front cover of Ambivalent Childhoods
Ambivalent Childhoods
Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child
Jacob Breslow
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

Explores childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability to interrogate what “the child” makes possible

The concept of childhood contains many contested and ambivalent meanings that have extraordinary implications, particularly for those staking their claim for belonging and justice on the wish for inclusion within it. In Ambivalent Childhoods, Jacob Breslow examines contemporary U.S. social justice movements (including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and antideportation movements) to discover and reveal how childhood operates within and against them.

Ambivalent Childhoods brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with“the psychic life of the child” that combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements, Breslow demonstrates how childhood requires sustained attention as a complex and ambivalent site for contesting the workings of power, not only for the young. 

Ambivalent Childhoods is a forward-thinking and intersectional analysis of how childhood affects activism, national belonging, and the violence directed against queer, trans, and racialized people. 

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front cover of Uniform Feelings
Uniform Feelings
Scenes from the Psychic Life of Policing
Jessi Lee Jackson
University of Michigan Press, 2022
In Uniform Feelings, American studies scholar and abolitionist psychotherapist Jessi Lee Jackson reads policing as a set of emotional and relational practices in order to shed light on the persistence of police violence.  Jackson argues that psychological investments in U.S. police power emerge at various sites: her counseling room, manuals for addressing bias, museum displays, mortality statistics, and memorial walls honoring fallen officers.  Drawing on queer, feminist, anticolonial, and Black engagements with psychoanalysis to think through U.S. policing—and bringing together a mix of clinical case studies, autotheory, and ethnographic research—the book moves from the individual to the institutional. Jackson begins with her work as a psychotherapist working across the spectrum of relationships to policing, and then turns to interrogate carceral psychology—the involvement of her profession in ongoing state violence.  Jackson orbits around two key questions: how are our relationships shaped by proximity to state violence, and how can our social worlds be transformed to challenge state-sanctioned violence?
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