future.

Still, I wonder if the differences between the US and Britain in this respect – namely, end-of-Empire melancholy and nostalgia – might be more superficial than they appear. The trans panic after all seems to be ricocheting back and forth across the Pond, gaining strength every time it makes the crossing. I know Jules has written brilliantly about the transformation of QAnon into a thing one could call TAnon (where the ‘T’ stands for transgender, and the conspiracy focuses specifically on the ‘transing’ of children, ‘white slavery’ style). That phenomenon is both highly reminiscent of late nineteenth century moral panics about an imaginary spate of child abductions into sex trafficking and, again, thoroughly transatlantic, just like those much older panics, I think.

There has certainly been a ping-ponging back and forth between the UK and the US when it comes to reactionary feminisms more generally: for instance, TERFism came from fringe eco-radical and ex-Catholic feminist theologians in the US in the early ‘70s, but was then incubated, institutionalised and made hegemonic in the UK, prior to making an unwelcome comeback in America in recent years. If there are outward ‘trans panic’ formatting differences between the two shores to be explained, I’d (again) mainly just want to repeat that this particular settler colony, the US, has a very specific history of criminalising Black childhood and disqualifying blackness from the rubric of childhood. Meanwhile, as we know, some classes of adults – think Brett Kavanaugh – enjoy a prolonged condition of privileged childhood in the indulgent eyes of the courts, whenever they behave delinquently. I’m not an expert in Critical Childhood Studies, but I’d guess this is a culture where we are especially used to worrying about the self-‘emancipation’ of certain kinds of unruly children, and about the risk of contamination of all children’s minds by the ‘wrong’ kind of children’s political visions. In any case, I think you’re right to pose this question as a way of reminding us that none of this is inevitable. Jules, what do you think about Rosie’s question?

Jules Gill-Peterson

I mean, it occurs to me that another way of describing that ping-ponging you are talking about is through the relationships or bridges between contrasting terms. ‘Women and children’ isn’t just a trope or an old fashioned phrase for no reason, right? One of the ways we might draw the contrast [between them] is by understanding their relationship as pivotal. And one of the broader commonalities between anti-abortion and anti-trans political movements is that they’re actually, broadly very popular. There are liberal articulations of them and there are far right articulations of them. There are left-wing articulations of them. There are secular formations and there are openly evangelical or Catholic ones. And in some ways the question of solidarity is about learning to see those series of connections and understand what they mean for organising or out organising this strange-bedfellows-world we’re living in, where you have not even that right wing feminists aligning themselves with, say, white supremacist groups in various settler colonies. There are an array of alliances here.

But think a little bit about the child here: the formation of the kind of child around whom you can have a moral panic is really, historically speaking, a product of largely the late nineteenth century. It’s a very Victorian kind of child. And that’s something that I understand to be a truly Anglo-American, largely a British and American, invention that has since been exported in different forms and imposed in various ways throughout the world. There’s a lot of intimacy and entanglement here in ways that are both alarming and upsetting. And so there are very short term explanations positing that QAnon really explains a lot about the United States, even though having moral panics around children is one of the oldest political playbooks in this country. Whereas the UK version has always seemed, at a distance, to be much more about white bourgeois women’s function as the gatekeepers of world empire. You know, a role they might have enjoyed much more literally in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but one that has incredible symbolic resonance.

There’s so many ways to imagine what the phrase ‘women and children’ might mean. And so maybe one I’ll just throw out is, for example, for trans women in the United States the practical, political, moral impossibility of having recognised relationships to young trans people that are relationships of solidarity or political co-organisation. It’s not that it doesn’t happen, but it feels largely impossible to do in any way that would be public or known. And that to me is a really interesting dilemma of ‘women and children’. Further, we can think a lot about the contrast between the sort of public sphere dilemma of that versus, say, the wealth of Black, trans, political infrastructure throughout the United States where women and young people already live in relationships of solidarity, mutual aid and political co-organisation. That just looks like I put more dishes on our proverbial buffet table, but now we have a lot to eat.

Salvage

Yes, I think we’ll come back to a lot of those dishes. Thanks, Jules. As you touched on, obviously part of what’s at play here is a particular idea of children and of childhood, which imagines children to be both incapable of self-knowledge that contradicts their parents’ ideas of them, and without the agency to judge, to make decisions or accurately articulate themselves and their self-image such that they must be encouraged, groomed, forced, tricked or misled into seeking recognition and healthcare that affirms a different gender than the one that was assigned to them. I feel like this idea of children is so well hegemonised, so deeply embedded, in modern society that a lot of the time we can’t even really see it happening. And I wonder, Jules, if you could talk about the way that that is an extremely historically specific idea about children. If you could talk a little bit about the history of that particular idea of childhood, when it came into being, how it was first and subsequently mobilised.

