Welcome to the tumblr of Dr. Kathleen Kellett! I do public scholarship, education, and storytelling on the subjects of monstrosity and young people. I return to tumblr after a decade-long dormancy, like a beast of legend.
actually caring about the rights and safety of children is so stressful right now because a large amount of the time I'm sitting there internally screaming "THAT'S WORSE. THAT POLICY IS GOING TO ACTIVELY CAUSE HARM TO CHILDREN YOU ARE MAKING IT WORSE." and nobody cares because it's not actually about protecting children but the thing is children actually do need more protection very badly, just not like that. REALLY not like that. and the things that would actually protect children (education, greater personal autonomy, access to knowledge and resources that don't hinge on their parents being willing/able to provide them) would give adults less absolute power over them and that upsets too many people who see children as status symbols and tools and extensions of themselves.
New NYRA Blog Post Published: "The KIDS Act will KILL Kids - Firsthand Story From a Teenager"
Read the first hand story from a vulnerable teenager about how Online Support systems help with their struggles & how KOSA and the KIDS act would threaten them.
Read the first hand story from a vulnerable teenager about how Online Support systems help with their struggles & how KOSA and the KIDS act
oh shit i didn't expect this to actually get notes lmao
these are all direct quotes from jeffrey jerome cohen's "monster culture (seven theses)" (full pdf linked)
i highly encourage you to read it yourself!
that said, while i think cohen's writing is evocative, it can be a little dense, so while i'm here, here's my capsule summary (you can also hear me talk about this in the first episode of my podcast) (listen to @ghostswerepeopletoo)
i. the monster's body is a cultural body - The monster is a work of fiction to be analyzed through tools of literary and sociological theory.
ii. the monster always escapes - As long as the cultural fear from which the monster stems persists, the monster will reappear in retellings, reimaginings, and sequels.
iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis - Monsters defy binaries and challenge easy comprehension or categorization.
iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference - The monster represents the Other.
v. the monster polices the borders of the possible - Tales of the monster exist to discourage unacceptable or taboo behaviors.
vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire - Subjects can vicariously participate in the disruption of the social order through the monster.
vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming - Within the monster we find information about the self.
New NYRA Blog Post Published: "How the KOSA and KIDS Acts will Harm Vulnerable Teenagers"
KOSA & the KIDS Act harm vulnerable teenagers by cutting them off from online communities & support systems, & could be used to censor LGBTQ content for minors.
KOSA & the KIDS Act harm vulnerable teenagers by cutting them off from online communities & support systems, & could be used to censor LGBTQ
(This is Jupiter) Hi Dr. Kellett! So I was casually re-listening to your "monsters of childhood innocence" video and this struck me with some interesting thoughts. I feel like I have a conflicted relationship with literary romanticism, where I find myself deeply agreeing with and also deeply disliking parts of it simultaneously. In particular the thought of the 'innocent naturalized child' (1/2)
(cont) stands out to me because, well, you've done a great job explaining everything wrong with childhood innocence as a social construct, but on the other hand, I feel like there's something to be said about combatting the "denaturalized" attitude that's applied to many people. How do you thread that needle, combatting both the 'naturalized innocent child' and the 'unnaturalized monster' without feeding the other? I'd like to discuss. (2/2)
Hi! Thanks for reaching out over here. :) I love this question, because it gets at exactly what makes dealing with social constructs so difficult. It's impossible to not have them, and if we compare "childhood innocence" to like Puritan child devilry, then at least the former is better than the latter!
What I try to focus on is identifying the goals behind the constructs and then breaking down the ways the constructs fail to meet those goals. For really any social construct of childhood, the goal is to create systems that provide a "good" life for kids. Even the Puritans wanted that ... it's just that their idea of what would be "good" is, uh, different from mine.
The Romantic belief in childhood innocence, on the other hand, has some underlying goals that I can get behind: encourage children's curiosity and imaginations! Provide them with access to green spaces! Give them freedom to play! Assume generally good intentions, even if they don't yet have the knowledge base to understand or react to a situation like an adult would!
