Understanding Anonymous, Understanding Youth

"Who is Anonymous" asks Don't Poke the Bear: Scrimmaging with Anonymous by text2cloud. The piece concludes with this statement: "Who is Anonymous? They are our students."

Well, with a couple of teenager outings documented, it seems likely that this assemblage is made up of at least some young people. But what do we take from thinking that they are "our students"? Also, I wonder how well the group can be understood by knowing a few of the unveiled involved individuals. With their 4chan affiliation, non-hierarchical "divided by zero" structuring, political and jackass-styled frivolous efforts, and "doing it for the lulz" history, a question I am much more interested in would follow up on last spring's InfoStructure talk by Julian Dibble to ask not "who" but "why" are young people Anonymous?

Guiltier on grounds of heteronomativity: On youth sexuality and disproportional sentencing

In their schools, communities, and local court systems, gay and lesbian youth get called out more frequently and punished harsher than straight youth reports this study by Himmelstein and Bruckner published in the journal Pediatrics. The study covers a eight year span (1994-2002) and finds that non-hetero-identified females get stopped by police and punished far more often than their hetero-identified peers for same actions.

A Washington Post article quotes Prof. Stacey Horn from UIC interpreting Himmelstein and Bruckner's study this way:"To me, it is saying there is some kind of internal bias that adults are not aware of that is impacting the punishment of this group," she said.

But even with more school expulsions, bigger criminal records, and more frequent determinations of deviance from those around them, "it gets better" for these kids, right?

It gets better?: On technologies of homophobic bullying and adolescence

"Eighty per cent of Irish teachers have witnessed homophobic bullying in schools" reports this article on bullying and the It Gets Better campaign. This piece raises some important considerations about the campaign, and hits on a few things that I have been tossing about for a while now. Namely, what are we saying when we tell kids to wait and to believe that "it will get better?" Is it enough for young people to know that they occupy a transitory and liminal space of cruelty? Is this what they need to make it through?

What are we saying when we tell kids to just hang in there?

First off, perhaps I am reading into it, but there seems to be a suggestion of eventual escape in the campaign's "it gets better" message. Something like "Hang in there, kid! You'll be able to get your license and maybe even your emancipation and then you can move the heck away from this crap to more acceptance eventually." Ok. That's a little harsh. But I guess what bugs me is who is being asked to retool in this campaign. To me, it seems, once again, that the onus is being put on the kid here -- the onus to hang in there. To know that it doesn't make any sense, but to know that it will get better. The onus to take it until they can get out. But should young people have to take it? Should they have to wait for the changes that come with more adult living in order to be treated ok? Should they have to escape?

Of course, many do. This is, indeed, what some young people need to do to be ok. However, according to Mary Gray's very bitchin book, quite unlike the popular discourse that suggests LGBT-identifying youth view cities as light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel lifelines where respect and real living, like pots of gold, await them, not all rural kids jump at the chance to get out of the country when they grow up out in the country. Not all can leave. Not all have to leave. Not all want to leave. And not all do leave. How is this considered?

Outside of this, I see this framing of the homophobic bullying some LGBTQ youth go through as quite similar to adolescence -- an extended period of marginalization and oppression within Western culture in which young people are deemed less-than-full citizens who are unworthy of full civil rights. This, too, is a cruel liminal period. Similar to the hostile conditions faced by many lesbian, gay, bi, queer, questioning, and trans youth (as well as to the non-hetro status of many of these youth), young people in adolescence are told they will grow out of it, that "it will get better" when they "move on." Yes, it is comforting to know that you are not alone in your plight. But what I feel is missing in both analyses is the fact that this cruelty does not go away once we grow out of it. Kids move on, perhaps, to more happy queer friendly/adult social locations. The experience of marginalization and cruelty remains as part of life for others.

I think the campaign says some very important things. Still, I wonder how this campaign would be different if it spoke not to LGBT youth, but to those involved with youth, to the active and complicit social relationships that make up this technology of bullying. 80% of Irish teachers say that they see bullying happening toward their students. Dorothy Espelage reports similar numbers in her school bullying research stateside. Still, the promise is that youth will move beyond the negative treatment eventually. Without even needing to think about how most LGBTQ-identifying folks, in fact, never do find spaces in our country where "it gets better" enough:

-to allow them civil rights that respect and protect their families' rights to earned social security and pensions, to insurance, and to their general bounding,

-to provide the couple immigration rights,

-to allow them to make decisions for family members and to visit their loved ones unexpectedly in the hospital without a lot of hoo-haw and pre-filed paperwork (the logistics of Obama's April federal decision are still being worked out),

or,

-to keep them from losing their job because of who they are,

this current approach seems to me to be based in at least a bit of unintentional neoliberalist finger-crossing and good old American denial of structure.

