So, Cecire doesn’t frame it in these terms, but for me peurility is strikingly useful for thinking about why boys don’t seem to fit very well into the category “tween,” and I think it has a lot to do with why the category is called that in the first place. Be-tween foregrounds the tension between childhood and adolescence that girls of a certain age deal with. As Cook and Kaiser (paywall) point out, that tension is reflected in the actual products produced for tweens — girls’ clothing that tries to strike a balance between aspirations to adolescence and the demand that girls as children not be sexy. That tension is a real thing that many kids and adults experience and think about, and I think that explains why the term “tween” has so successfully moved from being a professional marketing term to enter common usage.

But that betweenness is so intensely focused on sexuality (as, again, Cook and Kaiser detail pretty thoroughly in their analysis of the clothing industry). The problem that tween solves is that girls’ and women’s sexuality is so fraught, which is so clearly on display when tween celebrities like Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears struggle mightily to transition their public image from child to adult — the controversies are always and only about their sexuality. (Seriously, Miley smoking pot got nowhere near the attention that the nude-but-covered Vanity Fair photos did, or the pole-dance at the Teen Choice Awards did.)

So this is only half-baked, and it’s really just a placeholder for thinking more carefully about it in the future, but puerility seems to help boys massage that transition from child to adolescent in a way that girls don’t have access to. When I write about this stuff I usually use Sutton-Smith’s “phantasmagoria” and McGillis’s “Coprophilia”[1] to describe kids’ gross-out humor, bathroom jokes, sexual innuendo, etc. But the better word is “puerile.” For younger kids that stuff is moderately gendered, of course, but girls as well as boys practice and enjoy it.

But something like “propriety” kicks in at some point for teenage girls, as part, I think, of the demands that they police their sexuality (that’s what propriety means, right?), and propriety clearly excludes all that gross-out humor and stuff. All that stuff never leaves boys’ culture though! Comedies like the Hangover, or Wedding Crashers, that teenage boys and young men flock to in theaters, are full of the same sorts of silly, gross, ridiculous humor as boys’ cartoons. (I have not read it yet, but I suspect that Halberstam on Dude Where’s My Car would be compatible with this — again, lots of placeholders.) One of the criticisms leveled at Bridesmaids was that the puerile humor of diarrhea and sandwich sex was masculine, so rather than finally having a comedy written by, starring and for women audiences, you get the same old puerile non-romcom humor that movie comedies always have. (The link is to the Spectator because its anti-feminist perspective is exactly the one that’s relevant here.)

But what’s more, precisely because the gross-out humor of puerility is so concerned with genitals, puerility ends up being this thing that (straight) boys can embed their sexuality in. So while girls are supposed to be asexual children and then, all of a sudden, sexual but proper women, with any grey area being grounds for huge freakouts and moral panic, boys get to work in the comfortable field of puerility for their whole lives. Puerility seems to provide a sort of scaffold for boys, from childhood to adulthood, where they can build on what they already know. And that means, I think, that there are fewer moments when they or their parents find themselves thinking about being “between” anything, which means that there’s less utility in media and consumer products that are addressing the particular desires of “tweens.”

Unlike Sutton-Smith’s phantasmagoria, which I’ve been using, puerility, at least to my ear, really highlights the tropes that are shared between boys’ culture and men’s culture. And because puerility is something that’s easy to recognize in men’s culture, it highlights the ways that men are freed to be childish.

Clearly, this is far from perfect. Cuteness is this interesting growing theme in public culture, which suggests an increasing availabity of girlishness for grown women. But I think the thing about puerility is that it doesn’t preempt sexuality, whereas girlishness might. (The magic pixie dream girl, for instance, is an object of male desire but isn’t supposed to express her own sexual desires, right?) And then, of course, tropes of girlishness get smacked down quickly, because, as the Jezebel piece points out, maturity matters for women precisely as defense against criticisms from men.

[1] McGillis, Roderick. 2003. “Coprophilia for Kids: The Culture of Grossness.” In Youth Cultures: Texts, Images, and Identities, edited by Kerry Mallan and Sharyn Pearce, pp. 183–96. Westport, CT: Praeger.

This single-minded focus on children’s health and flourishing leaves little room to think about the bigger picture. In a 1980 journal article, social critic Robert Crawford used the term “healthism” to refer to a new preoccupation of the middle class with personal health and wholesome lifestyles. He also drew a connection between healthism and political disengagement. A sense of impotence—“I can’t change the world, but at least I can change myself,” as Crawford put it—fed the mania for vitamins, exercise, herbal supplements. And in turn, as people poured more energy into their own health, they had less time and inclination to invest in civic or political involvement. Since 1980 this outlook does not seem to have abated, to say the least, and for parents it applies doubly to their children. In shaping contemporary parenthood, this retreat to the private sphere has been at least as important as a retreat to nature.

