“Scholars have found that images of the body often present idealized versions of feminine beauty – thin, tall, long legged, and always young”
(Heiss, 2011)
Although having a ‘young’ body is ideal, when used in this way, the terms ‘young’ and ‘youthful’ represent something very different to the lived-experiences of chronologically young people. Youth for Sale is contradictory to other discourses of youth (Youth as Active and Youth as Passive). When considering those chronologically young the
76 emphasis is on temporality: youth is the period after childhood and prior to adulthood; a time it is desirable to ‘grow out of’ by meeting the adulthood signifiers. Youth and time are therefore intrinsically, yet incongruously linked. Whereas, on the one hand, we want to assist our young people in their risky transition to adulthood (the sooner they reach adulthood the better), there is also a desire to remain, as adults, forever young. Although when discussed explicitly youth is about transience, when discursively, perhaps implicitly used, youth is about the desire to pause time. I have highlighted over the last two
chapters the ableism inherent to a discourse of youth as becoming-adult. It seems neither of these youth-time relationships is useful for disabled youth. As my young disabled participants confirm in Chapter Eight, Youth for Sale excludes the lives of young disabled people. It is therefore important to continue exploring the potential dangers Youth for Sale poses to disabled youth. I want to know what else we aspire to when we strive towards the embodiment of Youth for Sale; what is the promise of youth?
Discussions thus far tell us that time and embodiment are key features of our desire for eternal youth. I now step away from direct encounters with youth for a while, in order to consider relationships between time and embodiment further. I bring youth back in the latter part of discussion.
In a neoliberal society, time is a valuable commodity. Christensen, James and Jenks (2001) consider how children understand and embody time, arguing that children learn the ‘value’ of time through bodily discipline in the classroom. ‘Wasting’ the teacher’s curriculum time, leads to the teacher claiming back this time by denying the student playtime. Children learn that time is a finite resource, to be used productively: ‘time is money’, not something to be ‘wasted’. If used correctly, the reward may be ‘free time’. According to budget studies of time, this means a better quality of life (Adam, 1990). How time is used in the present leads to consequences in the future, something children and young people (incomplete-adults), know all too well – work hard in school, and you will be rewarded with a good job (an essential of adulthood), or so the story goes. Featherstone (1982) argues that the aged body is inscribed with the passing of time which serves as a reminder of our own mortality. This, he argues, is something we try to disguise through body work, maintenance and repair. Whereas children and young people are encouraged to use their time productively in order to ensure a ‘good’ future, our desire for youthful looks is perhaps a desire to put off mortality, to suspend time. To again quote Blatterer (2010, 69), “the ideal is to be adult and youthful but not
77 Embodiment is imperative to conceptions of time. Time, embodiment and time’s ability to include and exclude is explored within CDS. Resting upon the argument that disability is not ‘fact’ but a social construction, Ferris (2010) argues that disability is always
mediated, and that “one crucial mediation of it, is time”. Neither is time a ‘fact’. Michalko (2010) writes of “culture standard time” - the time we are all expected to adhere to, the time of the normates, the ideals, the ‘ordinary man’. As a blind man, Michalko writes of “feeling dorky” using a white cane to navigate his way around (a risk, he maintains, we all face when entering a different time zone); although ‘blind time’ and ‘culture standard time’ are expected be in synchrony with one-another, the assumption of sightedness means a blind person acting within ‘culture standard time’ risks of “looking dorky”. Nevertheless, blind people are expected to ‘fit in’, to synchronise their watches with ‘culture standard time’. Refusing to do that, however, blindness time offers, a “time for sight, for normalcy, to develop self-understanding” (Michalko, 2010). Similar notions have been maintained by others under the term ‘crip time’. ‘Crip time’ is not just about allowing extra time, working within a discourse of inclusion which also allows for
exclusion (Price, 2011; Titchkosky, 2007, 2010), but about flexibility and the questioning of normative and ableist time frames (Price, 2011). Again, disability illuminates and allows us to challenge what has become inherent. I show young people in Chapter Six claiming back their own time, from time frames imposed upon them.
Classrooms are a stark example of largely unquestioned normative timeframes, which add to the educational exclusion of disabled children (Price, 2011). As Davis and Watson (2001, 674) put it, the disabled “child is forced to fit into already existing educational and social processes and practices, which afford little space for the investigation or
understanding of difference”. Although not specifically engaging with disability, James (2000) points to the continued influence of developmental psychologists such a Piaget in the structuring of children’s lives. She argues that children’s bodies are defined by the passing of time; such as schools being organised into age-based classes. Thinking back to Chapter One, we see assumptions of normative development potentially excluding disabled children. However, she highlights that children do not understand the relationship between their bodies and time as purely quantitative. Rather, age (the measure of time we apply to living things) is conceptualised as a holistic, embodied experience, which symbolises social status, and allows or denies access to any number of
78 endeavours. The following quote from James’ fieldwork with primary aged children illustrates this:
“CAROL: (after comparing her height to Lorna) I’m bigger ALLISON [researcher]: Would you like to be tall?
