Queerness, Adolescence, and Developmental Citizenship: Concerns for the Twenty-First Century

In the early twentieth century, U.S. concepts of “developmental citizenship” presumed a gradual extension of rights based upon a naturalized trajectory that would lead individuals toward heterosexuality, gender complimentarity, and increasing social and political investment.  The particular means changed dramatically over time through which psychological, pedagogical, and political discourses positioned adolescence, sexuality, and gender in relationship to national belonging.  What persisted in subsequent decades as a powerful precondition to full citizenship was a compliance with white, middle-class values and gender and sexual normativity as a marker of successful adjustment into American adulthood.  Figurative “problem youth” were attacked in part because they threatened to expose exclusionary assumptions undergirding supposedly universal ideals of inclusivity in optimistic modern American democracy.  Even when Chicago School sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s democratized modern adolescence through rehabilitating some aspects of ethnic working-class youth culture as participatory training grounds for American political and social citizenship, heterosexuality and gender normativity remained central to their vision of inclusion.  This paper will explore how traces of the tensions between homosexuality, gender diversity, and maturity embedded in early 20th-century developmental citizenship continue in the 1990s and today to trouble contemporary conceptualizations of adolescence.  It will conclude with speculation about what might in the near future come to constitute, in a homonormative sense, a properly normalizing lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender adolescent proto-citizen.