All good stuff, and hopefully goals that anyone can get behind. However, the construct itself is so wrapped up with white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that we immediately run into problems. Ways of being that go against those systems are seen as evidence of a lack of innocence, so whole swaths of kids get excluded from consideration in those aforementioned goals.
Beyond that, "innocence" gets so politicized and used against kids in ways that also impede those goals, especially when "innocence" is seen as something that can only be preserved through ignorance. Withholding knowledge from children doesn't actually provide a carefree and happy life; it creates conditions of anxiety and vulnerability (at best).
So when I'm talking to people about critiquing childhood innocence and I get resistance (as I often do), I try to emphasize that I'm not against those goals, and I'm not at all saying that I think kids are "guilty." It's just that when we focus on the material effects of the social construction, we can see that it's not actually benefiting real kids in the way that (ideally) most people would want it to.
I hope this is a useful answer! If you or anyone else wants to chime in with more thoughts, this is exactly the kind of conversation I like to have all the time. :) Also, I highly appreciate the Dr., but you can for sure call me Kathleen!
Thank you for the detailed reply! And I'll keep that in mind, Kathleen!
A lot of my thinking on this boils down to that I think a lot of things- disability, race, the usual suspects you've talked about in your video but also things like assistive technology or even more fantastical ideas of 'otherness' get excluded not just from the construct of 'childhood innocence' (and you've thoroughly sold me on that as a thing to move away from) but the ascribed presence-of-guilt.
One of the aspects of romanticism that really does appeal to me is the idea of Nature and what is Natural, although this raises the big dilemma that we often don't really actually look at nature but rather narratives we imagine about nature. Snow White surrounded by deer and little birds eating out of her hands is a construct; somehow we imagine that would feel different if she was instead surrounded by, say, wolves and vultures, or snakes, even if the animals were behaving the same.
This leads to my own fantasy-flavored contrarian streak to this specific phenomenon. Nature is not an exercise in right or wrong, it's just what is, and there is a certain absence of guilt to that existence, but there is not a "presence of moral purity". It is innocent in one sense, but ascribing innocence to it in the other sense is unhelpful and, personally, annoying.
This is why it sometimes irks me the way people talk about swans, or dolphins, as actually awful mean-tempered monsters. They're just animals. They were first ascribed a saintliness that I agree is inappropriate, but now it feels like challenging that, people have swung around to punishing them for being, y'know, animals doing animal things.
Especially as someone with a generalized anxiety disorder, I have a brain that puts narratives of hostility and menace on almost anything that stresses me out. On a bad day, I can read monstrous hostility in a parking garage. So even just for my own mental health, I try to challenge that. The parking garage is normal. I can have opinions about how it's constructed but none of that translates to malevolence.
In the world of fiction, this is the treatment I love to give monsters. When the monster is very often positioned outside of normal and thus framed that way- lurking, hidden, or only revealed dreadfully- there's something powerful to just having them... be there. It's a widely spoken truism that the monster is less scary the more times it's revealed, but that less-scary can even turn into 'feels like our friend'. If an audience spent an hour watching a very inhuman and not 'moral' monster navigating an environment, solving problems, I feel like by the end of that hour most people would like the monster at least a little.
So I guess it's interesting to start to approach that idea of nature being of paramount importance, but also, that we have to make sure we're actually talking about what nature really is. At least in my thinking, one of the properties of nature is a total absence of both guilt and innocence. It's humans who decide how we feel about it, and that's not a bad thing.
I think it's pretty deplorable, for example, when people suggest we should just permit suffering because 'it's nature' because you and your choices are also part of the nature here and that doesn't mean you lack control of yourself.
Mostly, this sort of thing is interesting to me because as a reader and a writer I'm pretty heavily self-taught. Not that I lack for an education, but there's a lot of genre and philosophy that I just haven't been exposed to, so as an adult I'm out here figuring out my own perspective after-the-fact.
Nature as neither innocent nor guilty resonates so much with me -- I think you've articulated that perfectly. (Ironically, I literally just scripted a short about nature and wildlife "monsters.") The Romantics sure did love to think about capital-N Nature, but you're right that they were trying to fit it into a very specific narrative. There's something ironic about the way that studying narratives is what allows us to actually deconstruct them, but it's certainly why I do what I do!
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