CAROL: Yeah... I want to be 15
ARTHUR: Your birthday is before mine
GEORGE: Yeah, I’ll be 6 and I’ll be bigger than you then”
(James, 2000, 29)
Children learn their bodies through the passing of time. The discussion of time, therefore, leads to one of bodies. Aging is interwoven with normative ideas of bodily capability. As well as learning that time has a ‘value’ in the classroom, children also get taught that a ‘good’ body is “both controlled and seen to be controllable” (James, 2000, 31). The ‘good’ student in the classroom walks properly, sits up straight, doesn’t fidget, ties her shoelaces and tucks in her shirt. Davis and Watson (2001) report that physical restraint is routinely used in classrooms to ensure the conformity of disabled children’s bodies. Furthermore, the older the child is, the closer she is to ‘youth’, the higher the expectation of a ‘good’ classroom body (James, 2000). In concurrence with feminist-disability critiques of idealised bodies, we see that the process of judging the interior of the body by its exterior begins in school, and children are aware of this (Backett-Milburn, 2000; Burnett & Holmes, 2001; Christensen, 2000). Discourses of ‘good’ bodies work
alongside those of ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ bodies. Through these discourses children learn the cultural importance of body work. James (2000) explains with the example of
children’s conception of a ‘fat’ body. A fat body is a greedy body that is not properly controlled. Bodies must be orderly. A fat body cannot tie its shoelaces or walk properly, so it’s not a good orderly classroom body. Bodies must also be able to participate. A fat body cannot run fast, it gets caught playing tig. It is not a good participating playground body. Fat bodies, like disabled bodies, are undesirable. Children, like adults, James (2000) argues, judge bodies in moral terms, although a tall body signifies age and maturity, a fat body is equated with lack of bodily control, greed and antisocial
behaviour. Disabled children’s bodies are undesirable to the extent that they endure the violence of routine physical correction (Davis and Watson, 2001). Again, we see the importance of research question one: what dangers do young disabled people face if normative discourse remains unquestioned? As Barton (1993, 243) puts it, “[p]hysical difference [...] makes the bodies of disabled people public property”.
79 Literature considering the sociology of the body and the sociology of childhood has scarcely engaged with disability and experiences of disabled bodies (Shakespeare, 2006b; Wickenden, 2010). Chandler (2010) approaches the body through a CDS perspective when she writes about her Mum telling her, her ‘first story of disability’:
“My story of her story goes like this: When I was 5 years old I went to a friend's birthday party at the zoo. A group of girls were showing off their newly discovered skill of doing a cartwheel. As I began the dismount into this ellipse, I expected to complete it without trouble like the girls before me. Instead of gracefully spinning forward as was previously demonstrated by my friends, my wrists buckled under my weight, my legs refused to fly upwards, and I collapsed in a laughable heap on the grass in front of them. In this moment I understood my body as troubling but I did not have an idea of, and thusly did not have, a disability. Later that night, as my mom was helping me get ready for bed, I asked: "Mom, why can't I do a cartwheel?" expecting she would be able to untangle the entanglement that was my experience of my embodiment. She responded with the first telling of disability.”
(Chandler, 2010)
Chandler’s story illustrates time’s mediation of disability (Ferris, 2010). She was not disabled until after she had “understood her body as troubling”, at which time she was told of disability. Chandler’s story also shows that disability’s invisibility within the sociology of the body and childhood is conspicuous. When Davis and Watson (2001) highlight the physical restraint disabled children face when not conforming to normative time/embodiment frameworks, we see how replacing James’ (2000) explorations of children’s conceptions of ‘fat’ bodies with disabled bodies could result in potentially more demonising conceptions. Moreover, as much research considering
time/embodiment relationships stems from CDS and the sociology of childhood, it seems children and disabled people are perhaps more enlightened than their adult and non- disabled counterparts in realising the exclusionary potential of this time/embodiment relationship. When I ask my young disabled participants about time and embodiment in Section Two, we see the importance of listening to those at the peripheries (Shildrick, 2004).
Let us link this back to Youth for Sale. I argued earlier that discourses of Youth for Sale result in women’s minds being ‘read’ from the exteriors of their bodies. This is
particularly the case when the women are considered ‘differently embodied’ (Shildrick, 2009). Christensen’s (2000) exploration of cultural constructions of childhood
80 vulnerability and Backett-Milburn’s (2000) study of adult and child perceptions of
‘healthy bodies’ concur with James’ (2000) arguments around ‘fat’ bodies. Children, like adults, make internal judgements about a person, based on their external appearance. Furthermore, both children and adults are aware of the importance of ‘body work’ in order to maintain healthy (read: ‘controlled’, ‘orderly’, ‘moral’, ‘good’) bodies. For adults ‘body work’ is done self-consciously in order to meet expectations imposed by Youth for Sale, and both under and over attention to bodily maintenance is open to criticism. For children, however, the reasons are more pragmatic: “exercise had strong and immediate purposes of social inclusion, pleasure, personal credibility and peer acceptance” (Backett-Milburn, 2000, 97). A well exercised body can take part. It does not get caught in tig. It can do cartwheels. Furthermore, a well-presented child’s body is seen as a sign of adult parental achievement (Christensen, 2000). Although the ideal body may always be young, the young, like the aged body, is expected to work to meet ideals.