Maybe it’s unfair to say that the failure of Turkle’s account of technology is that she doesn’t read and think about breastfeeding and parenting more, since it’s a book about technology. But her concerns are all grounded in this idea that there are some fundamental knowable values, but when you push on them she seems to just be lapsing into a very familiar sort of moralizing about the family.

So, for instance, in this TEDxUIUC talk from a year ago, Turkle’s examples are of parents pushing kids on the swing while texting, kids sleeping with their phones, or, in what I think is a really telling example of her style, she says (at 3:13):

Children describe that moment at school pickup, they’ll never tell you that they care, but they describe that moment where they come out of school looking for that moment of eye contact, and instead of that moment of eye contact with a parent, who after all, has shown up at school pickup, that parent is looking at the iPhone, looking at the smartphone, and is reading mail. So from the moment this generation of children met technology, it was the competition.

There’s this affective resonance here, for an audience who’s caught up in a series of stories about how the minute, everyday aspects of our lives are actually full of emotional power, and that emotional power depends heavily on the preexisting intensity of the trope of concern for children. That is, once we start talking about children, we allow ourselves — we enjoy, even — this immersion in sentiment that seems wholly commendable (how can concern for children be something to question?)

But I think Turkle use of this rhetorical approach really asks her audience to suspend their critical faculties as she goes through this list of concerning moments. Because, really? A parent reading while waiting to pick their kid up after school is creating some sort of notable emotional distance or disappointment? What if you substituted a paperback novel for the iPhone in this story? Turkle’s concern is explicitly about attention, and in situations like this a book would clearly be creating precisely the same interactional dynamic as an iPhone — i.e., preventing the parent from giving 100% attention to the possibility of their child’s appearance at the school door.

And thinking about books, I think it makes sense, here, to draw a connection to Janice Radway’s classic article about women and romance novels. In that piece, Radway talks about housewives using romance novels as a form of escape from their domestic lives. Radway describes immersive reading as being very much about transcending the physical space within the walls of a family home to enjoy a fantasy life, really, a way to “bail out from physical reality.” So if one of the 1970s midwestern stay at home mothers in Radway’s study were to drive to pick her kids up at school, and sat with her book while she waited, at least from Radway’s account, she wouldn’t just be managing boredon, she’d be actively avoiding her duties as a parent — duties which in very many cases are not, it can’t be stressed enough, always fulfilling or happy.

But in that situation, we’d never think to blame the technology of the book for preventing women from being good mothers. (On second thought this is probably only true for a narrow sense of “we,” but I expect Turkle would be part of that “we.) Instead, we have feminist tools for criticizing the situation that puts mothers in a position of needing to escape an oppressive and unfulfilling family life, and we have additional theoretical tools for thinking about how even such private, escapist reading might be a tool for building connections and community that really do counterbalance the failures of family life (Warner’s chapter on “Public and Private,” especially the discussion of the Beechers, really resonates with Radway, I think). And if someone were to argue that the problem is those darn mass market paperbacks, well, it would be hard to see that as anything other than a cynical attempt to change the subject, and to comfort the comfortable.

So, since we already have a good understanding of how exactly this dynamic of media-vs-parental-attention has played out in another context, it’s really on Turkle to argue that the issues are different (that they’re not about gender roles, about ideologies of parenting and the family, about time and money and work, etc.). Why, for instance, doesn’t Turkle ever cite Arlie Hochschild, who actually has a substantive political and sociological story about how the attention of family members is increasingly directed away from one another? And Hochschild’s story accounts for the same issues but goes back decades, so where’s Turkle get the idea that phones are too blame?

Another favorite example, from an interview Turkle did for the American Psychological Association:

One gender element that did become apparent is that mothers are now breastfeeding and bottle-feeding their babies as they text. Of course, in feeding an infant, so much more is going on than giving nutrition to a baby. There is the emotional exchange on the most primitive level, the feeling of gratifying someone and being gratified in return. A mother made tense by text messages is going to be experienced as tense by the child. And that child is vulnerable to interpreting that tension as coming from within the relationship with the mother. This is something that needs to be watched very closely. It reminds me of something that has occurred to me often as I have done this research: Technology can make us forget important things we know about life.

