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?

As a transracial and transnational adoptee scholar, organizer, and activist, I’m interested in using postcolonial feminist frameworks to analyze the material and cultural productions of adopted people (who are most often adopted as infants, children, and less often as youth), especially within transracial and transnational adoption.

By productions of adopted people, I mean the way people, namely infants and children who eventually become adults, are made into transracial and transnational adoptees. This occurs materially, for example, through their/our legal and embodied transfer from families of origin through adoption industries and overall child welfare systems, often moving from working class communities of color (and in the case of transnational adoption) from countries impacted by colonialism, imperialism, racism, militarism, “natural disasters”, etc to middle/upper class predominantly white populations in western countries that have participated in/profited from colonization, imperialism, militarism, racism, etc. This production also occurs culturally, for example, when the social phenomena of adoption and adoptee subject (not necessarily the adopted person themselves) reinforce state-sanctioned norms of the heteronormative patriarchal nuclear family and geopolitical value systems (i.e. transnational political power dynamics between western countries and “developing” countries). I’m also very interested in sitting with how these productions affect the holistic well being of adopted people, communities/families of origin, birth/first families, and groups/families vulnerable to separation. These are the kinds of things I’m interested in exploring more broadly.

In my workshop, I would like to further investigate the confluence of social injustices, adoption industries, and foster care systems. I’m curious about how feminist approaches in Gender Studies have interacted with Children and Youth Studies on issues related to adoption. I’d like to pair some perspectives that may not often be heard next to each other, such as adoption scholars and adoption abolition activists to reflect the possible overlaps/gaps/tension points and visions/desires for the future. I might use some of my own legal adoption documentation to explore the language invoked to declare my adoption official, and how this demonstrates some ways the law conceives of and produces the child, their best interests, and the adoptive parental figures. Who knows! Anyway, I’m excited about potential collaborations with people interested in the above. Please reach out to me for a chat if you’re keen. Thanks!