Re: 'Queering' puberty?

"[Puberty] deserves to be subverted (puberty is not a moment, it's a process, an engagement with brute forces of nature whose power we cannot deny but which as a highly agentive species we seek to control)." This is interesting for what it reveals - nature and the body as The Enemy. All nature must be subverted to rational human will. To me, the body and nature belong to my identity as a human being, which I don't resent. I resent it when it goes wrong; when my body won't function or causes me pain. But I don't resent having a body, or its healthy functioning. So I am not sure why you think that puberty "deserves to be subverted". (You didn't explain why you think this, except to point out that it is a natural process - and therefore a priori bad, I suppose). Puberty is not an intrinsically distressing state, but can be made to be distressing by weird societies like that of America. What you consistently ignore is that the 'subversion' of puberty has significant costs in terms of building up ever more powerful agencies that have an interest in this 'subversion', and are prepared to do whatever they can to make kids unhappy so that they can sell the drugs they manufacture. Surely as a Marxist - I assume you're a Marxist if you're a Trot - you cannot suppose that these corporations whose wealth you'd feed would be completely neutral agents and wouldn't seek to maintain the source of their economic power? What mental block or aversion makes you refuse to interrogate the broader social trends that are operative within American society??? There ought to be something that says to you: 'putting perfectly healthy kids on drugs - maybe this is not such a good idea. Maybe this is not the "answer" to anything.' To me, yours is a deeply reactionary stance. It would give power to those agencies that have the greatest interest in people not identifying the source of their miseries in social conditions. It would mean stabilising capitalism for another hundred years. Of course, I haven't anything against reaction as such; I'm terribly nostalgic myself. But yours is the wrong reaction; I like the past, but you would eternalise the present. And I hate the present - the present is exactly what I want to escape from! (I'm glad you found Parfit interesting and useful. :)