Mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself.
Governance is inherently based on projected values. linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives, and youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create queered, feral, ageless networks of care.
I’m your host, MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old. I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review Center. author of the blog Debate Me Bro, and organizer of some all ages queer spaces in my city and online. With me today is Madeline Lane McKinley, who’s currently writing a book called Solidarity with Children, an Essay Against Adult Supremacy for Haymarket Press.
Madeline: Hi there!
Mk: So can you tell us a bit more about your writing, who you are, what makes your life meaningful, what brings you queer joy, all of it?
Madeline: Absolutely. Yeah, I my name’s Madeline Lane McKinley. I go by she or they, and I’m an author, a cultural critic teacher, and a kind of a parent comrade to a 12-year-old non-binary artist and activist.
I’m also part of the Blind Field Editorial Collective. And we publish a lot of political writings on themes such as. Child liberation or cultural representations of child centered questions of the family and, sci fi, horror, comedy, all sorts of things like that. I’ve also done a lot of feminist organizing which is focused on community accountability and sexual violence, and especially child centered Mutual aid projects and political education.
And I’m also a cohost of the podcast genre reveal party where we talk about we’re currently doing a season on movies about school and representations of school. Which has been really fun. So I’m really excited to be here and thanks so much for asking me.
Mk: I know this is like the first time we’ve talked about this, but I am already in awe of the way you bring youth liberation into every strand of organizing from mutual aid to political education to art and media.
Like so many organizing projects try to talk about youth liberation. Liberation, but make it maybe its own campaign separate from everything else. And I love seeing it integrated into an entire anarchist praxis and an entire queer world making. So when we first got in touch about all this you shared with me that a chapter in your book is about the history of childhood as a concept.
Can you tell me more about that?
Madeline: Yeah. What I became really fascinated by. In researching that chapter, and I guess I had already been been thinking a lot about it with my relationship with my kid. And then also thinking so much as a parent about what the world. Looks like through, from a kid’s perspective in the last decade.
So I’d been really thinking about this question of childhood as essentially a site of impossibility in some ways. It’s often something that’s happened already and longed for. So I begin the chapter by thinking about the history of childhood. And there’s this really interesting book called Centuries of Childhood, which was written in the early 60s by this French demographer, Philippe Alliez.
And he like, invented childhood studies in a lot of ways and started thinking about his argument is that childhood as a concept did not exist until the 17th century. And I’ll say as a caveat that This is a very Europeanist history that he lays out and very bourgeois in lots of ways, but it is very useful to start with this insight that childhood isn’t just a natural state of being, that it actually had to be.
It’s an idea or a social construction. So Arias makes this case based on in part, at least on child mortality rates. He was a demographer but also on the social formation of the private family or what he calls the modern family in which the child becomes more and more of a central figure, especially this.
On right as inheritor of private property so more than just purely ascribing to this history. I want to think about the idea of childhood as a social construction, as I said, and not as a natural condition. And it’s in this time of Arias’s history that childhood becomes more more imagined as a kind of like quarantine.
State of not yet, not yetness not yet adulthood. And my argument is that it becomes defined in relation to adulthood, that there is no idea of childhood that isn’t constructed out of adulthood, some adult imaginary. And one of the things I was looking at was this really fascinating book by Marxist psychoanalyst, literary critic, feminist extraordinary Jacqueline Rose, and she wrote a book about children’s children’s literature, but specifically Peter Pan as a case study.
And her argument is that like childhood itself Children’s literature is impossible, that it is a kind of impossibility that children’s literature is not written by children, nor is it written for children. The purpose of so much of children’s literature is to discipline children and teach them to accept adult power.
That’s often the moral of the story for many tales. And none of this is to say that children do not exist. That’s a really important distinction to make politically, but. It’s important also to be thinking about childhood as a story that we tell each other or ourselves about children and about our own experiences of being children that seems to, at least in a mainstream way, naturalize and justify a state of, Disempowerment and subordination.
Mk: This idea of childhood as a social construct is so powerful and really reminds me of the narrative in the trans community that gender is a social construct, yet is still subjectively real for some people. While some people may experience gender to impose it, Through gender roles and through assigning it at birth and through state repression is still Necessarily transphobic and similarly the way we impose age through nuclear families and developmental pathways and compulsory education And even the way that we enforce age and linear time all only serves to assimilate Queer lives into a narrative that is featured and respectable rather than illegible to all control And like the enforcement of linear time not only Erases queerness like i’m sure our listeners are familiar with the concept of queer time and how a queer life path Doesn’t have the same milestones that others might but also erases the neurodivergent reality that some people Simply don’t experience linear time in say In a way that most of humanity might and you know to be ageist is to Limit all of what people of any age can be the queer community neurodivergent folks and everyone else So on that note, how would you say that linear time and imposed development as a construct tie into capitalism?