Jules Gill-Peterson

Sophie mentioned earlier, a key motif, which is children as a quasi-form of property – and I really mean quasi because the history of treating people, actual people as actual property comes into play here and I wouldn’t want to flatten the difference. Nevertheless, if you want to make all of those series of ascribed differences real, that children are unknowing, incompetent, innocent, incapable, unreasonable, closer to the state of nature – if you’re Jean Jacques Rousseau. All of those ideas become a manifest problem in the industrial era because, of course, children are leaving the household economy either to work, as Dickens gave us: suffering in all sorts of ways that both sentimentalised and problematised those really serious issues. And at the same time, the movement for the abolition of slavery is scoring a series of successes. And so, in the case of the United States, which is the version I know the best, we sort of emerge in the chaos and the white supremacist backlash of Reconstruction, asking questions that are at once legal, economic and literal.

The United States was founded on a very clear distinction between some people being people and some people being things or property. Now you’re getting to this era where, you know, the widespread recognition that children should be working and should be in school is brushing up against the intense project of trying to maintain racial domination as close to the modality of legal slavery as possible. And so it’s really in that kind of maelstrom that you get the production, on the one side, of the kind of Victorian, innocent child we all recognise. A white child with exaggerated big eyes who’s completely helpless and really cute and not capable of doing anything and doesn’t know anything. And, my goodness, we wouldn’t want that kid to be cleaning chimneys! That kid should be in grade school! And then, also, families will learn to love that child in place of expecting that child to bring in wages or to do a bunch of labour in the home to sustain the family unit. So you get a sentimental economy replacing a formal economy, and the production of that child who is protectable but also incompetent and undeserving of civil rights, as they are being articulated after the Civil War. That child can only be produced if you produce its foil, right? In the US, the foil of that child is the Black child, and historians have really convincingly dug into the ways in which Black children aren’t really seen as children anymore, come the Victorian era.

You can look at the formation of the juvenile justice system. You’ve got the first juvenile courts at the very end of the 19th century – the first one is in Chicago. I mean, these things are ghastly nonsense, right? It’s a really lovely court where when you go to it, you have no procedural rights, you don’t have a right to an attorney, you don’t necessarily get a list of all the charges or evidence brought against you. You can be hauled in for anything, right? You could be arrested and sent to a juvenile judge because you are causing a ruckus at home. Or because you were just loitering on the street or running around or whatever. And these judges could basically come up with any sentence they want, because they’re acting like parents. They’ll send you away to a reform school or something like that, often until you’re twenty-one. And that’s a terrible contraction of the economic and political agency of white, innocent, protectable children that we punished under this regime.

But right from the very beginning, historians have found that those things, juvenile courts, essentially are interfacing with the advent of Black Codes, after the Reconstruction Era. Black children are arrested at far disproportionate rates, both in the urban North and in the Deep South, and these courts are essentially leasing them out – not essentially – they’re literally leasing them out into de facto conditions of enslavement. And so you can see that sort of sharp distinction, which also shows up culturally. Robin Bernstein’s book Racial Innocence talks about this.

You can see the distinction between Victorian white girls learning to play with white dolls and care for them and love them and actually learning – and there’s lots of material culture and archives around this – to treat Black dolls violently and learning to see them as unfeeling and inhuman. And learning that if you punch a Black doll, it doesn’t really hurt it. And so there’s this whole cultural modality that comes into play, where creating a protectable, innocent child is not really a great deal for those children who are classified under that rubric. But it also creates some of the most dehumanising, violent corollaries.

And we could talk about the openly genocidal project of forced schooling of Indigenous children, kidnapped on purpose from their communities, wrenched away, put into schools, and intentionally abused on a mass scale to destroy not just Indigenous culture but Indigenous polities as well, by breaking down their reproduction from generation to generation. This larger project has to do with industrialisation. It has to do with the problem of children working – and creating the sort of alternative child to that, unsurprisingly, requires creating a series of disposable children. And that might help us understand why, in order to protect some children from the abuse of adolescent transition, we have to intentionally abuse trans children. Pretty extremely. Those sorts of contradictions are quite symptomatic of this regime of Victorian childhoods.

