Taxonomy and the Child

Response to Mossman

I know a woman who was afraid to meet my children because, as she is a lesbian, she was afraid my children wouldn’t like her. Her reasoning? She believed that I, as the daughter of a minister, would have indoctrinated my children with a hatred and disgust for anyone homosexual (I realize that this term is not ideal, according to one of this week’s essays, but I find the term ‘queer’ to be pejorative, and as no one, not even the article, has been able to suggest an alternative that satisfies everyone, I’m not quite sure what to say.). I was upset by the woman’s fear for a number of reasons, including but not limited to my feeling that she had just rejected my children and me for easily as narrow-minded a justification as that which she claimed to think I would do. But more than that was my amazement and horror that she would think I’ve apparently sat my children (ages 14, 10, and 7) down and told them first, what homosexuality is (age-appropriate for fourteen, perhaps for ten, but definitely not for seven—if I did that, part and parcel of the discussion would include sex, which she’s certainly not ready for); and second, that it should be condemned and those who are homosexual stoned, tarred and feathered, and so on (please read that list as sarcasm in the Swiftian sense). What kind of parent would I be? I’m not willing to say that there aren’t parents out there who would and do have conversations like that with children, but I am willing to say I abhor the thought of it, and I honestly believe that many, if not most, adults, know that not only is the discussion age-inappropriate, it also holds little or no interest for a child.
Why? Perhaps an example from Mark Mossman’s article “The One-Legged Wonder and Other Names” will help to demonstrate. In the article, Mossman discusses the fact that his friend’s father couldn’t quite wrap his brain around exactly “what [Mossman] was” (3). Mossman comments, “[…] he needed to understand me, one of his kids’ playmates, to name me, to define me, to put me into some kind of manageable, identifiable space. Naming is an act of cultural management” (3). This taxonomic urge, a hangover from the Victorians (interesting and coincidental, isn’t it, that the Victorians were the first to name ‘childhood’ as a group and point in development?) and points before, is a clearly adult tendency. It is this adult tendency that caused the woman I know to be certain I would have told my kids that she is a lesbian. After all, it’s how she’s niched (both by others and herself), so why on earth wouldn’t I? Frankly, because the taxonomic urge is not something that children seem to possess, and I’m aware of that.
Open questions: Have you ever been around a child? Do you remember being one? Do you have any? I’m always amazed by those who can remember their own childhoods well, and perhaps have children themselves, but cannot understand the nature of childhood at all. I found Mossman to be one of these folks. The entire article, the premise of which I certainly don’t need to rehearse here, centered on childhood—his experience as a child, how he manipulated his experience, and what he sees when he looks back. I’m interested in the clarity of his vision, insofar as most people I’ve met don’t remember their childhoods nearly as vividly as he does, but nonetheless, Mossman recounts his childhood for us. He is, of course, discussing the space that he occupies and the fact that he actually moves between two spaces as an adult, just as he did as a child. What I’m more interested in, though, is the way he in which depicts childhood and children in his article, for while he gives himself credit for “simply s[eeing his] body as different (13), he comments that children (and adults, not surprisingly) who watch him take of his prosthetic leg feel “anxiety and strangeness,” “discomfort and uncertainty” (13). Why is he so certain that the children feel anything more than the difference that he felt? Children tend to see things very simply. They do not form judgments immediately that represent the binaries adults need so very much to set forth and articulate repeatedly just to convince themselves and others that the binaries are ‘true.’ I still remember one of my kids asking who “dad’s brown friend’ was. Nothing about ‘black,’ ‘African American,’ no loaded racial identity / stigma / space, etc—just a simple statement of actual physical color.
Indeed, Mossman himself is obsessed with binaries, which he apparently needs as do all adults. The spaces he moves between, the “poles of normalcy and abnormality” (12), and other either / ors along the way in the article demonstrate to me that adults—no matter whether disabled, physical body intact, white, green, purple, hetero, homo, metro, or what have you—are obsessed with classifying and binarying away. And I do not use that as a verbal lightly. It’s an action, right? It isn’t a noun with properties—a binary is…what? An action done by humans to niche people and ideas and things. If nothing else, for me this article is a reminder that the distinctions we make and the hairs we split are man-made…literally.
A closing thought, since I know this is longer than it’s supposed to be. Mossman comments that
As a child I often understood myself as a hero, a wonder. But really, I
now know that, in some sense, I always understood that it was an
elaborate game, a game that I could always play to my advantage if I
wanted to. Again, it was all about names, roles. […] I just did what all
freaks learn to do: I tried to avoid circumstances that would leave me
powerless, and create situations that would instead give me a measure
of power and control [… ] I put on the appropriate mask…(5)
It’s an interesting idea (and I’m certain not understood nearly to that level in his childhood), but can any of us really way that we didn’t, at some point in our growing up years, no matter our myriad situations, feel the exact same way? So long as adults keep teaching kids what makes a ‘freak’—and it seems to be for any arbitrary reason, those kids will grow into adults and binary away.