And the way that childhood is commodified
Madeline: So I’m going to do my best to answer that question. Which I think is really brilliant. And there’s a lot there. There’s enough there to spend a whole weekend talking to you about really. But. I think a short version is that childhood is a kind of false progress narrative for which adulthood is imagined as reaching a kind of stasis or completion.
Right? And of course, especially in this kind of like capitalist timeline of, schooling and then, post secondary and then getting spit out into the world of unemployment and precarity I think many people of, of my generation have grown really distrustful of what, Quote unquote, adulthood means which I think is really valuable politically.
By extension, I think the child is conceived as this kind of incomplete adult subject. And again, the idea of children is always defined in relation to adulthood which is an adult supremacist logic, obviously. It’s a way of understanding children as sites of ownership rather than as, full human beings and legally, politically, culturally, the child is then.
This figure of private property more than a human subject, right? So I think all of those are things that we can contest which mess with the logics of progress that I really hear in your question. And I would say that childhood and adulthood are both, we need to think about them both as these fantasies.
That’s ripe territory for commodification, but it’s it’s literally a story that we buy into.
Mk: I’ve never heard HSM described that way, like literally even as a person who’s experienced anti child HSM my whole life, I’m having so many realizations right now. But really, it resonates so much that us kids and teens are seen as incomplete adults. So as a result, our pressure to measure up to an idea of adulthood, that’s really just about being productive and controlled.
Like I think of the increasing pressure on high school students surrounding college admissions. And even like teens in the workplace and the fact that child labor is sadly still a thing in many places. Yeah. And honestly, there are always so many parallels to both queerness and neurodivergence and anything that has that inherent a temporality to it.
For example I’ve heard discourse in neurodivergent. Spaces about how people like me who are autistic tend to be seen as deficient, holistic people who are holistic, but somehow failing at life when really we’re not. We just have a different neurology. And similarly, children are not adults who are failing at being adults.
Children are just children. And that’s okay.
Madeline: Absolutely.
Mk: And even I hear this from adults, that the construct of adulthood tends to lead to a lot of individualism and hyper masculinized pressure that can lead people to mask, or to be closeted in their queerness, or whatever it is. On that topic, how would you say this all intersects with gender transness?
Because the nuclear family and linearity are so much about gender perception.
Madeline: Absolutely. This is obviously such an important political issue right now. We’re seeing, almost week by week, some national headlines around these issues, right? I want to say so what I can do here is just politically frame how we think about these questions and talk about them.
And I think that’s a really important whether or not we’re like, Political organizing or not, right? That’s something that we should just constantly be doing around this cultural moment to shift the conversation. But the issues we’re seeing about trans kids today stem from this kind of false binary between, there’s this either state power or parental rights.
What is, I’m granting child freedom, right? And obviously we have to think outside of that binary. Either way, the child is not understood as a, as a human being or is having intellectual or bodily autonomy, whatsoever. And the child in the private family specifically has this history of disciplining gender and sexuality, of enforcing.
An adult supremacist and white supremacist fantasy of purity and, strongly heterosexual and gender conforming. In terms of linearity, it’s again, this matter of preparation for adulthood, and there’s a logic of investment in the child that’s about succession and preservation of the family.
As a unit of private property all underlying this and transness and queerness really bring this into crisis in a lot of ways. And that’s why it’s, that’s why we have to be paying attention to it and actively working on this whether or not we are kids. Whether or not we are the caretakers of trans kids, whether or not we are trans kids we need to be collectively working on this because we’re all human beings and so it should be recognized as a collective project, but so often is the case with anything Focused on children, the political responsibility falls on people with proximity to children, which is too often not the case on the left.
Mk: Yeah, that idea that trans kids are forced to assimilate into either the nuclear family or the state to be able to access the care and solidarity and community we need, and even then it usually stops at healthcare rather than any more expansive idea of trans liberation, that is so real. In my experience, what trans youth tend to hear when we push back against anti trans legislation is either to detransition and follow the wishes of unsupportive families, or to advocate in a neoliberal way.
You’re trans, become a leader of the youth, join a non profit, the democratic party, whatever it is. The message trans youth get tends to not be, something that makes space for youth liberation. And the idea that Trans health is not just being able to access HRT and gender affirming care.
Trans health is bodily autonomy. Trans health is reproductive freedom. Trans health is anarchism. Because, honestly our mental health is definitely affected by the systems of control that we live under. And of course, the carcerality of compulsory education ties into this for trans kids, and all kids, in a way that the nuclear family does, too.
As we’ve seen with how anti trans legislation, like the Don’t Say Gay bills, affects school, this form of state Some repressive youth so much. So what are your thoughts on the homeschooling and unschooling movements? Are these youth liberationist or do these just hand control over to parents while having somewhat liberationist
Madeline: aesthetics?