Salvage

Thanks, Jules. That’s very useful to thread those together. I want to get into a little more of the difficulty of navigating some of this stuff in the present moment. Because part of the problem is that – even with all of that very real historical construction – part of the reason that appeals to protect the children are so seductive is because children are physically fragile, right? They are easily physically overpowered and can be forced to do things in a much easier way than most adults can. They’re really little and they trust people very easily. That does seem to be true, even if there’s also a historical construction of children in an exaggerated way. And it’s also the case that emotionally, mentally, there are certain developmental milestones. Which means that the judgements and thoughts of children are at least different from those of adults, even if we might not want to say that they’re less. They lack sufficient knowledge or understanding of certain situations to adequately assess danger. That seems pretty uncontroversial to say about all children. They are vulnerable, they cry out for protection.

But they’re also vulnerable because they’re legally entirely dependent on adults. They don’t have the means to acquire food, to acquire shelter without any adult assistance – it’s illegal for them to work – and they don’t get to make any choices for themselves. They’re entirely at the mercy of adults until they are themselves deemed to be adults by whatever state they’re living under. Thinking about this conversation, I tried to come up with a list of the things that I think specifically children need to be protected from, as opposed to things everybody needs to be protected from, like war, starvation, homelessness, unwanted sexual contact and violence and so on. And I realised that the specific things that we might want to protect children from are actually mostly things that shouldn’t exist, right? Like credit cards, weapons and busy roads. We’ve created a dangerous situation for children, but they’re not natural things that children are incapable of dealing with, they’re the worst inventions of capitalism.

So my question is: how do we balance? Children do have agency and they should have their agency acknowledged and they should be respected when they tell us that they are someone else than who we think them to be – I feel that very deeply. How do we balance that with also thinking about the actual vulnerability, physical or otherwise, of children when we’re thinking about the politics of childhood? How do we think about the kernel of truth of innocence and protection versus children as kind of political and agential people? Sophie, maybe you could start us off with that one.

Sophie Lewis

There’s a lot of emotion vested in the idea that childhood is in some way a constructed category. It’s almost universal to feel a strong objection to something like that. What are you academics talking about, children exist! There’s no disputing that we as a species are young and small before we are less young and small. Children do exist! But the questions Rosie has just asked are fantastic ways of putting us back in touch with our most utopian horizons and our fundamental goals as anti-capitalists, as communists, as people struggling for the abolition of the present state of things. Because as she began to show, there’s nothing that we would want for the children that we would not want for ourselves. Thinking about what children are owed, what we owe to children, as it were, is a great way of thinking about what we owe ourselves and each other.

The boundaries between these things don’t really exist in any stable way. Liat Ben-Moshe, earlier at this conference, was talking about infantilisation as it applies within the institutionalisation of disability. There is the assumption that certain sorts of disabled people require care similar to the care imposed on many children, ie, a certain kind of desexualising custodial care – except forever, in this case, and with no possibility of graduating into an integration into society, into community. What if we think about infantilisation in dialogue with disability liberation? I think it becomes easier, if we do, to see the false binaries, the false choices, the false oppositions that are posed in the context of care, such as: institutionality or the private nuclear, heteropatriarchal household? The authority of carceral care in an institutional setting, or the authority of the proprietary parent? Neither please!

But that’s also an easy thing to say given that we often don’t concretely have another obvious option, as individuals struggling to survive in the interstices of a deeply brutalising, individualising, atomising mode of reproduction. What is harder to grapple with is the possibility that ‘the children’ really do need to be understood in fairly theoretically informed ways, by all of us, as indeed, yes, constructs that are there, in part, to keep class society going. Childhood is a temporal category that helps naturalise the “work society” and manufactures mass acceptance of waged labour. It is widely imagined as the time when we do not labour to produce surplus value, and serves thus as a way of buying us off, making it seem inevitable that we must then graduate into the rest of our lives, meaning lives that we – most of us – must give away in work. This is why I talk about the family as a technology of work, because of the sense in which it is – specifically because it is the children who require us to go to work before they are themselves required to grow up to go to work and have children of their own in turn who will require them to keep going to work – an immense naturalisation of work.

Children in the real world are not simply the reason adults want to go to work and have to go to work, however. They are often carers themselves, besides being (if they are lucky) cared-for. We would do well to remind ourselves: children often have abortions, children often have sex. Children can get married at any age in many states within this Christian-nationalism saturated settler colony, even if they are not legally allowed to have sex outside of marriage. These sorts of things really expose the core logic of reproductivity- and fertility-protecting nativism at the root of the politics of childhood.