Jeffrey Arnett coined the term "emerging adulthood" to address the lengthening of Western non-adulthood deep into the 20s. On a visit to campus a couple years back, he stated numerous times that young people and their parents across the Western world have been so relieved to hear about his "new developmental stage" because it helped describe their experiences of not finding meaningful careers, not feeling like they were "on a path," not "knowing who they are," not being able to support themselves financially or to figure out how to afford health insurance. Yes, this sort of not finding and not knowing involves a lot of exploration, which folks think is quite swell in these parts, as in Europe. But it also involves a lot of stress and uncertainty, and, for many, a forced exploration that comes from having few meaningful or even tangible places to settle. With no universal healthcare, it also involves real fear and risk. People felt relieved, Arnett said, because knowing that emerging adulthood "existed" made them feel more normal.

Exploration is often quite wonderful, but the rhetorical line drawn between youth exploration and adult stability in US culture gives me serious pause. Why such a stark division? Does exploration end when adulthood begins? Of course not. Why might we tell young people that it does?

Perhaps relatedly, I have noticed that concern about this new developmental stage commonly draws justifications about how youth prefer exploration over settling down. It goes something like this: Young people want to explore. They do not want to settle down into drudgery. As such, emerging adulthood is meeting young people's interest and needs. It is good for them. They want it.

This line of thought is rooted in an artificial binary of youth/emerging adulthood as a time of exploration, and adulthood as a time entirely devoid of exploration. I am not at all convinced that this binary in any way represents reality, or that a choice involving these two options needs to be made. However, with such choices laid out on the table, who wouldn't volunteer to avoid adulthood at all cost?

This type of thinking also strikes me as similar to Hargittai's work on digital na(t)ives. Are all young people naturally tech saavy? Clearly no, argues Hargittai in her article. Are all young people interested in drifting through their 20s and 30s? Hardly. But, in either case, what might be the result (or purpose) of common conceptualizations of youth that state that they are these things, that they want these things? How might these framings shape how young people are treated, funded, educated, counseled, comforted, policed? How might this shape how they understand themselves?

Arnett's theory takes into consideration that societal changes are underway that make delayed adulthood make more sense -- the "new information society," birth control and more acceptance of sex out of marriage, later marriages... But emerging adulthood doesn't question these changes or critique the culture which ends up denying full citizenship to more and more "young people." These things are accepted as immutable givens. The spotlight falls instead upon young people's search for personal "identity" and meaning. In emerging adulthood, extended adolescence is young people's exploration, its their choice, its their problem to solve. Again, the young people are the ones who are to do the retooling to fit in. Should we believe that the reason 20-somethings work Mcjobs and pay exorbitant prices pursuing endless degrees boils down to "because they want to?" Baseball-loving girls drop out of baseball "because they want to" as they move further into grade school and receive more intense gender-based teasing from boys on their own team. There is whole a lot of social and structural experience involved in both of these types of individual wanting. Without critical perspective, it is impossible for "emerging adulthood" to distinguish young people's intentional meandering explorations from their very purposeful and productive subjectivity through governmentality and self-regulation.

Yes, so enough. Most of this will be for another post. For now, though, I am left thinking about the impact of being told that something that is causing hardship is normal rather than troubling. What do we lose when we are coached to feel normal within clearly abnormal and unjust circumstances? What happens when those who are oppressed think that the conditions they exist in are normal?

By accepting that denied adulthood through the 30s is normal, I think that concern is removed from the systemic and structural factors involved in young people's struggle. By accepting that this is normal, I think people feel less worried about how young people are faring and being treated in our culture. By accepting that it is normal, I think we are more able to look away from the unjust economic and social policies and practices involved in young people's current social realities. By accepting that it is normal, social critique and discontent lessens as struggles continue.

I believe both extended adolescence and homophobic bullying present extremely good cases for not just looking to more just futures for kids, but for taking seriously what is happening in young people's present. Hope is problematic if it convinces us to ignore our (or others') realities. Yes, those who are treated poorly in liminal spaces due to the way they are or identify should be able to feel hope. But they also deserve to claim and use their social discontent. They deserve to have their struggles read as structural rather than personal problems. It may, indeed, "get better" for LGBTQ youth and for young people in adolescence, but this means little when the left-behind social marginalization and cruelty remains considered a normal part of life for others among us.

Here's to more hope for the present, eh?

(image credit: http://www.pawesome.net/2010/01/a-roundup-of-hang-in-there-motivational-posters/ Pretty pawesome.)