This tension between agency and vulnerability will reappear throughout Minor Troubles, as young people''s own characteristics--their gender nonconformity, their queerness, their Blackness, their sexual agency--cause trouble for adults'' investment in the innocence of the category of childhood. As I will suggest, the racialized rhetorical figuration of the child, when it is instrumentalized in public deliberation, brings cultural ideas about the qualities of childhood into contact with the lives of real children, producing material consequences that are disproportionately harmful to youth of color and queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth. Of course, while Stewart''s interview with Rutledge provides a brief look at some of the central themes I explore, I could have begun with any number of other contemporary examples that also illustrate conservative unease with racial, gendered, and sexual difference in contexts involving children: legislation that prohibits discussions of LGBTQ+ histories and lives in schools, bans on books that feature anti-racist or queer-inclusive messages, prohibitions on education about systemic racism and critical race theory, accusations of "grooming" leveled at adults who teach sex education to minors, worries about drag queen story hours, and unfortunately many more. These controversies get their grip in the public imagination precisely because they target children, but also because race, gender, and sexuality are all flashpoints for cultural unease--especially when young people are involved. As Ian Barnard asserts, threats to the purity and sanctity of children "summon up apparently limitless reserves of unreflective fear, panic, anger, and hysteria," and those feelings constrain the possibilities for genuine debate. To invoke hypothetically endangered children, then, is to make a virtually irrefutable argument that fallaciously but nonetheless efficaciously substitutes an emotional petition for rational deliberation. Whether or not the children in question are actually imperiled--by learning an accurate history of slavery, by using a classmate''s proper pronouns, by reading a book with a queer protagonist--their imagined distress is instrumentalized as a call for adults to act. In other words, the idea of the endangered child is a potent rhetorical tool--"a figure to be used, sometimes as a weapon," as Susan Jarratt puts it--that can be deployed strategically to justify policies that limit the freedoms of both young people and adults.

The controversies that we are witnessing today about race, gender identity, and sexuality are remarkable for the transparency with which the figure of the child is weaponized. However, this instrumentalization of childhood is far from unprecedented; rather, it emerges from the sedimentation of youthful vulnerability as a racialized characteristic, the construction of childhood as a repository of adult anxieties, and the mobilization of childhood as a means of maintaining systemic privileges and inequalities that have been decades and even centuries in the making. Rather than lingering in the present moment, therefore, Minor Troubles moves into the recent past, engaging with a series of case studies from the early twenty-first century that produce the rhetorical possibilities of the present. In the following chapters I examine recognizable public controversies--adult concerns about teen sexting; the bullying and suicides of queer kids; trans youths'' access to gender-segregated bathrooms at school; and sex education--in order to trace how vulnerability and agency emerge through the racialized, sexualized, and gendered figurations of childhood (re)produced in each debate. For instance, the first chapter''s discussion of the perceived technological menace of teen sexting in the 2000s demonstrates the disproportionate criminalization of youth of color and queer youth, and how the exclusion of Blackness inaugurates the vulnerability of childhood. In chapter 2''s analysis of the media attention to the bullying and suicides of queer youth in 2010 and beyond, vulnerability is tethered to whiteness, masculinity, and queerness, and these assumptions of inherent vulnerability shape government policy and school programs. Chapter 3''s close scrutiny of one community''s debate about gender-segregated bathrooms in 2014 reveals the way childhood is figured according to normative temporalities of development and racialized understandings of transness, and how agency emerges in the disavowal of histories of anti-Black racism. And finally, in chapter 4 the racist and heteronormative aims of American sex education programs are resisted by a contemporary innovative program founded in 2014 that provides comprehensive sexual-wellness education for marginalized youth and presents an alternate version of vulnerability that enables rather than replaces youthful agency.