| Adolescence has always been a cultural construction. The designation of a separate space apart from the presumed innocence of childhood and the myths of autonomy and responsibility that come to define adulthood is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. As such, adolescence bears the traces of the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation that attend so much of the period that calls itself "modernity.&;My first chapter, "Becoming Excellent," places Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Rigoberto Gonzalez's Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa side by side to unpack the racialized valences of "excellence" inside the American academy. I read these two memoirs as overlapping, and at times competing, accounts of the fraught and often invisible labor involved in becoming "one of the good ones." The second, "Becoming Trans," considers the advent of trans identity in the context of questions about desire, and metamorphosis. I turn to Octavia Butler's sci-fi epic Adulthood Rights as eerily prescient in its understanding of both the increasing value attached to trans identity and the very serious risks of belonging simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The third chapter "Becoming Deviant" examines to two more recent films, Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow and Dee Rees' Pariah to ask what currency terms like Independent Black and Asian American have on the marketplace of contemporary cinema. I argue that the emergent value attached to non-normative, or deviant, cinematic types can be understood as a part of a larger emphasis on the optics of multiculturalism and the performance of inclusion. For the final chapter, "Becoming Digital" I ask what cultural labor the "digital" performs as a mediating concept in postwar understandings of adolescence and innocence. Here, I pursue a two-fold strategy of both offering a materialist account of the infrastructure underpinning the technological revolution often shorthanded as "the digital age" while also attending to literary and creative works, Sarah Schulman's The Child and a computer program designed to simulate a virtual child for the purposes of soliciting potential predators, that ground these issues in human-scale stakes and consequences. |