So again, in remarks for a popular, educated audience, Turkle turns to concerns about failures of intimacy in families. A while back Kieth Humphreys at the blog Reality Based Community posted a link to this interview, with the quick aside that “some moms are texting while breastfeeding instead of focusing on their infant (which many mothers tell me was one of the most intimate experiences of their lives).” I and one other commenter noted that breastfeeding, while certainly intimate, can be a very tedious and time-consuming experience as well. Humphreys’s response to me was “As a parent I like to know about research findings that are relevant to children’s well being, if you don’t that’s up to you of course, but this is the reality-based community … we discuss scientific findings here whether they make people feel good about themselves or not (the climate is changing too, BTW).” What’s notable is that Turkle’s comments don’t actually reflect “scientific findings” — in fact, breastfeeding doesn even appear in Alone Together, except in a discussion of robots. So, as with her TEDx talk, Turkle appeals to this concern and sense of emotional primitiveness that her audience is going to be primed for that exists around children and parenting, and she uses that to get educated audiences to suspend their critical thinking, and instead to project disapproval towards some other group of people (namely parents, which means, really, toward mothers). I single out Humphreys because I don’t want to overgeneralize about audiences, but his response is a clear example of my point: he compares my suggestion that these scholarly discourses might have an ill effect on mothers to climate denialism while using the word “science” to describe Turkle’s off-hand comments to an interviewer for a popular publication, always keeping “the well-being of children” at the forefront, as though we’re sure we know what that is and as though that trumps anyone else’s well-being.

It really seems like Turkle and Humphreys (himself a psychiatrist), seem to think that for every moment they are breastfeeding, mothers should be focusing all of their attention on this “primitive” emotional exchange, having some sort of transcendent euphoria for several hours of each day. What I find just impossible to understand is that Turkle doesn’t see right off that the expectation of having an emotionally primitive connection during every instance of breastfeeding would itself create the sort of “tension” that she worries receiving a text might create — especially because she simply worries that the tension elicited by a text message might be understood by the child as being about the child’s relationship with the mother, when the tension caused by excessive pressure not just to breastfeed (for possibly overstated health reasons), but also to have an emotional connection at the most primitive level with the child (who may just be hungry and not interested in cuddles or whatever) … that tension is bound to be interpreted as about the child, because it is about the child.

So, mothers are under extraordinary pressure to be perfect, and mothers of infants, especially, are given this impossible task of shifting happily from the particular and often exhausting work of pregnancy, to the particular and often exhausting and often alienating work of giving birth, to the particular and often exhausting and often incredibly isolating work of caring for their child. And now they’re not supposed to text their friends or family?? It’s a very similar issue with waiting for your kid at school: are parents really supposed to spend several minutes every afternoon staring at a school entrance just to make sure that the very moment their child appears there they will make eye contact and provide their child with that little nugget of emotional connection? How does Turkle’s example make sense if that’s not her prescription? From where does Turkle claim the authority to conscript what seems like the entirety of parents attention and internal lives to the emotional management of their children? Is Turkle’s goal for mothers of infants to be alone in the home with their child, cut off from the world? From her comments, the only situation that wouldn’t be concerning would seems to be a return to the world of bored housewives cut off from connection or fulfillment that Betty Friedan described. Of course she’d protest that characterization, but the direct implication of her arguments about technology distracting parents is that parents’ attention is the rightful claim of the family, regardless of the consequences for their own well-being (again, this means ipso facto that women’s lives are the rightful claim of the family). But for parents and their children, women using media (in the form of smartphones) to communicate with friends and family while they’re caring for their young children simply must be a better thing than women using media (in the form of romance novels) to escape the isolation that a particular social configuration of mothering forces on them.

At minimum, Turkle’s playing really fast and lose with childhood as a social figure that is uniquely available for affective moralizing. What this is is reproductive futurism, which in the end is a lot more about disciplining adults than it ever is about caring for dependents. The irony here is that Turkle’s earlier work held out the promise that computers might accommodate play and experimentation with non-traditional, non-normative identities and now, when she returns having changed her mind in light of new developments, her objection is not that such promise is unfulfilled, but rather that computers are disrupting traditional, heteronormative sexual and gender identities, by giving parents (mothers) connections to a world beyond the home and childcare. And that’s the problem with making arguments about technology instead of making arguments about people.

This article examines the expansion of the U.S. children’s music industry in the last decade. It considers the sanitizing of Top 40 pop for child audiences in the Kidz Bop compilations, the entrance of Disney into the popular music market, and the meteoric rise of “tween” music products such as High School Musical, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Justin Bieber. Children increasingly consume mainstream musical products and, in the converse dynamic, children’s artists themselves play an increasingly prominent role in popular culture. In many ways they have taken the lead both in commercial success and in stylistic innovations. Examining public expressions of age-based solidarity among celebrity musicians associated with children, this article argues that children’s music is increasingly articulated through tropes of identity politics, representing the emergence of a childhood counterpublic.

