The Children Are the Future: Tracking the Rise of Anti-Trans Rights, Eugenics, and Book Bans in the 21st century

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Even as this year’s conference theme calls us to various kinds of endings (of US empire, of history, and of the planet itself) it also asks us to imagine the new, more hopeful, horizons our current conjuncture might reveal. But just as the promise of a different future can be harnessed for change, so too can it be used as a bludgeon to protect the status quo. This is particularly true when we consider the “reproductive futurism” (to quote Lee Edelman) inherent in the figure of the child. Each of the papers on this panel consider a different way in which calls to “save our children” are used to imagine more secure futures: be it through trans rights and anti-trans movements that imagine trans children as either needing saving by or protection from expert adults, preimplantation genetic diagnosis that imagines salvation as a future free from (specific forms of) disease and disability, or the uptick in conservative “mom” pressure groups exerting influence and ideological control through book bans. These calls to protect, save, and improve children all depend upon the notion that a more perfect future can, and should, be accessed via the child, and that it is the role of activist adults to act accordingly. Following this, Hayward-Jansen’s paper looks at how both anti-trans and trans rights activism obscure the children at their center; the paper focuses specifically on the 2020 Cass Review of medical protocols and recommendations for trans care for youth, and on the activism organized around the slogan “protect trans kids.” Meditating on what it might mean to save children before they are even born, Nadkarni’s paper considers the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to avoid passing down the BRCA mutation to future generations, asking how we might think of this practice in relation to new and older forms of eugenics. Bhalla’s paper picks up on the theme of regulation and control of children’s futures by examining the recent space of book bans across the United States that attempt to ideologically constrain the possibilities of youth and children’s reading as a powerful cultural practice. Taken together, these papers consider how the notion of “saving children” becomes a means not only of securing our present, but also of securing what is to come.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Saving Children and the Rhetoric of “Protecting Trans Kids” - Jude Hayward-Jansen

• Calculating Risk: Pre-implantation Genetic Testing and the New Eugenics - Asha Nadkarni, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• “Love is an Expertise”: 21st Century US Book Bans and the Rise of Moms for Liberty - Tamara Bhalla, University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Chair

• Jigna Desai, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biographical Information

Jude Hayward-Jansen is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, a feminist scholar and educator of contemporary US and South African literature and Queer/Trans studies. Their research toggles multiple literary and cultural fields while looking at the relationships between the U.S. and South Africa, queerness and history, and whiteness and conservative religious politics. Their current book project examines how queerness shaped the rise of the religious right in the U.S. and the collapse of apartheid in South Africa. They have published work in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and in Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa.


Asha Nadkarni is Professor of English and the Director of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She specializes in American studies, postcolonial literature and theory, Asian American studies, and transnational feminist theory, with a particular focus on issues surrounding reproduction. Her monograph, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (Minnesota, 2014), traces connections between U.S. and Indian nationalist feminisms to suggest that both launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation. She is working on a second book project, tentatively titled From Opium to Outsourcing, that focuses on representations of South Asian labor in a global context. In addition to articles and book chapters in venues such as NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, and The Routledge Companion to Global Television, she is co-editor (with Cathy Schlund-Vials) of Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996: Volume Three (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which received a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award. Professor Nadkarni is also the recipient of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Teaching Award (2018), the University of Massachusetts Amherst Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award (2020), and the University of Massachusetts Amherst ADVANCE Faculty Mentoring Award (2022).


Tamara Bhalla is Associate Professor and chair of the American Studies department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County where she teaches courses in Asian American studies, reading and readership, and post-1965 U.S. multiethnic literatures. Her book Reading Together, Reading Apart: Identity, Belonging, and South Asian American Community was published in 2016 by University of Illinois Press. She has published in venues such Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, Journal for Asian American Studies, MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States, Scholar and Feminist Online and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture. Prof Bhalla is currently leading a grant at her university from the Mellon Foundation to build a Global Asias program with a strong public humanities emphasis. Prof Bhalla is currently working on a book manuscript called Decentering Whiteness: Race and Reading in Contemporary US Literature which exposes how 21st century US-based reading and readership serve the needs and desires of white readers as they seek empathic identification with marginalized others.