![]() Queer scholar Jack Halberstam’s 2005 book In a Queer Time and Place argues that “queer uses of time and space develop… in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” Queerness itself is “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.” It is inflected by time-warping experiences as diverse as coming out, gender transitions, and generation-defining tragedies such as the AIDS epidemic. They thus develop a relationship to time itself that is decidedly queer. For them, conventional adulthood is not only inaccessible but undesirable. It wasn’t just that the Defense of Marriage Act was in effect and fewer reproductive clinics welcomed non-heterosexual clients the characters in Tea’s novel-and others who claim queer as a political identity-reject the heteronormative fantasy of adulthood. The best that could be aimed for was an academic placement and a lover who eventually tired of pansexual sport-fucking and settled down with you to raise a rescue animal in a rent-controlled apartment.” But what about those for whom that path has always been illusory? In her novel Black Wave, set in the late 1990s, Michelle Tea writes, “It so hard for a queer person to become an adult… They didn’t get married. These scholars both frame the disappearance of the conventional path into adulthood as a loss. Queer lives are notable for their lack of “chrononormativity,” starting in childhood. They fail to consider the ways in which, say, feminism, has played a part in whether young heterosexual women choose to delay marriage or dispose of it as a life goal. The sociologist Pamela Aronson suggests that the five “objective life events” still frequently used in mainstream discourse to measure the entrance into adulthood-“completing education, entering the labor force, becoming financially independent, getting married, and becoming a parent”-are based on outdated assumptions about class and gender. It’s these personal milestones-and having their stories listened to and validated-that allowed Silva’s subjects to claim the “dignity and respect due adults.”Īs for the conventional adult behaviors that remain a matter of choice, there’s a political valence to choosing differently. ![]() Silva found that her respondents had constructed new markers for coming of age based on “self realization gleaned from denouncing a painful past and reconstructing an independent, complete self”-by overcoming addiction, say, or reframing trauma as leading to empowerment. ![]() Silva notes that in “the contemporary post-industrial world… traditional markers of adulthood have become tenuous.” She interviewed working-class young people in their 20s and 30s to explore how they’ve redefined adulthood in an era of declining economic opportunity. If conventional markers of being an adult include getting a “real job” or purchasing property, for whom are those goals accessible? For whom are they a matter not of choice but of economic reality? In “ Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty,” the sociologist Jennifer M. Yet what constitutes adulthood has never been self-evident or value-neutral. In fact, books like Kelly Williams Brown’s Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps imply that adulting is a series of behaviors that can be chosen or learned. The conversion of the noun into verb form implies that adulting is more performance than inevitability. This uncertainty manifests as a kind of self-consciousness about what the “right” age is to partner off, have kids, buy a house, settle into a career. The term’s emergence among Millennials speaks to a generational uncertainty about what it means to grow up-or rather, about the behaviors one associates with adulthood. In its 2015 “word of the year” vote, the American Dialect Society shortlisted the verb form of “adult”-i.e., “adulting”-as one of the “Most Creative” new usages. ![]() The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. ![]()
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