Youth as a power relationship

Youth is not an age but a role we are made to play. Between infantilization and resistance, how can we rethink our intergenerational relationships to build together rather than dominate?

The Moving Boundaries of Youth

What does it really mean to be young? At what age does one become young, and when does one cease to be so? These seemingly obvious questions reveal the complexity of a category that relates less to chronological age than to fluctuating social representations. A five-year-old child will perceive a teenager as someone old, because so much older than them. Sixty-year-old people feel young while others consider them “old.” And some seem already old to us, even in their youth.

This relativity of perceptions invites me to question the very nature of youth. Pierre Bourdieu, in Youth Is Just a Word (1978), explained that youth constitutes an arbitrary social construction, a carving up of the continuum of ages that serves to establish power relationships. The boundaries between youth and old age are the object of permanent struggles, with each generation attempting to define its place in the social order.

Beyond these abstract representations where everyone positions themselves as young, old, adult or child, youth manifests itself primarily through specific attitudes: relationship to responsibility, to seriousness, to play, to concentration, engagement or disengagement with activities legitimized by the adult world. These attitudes constitute what the sociologist Erving Goffman would call “fronts” (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1956), identity performances adapted to social contexts.

Identity as Contextual Performance

What is striking in everyday observation is the identity fluidity of individuals. The same person can, from one day to the next or from one hour to another, from one space to another, adopt “young” attitudes then “adult” behaviors. This identity plasticity extends even to the registers of language used. Surrounded by friends, someone can “speak young,” only to ten minutes later, in a professional context, fully assume their adult responsibilities, and the corresponding language register. They are no longer a carefree youth but a responsible adult, whereas they were something completely different just moments before.

This alternation of social roles echoes the work of George Herbert Mead on the social “self” (Mind, Self, and Society, 1934). According to Mead, our identity is constructed in interaction with others, through a constant interplay between the spontaneous “I” and the socialized “me.” We continually adjust our presentation of ourselves according to the perceived expectations of our social environment. Youth then becomes less a fixed category than a moving identification, which we give ourselves or which is assigned to us by others.

Psychosociologist Henri Tajfel, in his theory of social identity (1979), showed how individuals tend to conform to the characteristics attributed to their membership group in order to maintain a positive identity. When adults assign certain characteristics to young people—immaturity, irresponsibility, need for play, for example—the latter may unconsciously adopt them to exist socially, even if these traits limit their real capacities.

Infantilization as a Power Strategy

What particularly concerns me is the way young people are systematically infantilized by adults, and are thus deprived of the recognition of capacities they could nevertheless develop. Every person needs their identity within the group to exist, because we are fundamentally social beings, as Aristotle recalled by defining man as zoon politikon. Without recognized identity, one does not exist socially.

When a person is assigned the identity of the “ignorant youth,” it paradoxically becomes easier for them to exist in this stigmatizing identity than to contest it. One performs with this identity simply to exist, without always becoming aware that one is stigmatized, essentialized and reduced in one’s personal and social capacities. As Michel Foucault analyzed in Discipline and Punish (1975), modern power does not merely repress: it produces subjectivities, manufactures individuals conforming to the categories it establishes.

Identity then becomes an invisible prison. The inattentive youth who laughs with friends, who doesn’t get involved, who doesn’t take responsibility—this figure is not an essence but the product of a power relationship. If some function this way, often without even realizing it, it’s because the adults who supervise them infantilize them, consider them a priori as having little capacity for responsibility. This self-fulfilling prophecy, described by Robert K. Merton (1948), means that adults’ negative expectations actually produce the behaviors they anticipated.

Deconstructing False Oppositions

It seems essential to me not to lock people into these images that become their identity. The idea that young people would be naturally irresponsible, superficial in their thinking, needing only to play to learn, is a myth. Adults also need to play to learn—Johan Huizinga brilliantly demonstrated this in Homo Ludens (1938), showing that play constitutes a fundamental dimension of human culture, regardless of age.

The most banal observation suffices to refute this exclusive association between youth and play. In any subway car, one can observe the number of adults absorbed in games on their phones. Play is by no means an activity reserved for youth; claiming otherwise amounts to maintaining a false image. We all need to play, and this need in no way compromises our seriousness or our responsibility. Joy is not the enemy of responsibility, any more than pleasure.

This confusion between youth and disorder, between play and irresponsibility, is not innocent. It serves to maintain asymmetric power relationships between adults and young people. As Paulo Freire noted in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), any authoritarian pedagogical relationship reproduces patterns of domination where the “knower” maintains the “ignorant” in their subordinate position to preserve their own status.

Recognizing Our Fears to Transform Our Relationships

Adults, let’s admit it, are not for the most part particularly mature beings. They carry their anxieties, their fears, but their journey confers on them a capacity for power and authority over young people. This authority, often fragile, needs to reassure itself by fabricating the image of juvenile incompetence. This is not an objective reality but a construction designed to protect adults, to preserve them from being disturbed or questioned by young people (when they could be so enriched by it).

Fundamentally, this assignment “young = incompetent” expresses a fear of losing power. It’s a preemptive power grab by adults, which considerably reduces what we could offer each other that is constructive and enriching. Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), showed how intellectual emancipation precisely requires breaking with this logic of the inequality of intelligences that underlies traditional pedagogical relationships.

I propose an awareness of our fears regarding young people, of our fear of being disturbed in our reassuring immobility. Recognizing these fears is already beginning to free ourselves from them. It would be so much more enriching for ourselves and for the world if we could welcome the competencies of all those from whom we currently forbid them. Young people are much more than adults-in-becoming; they are complete beings, carriers of knowledge, creativity and perspectives that we lack. Recognizing them as such means opening ourselves to a mutual transformation where each learns from the other, in a reciprocity that transcends relationships of domination.