To try to return back to the point: how do we think and talk about care and autonomy, vulnerability and responsibility, with, not just in reference to, children? This is the conversation I want to have here. The current state of play feels like a gridlock, like a terrifying terrain of fear and individuation. It’s almost socially impossible in many settings to speak with children if you’re not vested with the authority and authorisation to do so, an authorisation that has to be either kinship, or medical, or school-related, or carceral (the police are always allowed).

Again: when we think about caring for children, what is it that we think they need that we think we do not need? What do children remind us, inconveniently, that we owe to each other? I suggested in Full Surrogacy Now that we are all the makers of one another. And the task of communism, I really believe, is to learn to act like it; to organise infrastructure as though we really are each other’s harvest, for better and for worse. And that’s a desegregating horizon when it comes to this category of children, as much as it is (in the context of disability that I was referring to before) an horizon of de-institutionalisation, a radical upending of categories such as insanity and sanity, and independent and dependent, and adult and other.

Salvage

Thanks, Sophie. Jules, did you want to come in and add to that? Respond? Disagree?

Jules Gill-Peterson

I wanted to underline something you’re saying, Sophie. I loved what you were saying at the end about what we might call a project of desegregating the difference – the ostensible differences – between children and adults that have served to naturalise so many systems of domination. And I like to think of it as the principle of superintendence that some people – whether through a fantasy of nature or some circumstance – deserve to be deprived of, in some cases, minimum degrees of self-determination in favour of being lorded over by others who implicitly or explicitly deem themselves superior. The concept of the child we’ve been talking about in some sense facilitates that principle, which is absolutely bedrock to the capitalist political economy, but also – not to be too professorial – the history of Western political thought and the formation of the state. I mean it’s the actual bedrock principle of the settler project that you would arrive and not simply endeavour to replace people already living there but also appoint yourself their superintendents. And, not surprisingly, the most relevant body of case law in the United States for the mistreatment and the legal alibi for the United States and its modern containment of an attack on Indigenous sovereignty is treating Indigenous polities as ‘domestic dependent nations’. As if they were the children of the United States living within it.

So, to me, part of this question is words like ‘care’. I mean, maybe the only place there’s a shade of interesting friction for me is that I’m so intensely anti-utopian. I tend to be not very good at offering political programs or infrastructure for that reason, but it comes from a kind of deep pessimism about how difficult the critical project is up front. I’ll use the metaphor of unlearning, but I don’t just mean that in an educational or scholastic sense. It can be a matter of collective organising. But really, how? How can we even first unlearn, destroy if you like? There will be harmful coercive modes of care. Custodial relationships, superintendents that are not only the stuff that makes the world work, but unfortunately the very psychodramas of our family, youth, kinship structures, relationships, the so-called private sphere as well. And to me [unlearning those] feels like a really important project at a moment when there’s such over drafting of child moral tenets.

To take abortion and trans issues as examples, many of the initial responses have just been embarrassing. And they have also been kind of haughty: ‘look at these stupid fascists! All they want to do is ensure that pregnancies are carried to term and then they just abandon children, end of story.’ A moral superiority affect or aesthetic. There’s a really difficult but quite crucial and immediate task of figuring out what it would entail to smash some of these structures both at their massive scale and then in the micro scale.

The one other thing to say that’s only half true is that ostensibly all adults were previously children, and that’s sort of true and not true if we want to be really careful about it. But in any case, there’s something that I find disruptive about the dismissal of teenagers and of young people’s particularly political actions in this moment. The vitriolic disavowal of young people’s organising against gun violence. Just utter, utter ridicule of young people. Also, young people’s mobilisation around the climate crisis is just treated as if it were the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened, right?

And similarly, the idea of the social contagion of being transgender is premised on the idea that young people are foolish and are susceptible to one another’s whims. Therefore we don’t have to care at all about what they want or say about themselves. Those are some starting places for that unlearning process and also the terrain on which to build relationships of solidarity with young people who are already busy doing things that are, frankly, informed.

Salvage

Yeah, I think, maybe unconsciously, one of the reasons I wanted to bring the two of you together is that you, Jules, sit in this kind of pessimistic camp and Sophie’s kind of a perennial utopian. And I’m maybe some odd mix: a utopian pessimist.

Sophie Lewis

Well, let me just come back on the utopian super briefly, because I will stand up for it as a decolonial heuristic and as a method. There are at least two quite different histories of utopianisms, or so I have been taught by the comrades in utopian studies. Yes, one of them is colonial to the core, flowing from, e.g., Thomas More’s desire to map the ideal society. But there are also utopianisms of cyborg decolonisation that are more about making the road while, or by, walking. One option, if you don’t like the idea of utopianism, is to espouse Frederick Jameson’s formulation: the anti-anti-utopian. It is imperative to oppose anti-utopianism. If we wish to denaturalise capitalist work, capitalist subjectivity, the givens of the social reproduction of labour, the idea of capitalist kinship, colonial kinship, etcetera, we absolutely need to denaturalise the given. I would say that that gesture, which has nothing to do with writing recipes for the cook shops of the future, is the core of a critical utopianism we cannot afford to abandon. It’s about having the courage to mount a fundamental ‘no’ to the shibboleths of the liberal individual, despite not knowing exactly who else we might collectively become.