Very good question. And so often yes, it is one or the other as I already said, like the only alternative we can imagine to This state disciplinary apparatus of schooling is parental rights. And that is often a situation of abuse of children as well. And it’s very complicated if those are the only two options that we’re really thinking through.
So pedagogical models of unschooling can be really incredible ways to, Trouble, the carcerality of the school system but at the same time on schooling is also really vulnerable to that model of parents rights. And that’s why the religious right, for instance care so deeply about that.
I don’t think it’s one way or the other, either sending kids to a kind of day prison, which exists to discipline them into being, productive future workers, and also as a child care system for workers, that is what public education effectively functions as as poorly funded as it is.
So there’s that on the 1 hand, and then there’s keeping kids in the private home where they’re vulnerable to all forms of coercion and physical, sexual, verbal abuse. And also enforced, forms of labor and caretaking in many cases as well. So I don’t think we have many good. I don’t want to sound too bleak about this, but I don’t think we have many good working examples of this.
We just have kind of these glimmers. Of possibility here and there and looking towards the future of this question, right? Finding more and more, I know my kid is going to go to this summer camp this summer. That’s organized by youth and facilitated by adult comrades. And I think.
Having more and more models and doing more experimentation like that isn’t the answer because we can’t have that happen at a a really deep level collectively across different communities. But doing more experimenting with things like that, projects like that doesn’t hurt and it can give us a lot of insight into what we could do and implement maybe at a neighborhood by neighborhood basis or things like that to create systems of support that are really bottom up thinking about kids needs and And creating solidarity like that.
I hope that makes sense.
Mk: It totally does, and I think you’re so right about the importance of youth autonomously organizing with adult accomplices. Personally even before I got radicalized that has definitely helped at my school, I started this queer and trans anarchist collective, and as a result, Like we’re no longer as dependent on the school to teach us about things like critical queer theory or queer history, or even like what gender can look like.
Because we use speaking engagements to platform queer adults, but we also teach one another about this stuff. Like I have taught so many seventh graders, what anarchism is, that might not be the best legacy for me to have at school, but I’m pretty proud of it. And that’s great. I think.
If we can empower youth to do this for one another and to create the spaces that we need instead of just waiting for adults to create every youth liberationist space, then I think we can actually bring about youth liberationist futures, or I should say, youth liberationist atemporal realities and a lot of what adult organizing can look like is like seeing how youth are organizing and standing in solidarity with us.
It’s the equivalent of how straight allies to queer liberation should not be starting a queer liberationist group. Instead, they should be seeing what queer people are up to and trying to support.
So on a personal note, how would you say that you experienced anti child ageism and youth liberation as a kid and teen?
Madeline: Survivor of child sexual abuse. And so I do think about that a lot and about other kids. I knew who had similar experiences or who, I speculated might understand my situation. And and I also knew a lot of queer kids when I was a kid I was a kid in the 90s so there were all of them in the closet.
Mk: I’m so sorry you had to face that as a kid. It’s so painful to live in a society that governs queer bodies and exerts so much control and you are so loved. I’m so glad you feel safe sharing that in this space.
Madeline: Oh thank you. Yeah, I, it was everywhere. And so I didn’t feel that I was, particularly harmed by it more than anyone else.
I, I was around, but that definitely impacted me. And then having a kid also clearly shifted my thinking around these things. Later but just, yeah, as a kid, I grew up with this sense of responsibility for other people around me too. And that’s something I struggle with too, is feeling like too much responsibility, maybe for putting my needs aside a lot in some cases to, to my detriment.
I recently, and I know I’m like maybe Five years behind on this, but I recently discovered this like meme about older, what’s called older sister syndrome, which I heavily identified with but like much of my adolescence, I was what the portal is like. I had three half siblings from ages 10 to 14, so that was also a really big part of growing up for me, or whatever growing up means.
That’s obviously something we’re skeptical towards, but it did involve taking on a sense of, quote, unquote, adult responsibility in caretaking that I think really informed my thinking and as a kid, I felt like I had to get really good grades. I took the school system very seriously and internalized institutional power quite a bit.
And yeah, I think I just put a lot of pressure on myself to do a lot of things and ignore. Other elements of my situation and Yeah, into my 20s, I was just shaking that off a lot and like unlearning, I think a lot of adulthood can be about unlearning childhood whatever childhood really means.
