UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation argues that at the turn into the twentieth century a

constellation of genres and disciplines including genetic psychology, race science, political rhetoric, and romance constructed youth as a spatio-temporal category. While youthfulness as an abstraction had already been yoked to the rise of capitalist democracy, these discourses fundamentally shaped a youth concept specific to the material and ideological demands of the moment, one with far reaching consequences for future generations of the young. A new subject position emerged, abstracted from statistics and anecdotal evidence, postulated by scientific theory, and shaped by the logic of cultural production in an age of incorporation. Youth, in the sense that it was used during the period, served to symbolize a range of experiences and conceptions as a generalized identity, one that, while open to variations and following different trajectories, never fully accounted for what it purported to describe. A key focus of post-Darwinian sciences of human development, youth became the protagonist of biopolitical concepts such as race, nation, empire, and "the West."