Salvage

Utopian whether you like it or not, Jules. I do want to touch on with you, Sophie, something that Jules was talking about. I know that you’ve been doing a lot of thinking and research about the history of children’s liberation as a concept, as a movement. The description of a course that you have taught on Children’s Liberation says:

not so long ago, radical movements in America around Black Power, crip or disability liberation, domestic violence, sexuality, transgender freedom and socialism all related to children, to some extent, as political actors in their own right.

Why did the horizon of children’s liberation largely vanish from the left? I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the history of children’s liberation and what happened to it as a movement. When and why did feminists and queer people want to liberate children, and why don’t they anymore?

Sophie Lewis

Many people don’t know that kids’ lib, or youth liberation, or children’s liberation – whatever you want to call it – was a completely common category in the so-called red decade of the Long Sixties. Whether it’s Ros Baxandall or Linda Gordon’s women’s liberation collectives or the Boston Gay Liberation Front or the Third World Gay and Lesbian caucuses, everyone was talking about cooperative childcare and radical nurseries, projects that often came with extremely ambitious agendas of unmaking, for example, even the common sense that children by default only have two parents. Leftists were truly trying to get a national network of nurseries and co-ops off the ground in which the quasi property status of the child would be troubled and a sense of genuine responsibility from all to all would be incubated. There were men’s childcare centres and free schools. There was discussion of children’s liberation in Mad and Crip power circles, and the concept of liberating oppressed childhood was also being theorised in the milieu of Black Power – the Black Panthers for example were frequently thinking about the revolutionary task of forming new humans from infancy onward, not to mention what is due in the meantime to comrades who are not yet adults. There’s also an interesting history of Youth Liberation that is led by children themselves. For instance in Ann Arbor. This was a project that was supported by the White Panthers and by the Human Rights Party, and featured a fifteen-year-old running for the Michigan school board in the early seventies, but being denied on the grounds that she was too young. There followed a national litigation of the rationale for excluding someone from their own school board on the basis of their age.

Anyway. Why did all of this agitation against ‘adult supremacy’ die out in the eighties? I’d love to hear your perspectives on that, Jules. I tend to reach for the explanation that the ruling classes crushed the utopian energies of the sixties and the seventies into dust and that an extremely sophisticated and cunning counter-revolutionary project simply won out, and became dominant. The left simply was defeated, I believe – but then we compounded that defeat by erasing or ridiculing our own most utopian desires and demands. Suddenly there was a whole ecology of counter-revolutionary institutions, organisations and myths installed to wipe our own movement memory clear.

One very effective counterinsurgent strategy was the Right’s paedophilia smear against queer and feminist allies of children. That’s something that the left never really strategised an effective or courageous united response to. Back then it was ‘queers lurking behind ice cream vans and gender-bending feminists in daycare centres are polluting, contaminating, harming, scheming, infecting the children’. In the twenty-first century it’s substantially a replay with a transgender twist. We’ve been here before. But, indeed, we were there in the 1910s and 1920s when ‘white slavery’ undergirded a reactionary international. Entire purpose built organisations sprang up to prevent the despoliation of white girls by a fictional nation-threatening menace. We should be talking about this history, in my opinion, and more importantly, figuring out how to break the cycle whereby leftists and feminists and queers split with one another in the face of the Right’s divide-and-conquer virtuosity with the bludgeoning figure of the Child.

Jules Gill-Peterson

Maybe one other thing we could chew on together is the history of political economy and shifts in the labour market. The entry of women into the labour force in the global north on mass also created, among other things, the crisis in social reproduction, the child care crisis. But also the domestication of certain minimal planks of youth movements: lowering the voting age in the US in the 1970s; kids have actually some civil rights at trial for the first time. There are a series of liberal modernisation initiatives that I suspect had, whether they were designed to or not, the effect of depoliticising a lot of the antagonisms erupting in the 1960s as generational conflict – this is a kind of compliment to just the brute crushing of the seventies.

Salvage

Thanks, Jules. Thanks to both of you. I’m sorry we ran a little over our time, but can you really blame me?