This paper argues that age-based identities in US schools are constructed through a contrast between classroom-based literacy practices and communicative repertoires linked to entertainment media, building on extensive ethnographic research about popular music consumption and media use among schoolchildren at a small primary school in rural Vermont. “Literacy” is often seen as the dominant language ideology in school, emphasizing decontextualized, monologic, and non-indexical modes of communication in essayist writing and Interaction-Response-Evaluation classroom interactions. This paper argues that entertainment media, by affording repertoires for communication that strongly contrast with literacy education, occupy a privileged position in constructions of childhood and adult identities in school. When schoolchildren listen with friends to music on portable devices, they go out of their way not to talk about music in descriptive or denotative modes, and instead they creatively explore the possibilities for intimate, embodied, and indexical interactions that arise in social contexts involving media: practices such as sharing headphones with friends that emphasize communicative layering, physical contact, and bodily coordination, and devalue descriptive language. Theorizing such practices using Ray McDermott’s account of the oppositional power embedded in “inarticulateness”—while emphasizing the intimacy and solidarity among children that inarticulateness makes possible—this paper argues that children actively politicize the communicative ecology of school as a site for articulating age difference, setting media consumption and indexical communication in opposition to decontextualized classroom communication, connecting the one to childhood solidarity, and the other to bureaucratic, institutional, and ultimately adult identities.

I also received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University this year, for my teaching in the Core curriculum. Columbia’s Record profiled me for the award, here.

In the fall I’ll be back at Columbia as a full-time Core Lecturer, continuing to teach Contemporary Civilization.

I think access to current issues requires a separate library subscription (my access through Columbia is still limited to pre-2006 issues). The piece is also up here and on scribd.

I’ve got a piece up (with some photos) about kids’ MP3 players as material culture over at NYU’s Material World Blog, which is a nice place. Thanks to Heather Horst for inviting me to contribute.

• Benjamin J. Harbert, “Blood in My Eyes: The Inspiring Principles of Musicians at Louisiana’s Hunt Prison”

• Anita Høyvik, “How to Prescribe a Healthy Listening? Music Listening in Terms of Medical Efficacy at Rivington House”

• Jennifer A. Woodruff, “‘Girl, you nasty!’: Policing the Boundaries between Inappropriate Dancing and Moral Character”

• Tyler Bickford, “Musical Consumerism in School: Expressive Negotiations of Institutional Authority During Classroom Lessons at a Vermont Elementary School”

Abstracts below the jump.

“Music in ‘Total’ Institutions”

This panel considers musical practices in four non-musical institutions in the U.S.: a Louisiana prison, a New York City residence for people living with AIDS, a Durham, N.C., Boys and Girls Club, and a Vermont elementary school. Each of these sites fits on a spectrum of what Goffman calls “total” institutions, which voraciously claim authority over all aspects of their subjects’ lives. These institutions are intimately organized around their subjects’ totalizing identities as children, prisoners, and the chronically ill and indigent, which locate individuals in problematic relationship to “human rights.” The papers in this panel identify musical practices and expressivity—cultural fields often seen as outside the normal reaches of governmental or institutional authority—as central sites in negotiating the boundaries between individuals and institutions. In prison, inmates’ music is balanced between politics and catharsis; medicine claims particular access to AIDS patients’ emotions and affect through discourses of “healing”; girls’ dancing bodies become central to an after-school club’s justification to funding agencies; and schoolchildren’s everyday vocalizations negotiate the pedagogical authority of teachers. In each of these cases music is an intimate resource with uncertain potential: it affords individual expression and affiliation, but it may also provide an anchor for these institutions to discipline their subjects’ private lives. Identifying “total” institutions as important sites of ethnomusicological inquiry, these papers reorient a perspective on cultural politics toward the interactions and routines of everyday life, where expressive practices are constitutive of individual rights and identities in institutional and bureaucratically structured environments.

Tyler Bickford, “Musical Consumerism in School: Expressive Negotiations of Institutional Authority During Classroom Lessons at a Vermont Elementary School”

With children’s increasing access to portable devices like MP3 players, the widespread installation of Internet terminals in schools, and educators’ progressive turn toward corporate-produced “edutainment” for lessons, over the last generation U.S. elementary schools have become a central location for children’s media consumption. Traditionally understood as community spaces that shelter vulnerable children from dangerous public environments, with this shift schools increasingly confront a vision of children as an emerging public of legitimate, active, and independent participants in consumer society with increasing demographic and market influence. This paper considers how this tension emerges in everyday musical interactions between students and teachers at a small rural primary school in Vermont. Students at this school would often vocalize melodies, sound effects, and fragments of popular and silly songs from recorded music, television, the Internet, and video games to disrupt, comment on, or shift the social frame of the lesson. Such moments reveal distinct stylistic, textual, and generic differences between the interactional modalities of musical media consumption and the communicative and expressive modalities with which primary education is especially concerned to cultivate and discipline among children. Because elementary school’s pedagogical emphasis on literacy and communication already privileges expressivity as a field of social action, repertoires from musical media provide a powerful resource for children to engage adults on equal terrain. As they command expressive repertoires from both education and entertainment, children negotiate contrasting visions of childhood from media and school, setting empowered consumerism in dynamic tension with bureaucratic constructions of passive, sheltered childhoods.