Mk: I’m so sorry you faced all that pressure. And honestly, this governance by the school system, by the nuclear family, and this feeling like, This feminized labor dynamic of having to provide care while not really having supportive caring spaces yourself. Part of me wonders if that type of governance is why so many youth and teens really struggle with people pleasing and so many adults still do Like it’s something that we’re socialized towards in our childhoods And when we’re adults, we’re suddenly told to not have that and to be confident individuals But, how can we, when we have a childhood that’s so full of obedience and shame
I had never thought about that either, but that is such a strand of youth liberation, the idea of unlearning the anti child ageism that we carry over, even when we aren’t facing anti child ageism anymore, because I love Ayanna Goodfellow’s concept of ageism, Trauma, the idea that we all carry the BS that we internalized as kids, like I’m 15 and I still sometimes think about things I was told in preschool that do not serve me.
Like we’re all doing this throughout our lives.
Madeline: Yeah, definitely.
Mk: So on that topic, what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to resist ageism?
Madeline: I think my advice is to You might not be living in a place where there’s organizing spaces at least that are happening out in the open.
And I guess I always say organizing in scare quotes, like I don’t. I don’t really know what organizing means a lot of the time. I think finding comrades always for anyone at any age is really important. And learning how to support each other and trying not to judge each other and just showing up for your friends and working from there.
And building through that building collective power that with that, you have a better chance of pushing against adult supremacy in your life. Yeah. No matter what your context is, so I think together you can be creative, you can problem solve, you can find resources to support each other, find ways to be reciprocal not just ask for care, but care for others and do this every day.
And I would say that just needs to be a baseline, right? Of a kind of everyday practice. And if you’re not doing. Then you can’t really politically show up for anything else. So that’s the kind of create that threshold for you and the ones you care about to be able to be powerful and and work towards, whatever is important to you politically, whatever feels most urgent to you in your different situations.
Mk: Yeah, I love the idea that building collective power and building Liberationist networks of care can be the start of organizing Like that is so important to prefigure and I always think about how that is the kind of organizing that would still be Necessary in some idealized anarchist here. That’s a way to That it’s independent of hierarchy completely and I think we all need that for our mental health and it also really negates this narrative that youth are adults and waiting who are autonomous and Individualized and only exist to work towards some adult future But really youth can provide weird care and for our liberation.
We have to provide weird care speaking of actualizing anarchism do you have any shameless plugs for your organizing or other people’s organizing or stuff you think is cool?
Madeline: Stuff I mostly have writing projects in the works right now and That I can speak to, publicly I definitely know of a few projects that are not things that I can speak to publicly.
So in the category of shameless plugs, I have a book coming out soon with my friend, Max Fox, who’s an editor at pinko magazine, which is definitely a project. I recommend queer youth. We’re interested in. Communism and anarchism and child liberation to check out. A lot of free readings on the Internet.
Max also wrote an article called the traffic and children for para praxis magazine, which is free on the Internet, but I think would be appreciated by any of your listeners. Sounds like I’m plugging Max right now
Mk: is this titled by any chance a reference to the Emma Goldman essay, the traffic and women or.
Madeline: Yes,
Mk: amazing. As someone whose podcast title is a direct Emma reference. I love to see it.
Madeline: Good eyes. Yeah. So Max in my book is called fag hag and it’s coming up, coming out with Rosa press this year and it’s creative nine nonfiction, but it has a real, a really strong focus on child liberation questions.
And I think that’s all I can really speak to on my own behalf. Obviously wherever anyone is that, showing up for Palestine right now is so urgent and so important. However you can do that in the place you are. I always like to frame that, especially with with child comrades sometimes showing up for things politically just looks really different ways, right?
Based on the conditions of safety that various people live in. And degrees of autonomy that we can experience in our lives.
Mk: And there are definitely actions people can take that way. They don’t require being in certain geographical location. I guess I have a shameless plug. We talked about this on the podcast discord.
But if anyone has heard of Jewish voice for people Peace they have a daily power half hour on zoom that you can go to and talk about palestine actions and get reqs for what you should be doing that way usually ends up being petitions op eds, that kind of thing. If anyone goes to JVP dot org slash Gaza pH, then yeah.
So are there any other actions? Things that you’ve been into lately for Palestine that you would like to plug before we leave?
Madeline: No, just things that I’ve been going to locally. But it’s been great to see so many. There was a walkout at my kid’s school last month. Just, this obviously is happening to all Palestinian people, but it’s such an important flashpoint really for thinking about, like, how to have political solidarity with children.
This is an overwhelming number of children who are just being so horrifically harmed and impacted by this. And so I’ve been really inspired by especially. Actions at a local high school here and things like that. And yeah, I just want to say that most of the inspiring voices I’ve seen have been have been from youth.
So
Mk: exactly. Yeah. I love to see that so much. The idea that youth can advocate for other youth and our humanitarian rights, regardless of their circumstances, like that is such a powerful show of transnational, solidarity. And I love it. Yeah. So yeah. Thank you so much for sharing your Youth Liberation Journey.
I’m MK Zariel. This has been Madeleine Lane McKinley, and you are listening to the Child and Its Enemies.
Madeline: Thanks for having me on.