Between Sexuality and Narrative

Abstract

In a reversal of the usual question of what adults can do to cure the problem of adolescence, a recent art exhibit instead asked what the experiences, identities, and representations of youth can teach us about the problem of being human. In reformulating the terms of adult-adolescent engagement, the curator, Francesco Bonami (2003), calls “the adolescent” the “fourth sex.” If the female, male, and homosexual are called the first, second, and third sexes respectively, then the adolescent—who, according to Bonami, embodies simultaneously all three positions and none—might be the fourth sex. The adolescent, understood as straddling boundaries, pushing against limits, and living with extremes, unsettles society’s belief in maturity, rationality, and order and calls into question the adult’s confidence in their own grownup-ness. Bonami writes: “Adolescence contains the existential anguish of every human being. Only by blocking the memory can man forget the transitory condition of his existence” (12). Sexuality, and especially the sexuality of youth, we might argue, can be too stark and dissembling a reminder of this transition—a feeling of having arrived too late and too early. Sexuality, that intimate gesture of our humanity, is marked by our helplessness.

Adolescence is one of those mythic figures that the imaginary, and of course, the theoretical imaginary, gives us in order to distance us from certain of our faults—cleavages, denials, or simply desires?—by reifying them in the form of someone who has not yet grown up.

—Kristeva 1990, 8