Molding Youth

Abstract

In describing the cover for this issue, lesbian artist Harmony Hammond explains that she wanted to “make myself out of myself” noting that her organic art is “about building a form out of its self.” Applied to young people, this Rousseaun notion is the antipathy of how many adults and institutions view children: clay to be molded into acceptable cultural forms. The idea that five, ten, or seventeen-years-olds have the human capacity and the spiritual responsibility to (re)construct self out of their human forms is at odds with adult renditions of gendered and sexual bodies. Paradoxically, it has been the construction of “childhood” and its post-Victorian era concept of “adolescence” that has stripped youth of their entitlements as agents of selfhood. One of these entitlements is experiencing embodiment in its myriad forms. Gender rules and sexual conventions, in contrast, enforce cookie-cutter sameness onto the body of youth by cultural cops posing as teachers, parents, counselors, social workers–and friends. How then, in cultures of heterodoxy, might children disengender themselves, (re)creating embodied space? How can