The Florida Project:
The title of the film, “The Florida Project” reflects the name given to the early planning stages of what has become the walt disney world amusement park. In what ways do Moonee, Scooty, and Jancey assert their political agency amid the realities of capitalism and state surveillance?
What kind of daily political projects do Moonee, Scooty, Jancey, and the other kids create? How do the children move through, interact, navigate the Futureland and Magic Castle motels, strip malls, abandoned buildings, and stretches of highway in the off-brand disney landscape? What are the limits/constraints and possibilities of their everyday political creations?
What forms of care (and responsibility) are featured in the Florida Project? What are the differences between relational care (between people) and state care, such as the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) and Temporary Assitance for Needy Families (TANF)? What are the functions of state surveillance in Moonee and Halley’s lives? What does care look like between Moonee and Scooty? Moonee and Halley? What about the dynamic between Halley and Bobby? Bobby and the kids? What is the state’s role in “taking care and responsibility” of Halley and Moonee?
In what ways does the film challenge and/or reinforce aetonormative and childist perspectives of children?
The One You Get:
Tougaw explores his experiences/memories of infancy, childhood, and adolescence, often shifting to the neuroscientific lens through which to look at the genealogical and psychological inheritance from his biological and non-biological family alike. Born from a specific combination of his biological parents’ genes, potentially formatively neurologically influenced by his mother’s partners, and shaped by his life in various bedrooms, houses, trailers, neighborhoods, how does Tougaw assert (or conceive of) his sense of self? What function do categories of disability, disorder, and neurodivergence serve in his conception of self in relation to kin? (108-9)
As Jason Tougaw narrates his life throughout the book, he rarely, if ever, discloses his age. What other ways does Tougaw mark the passage of time and growth throughout his childhood and adolescence? What was your experience of reading a story about childhood (and family) that seems to resist referencing to age?
“Adolescents are sexual children. One minute they’re playing Marco Polo, and the next minute they’re sliming themselves up with Vaseline and jerking off competitively, or clinically, or clumsily, or dreamily.” (164) How does Tougaw (re)construct space to imagine children as sexual beings? What norms does he both acknowledge and challenge in his perspectives and memories of adolescent sex?
