Reclaiming the Inner Child: Temporal Refusals, Tender Returns and the After Life of Affective Attunement

As a Latina and queer counselor, I am keenly aware of the power awarded to me as the face of a system of “care” that reinforces the assimilation of queer affect and pathologizes non-normativity, while simultaneously continuing to navigate professional barriers and challenges rooted in the same systemic violence I survived as a child. And yet, it is that inner child who creatively adapted to survive these systems that is also my inspiration to radically re-imagine affective attunement within clinical care. Through her historical grief and informed joy, I am drawn to critique how much of the mental health care system continues to sustain structural and affective violence that perpetuates cishetenormativity, racism, rejection, and medicalization while reimagining socio-emotional care as affective resistance.

This essay-turned-multi-blog-posts emerges from my ongoing relationship with that inner child - an embodied living archive of sacred rage, tenderness, and resistance. Here, I explore the political and affective labor of reconnecting with the inner child as a queer of color provider working within the mental health industrial complex that both affirms and erases queer youth of color. Weaving together Julian Gill-Peterson’s trans of color critique of medicine, Dean Spade’s work on critical trans politics, Hil Malatino’s insights on queer affect and phenomenology, and Jennifer Mullan’s work on decolonizing therapy, I invite a consideration of inner child work as communal praxis. I seek to examine the emotional and ethical tensions experienced by queer counselors of color working with queer youth within the mental health industrial complex and conceptualize inner child work as a temporal resistance built on rage and tenderness as modes of transformation. I argue that for queer counselors of color, inner child work paralleling therapeutic work with queer youth is not a return to innocence, but a refusal to forget. I center the inner child as a site of resistance through nurture, vicarious affective liberation, and radical imagination of care and informed hope.

Theoretical Frameworks: Weaving the Web of Feeling

In this essay, I weave a theoretical framework founded in several critical extensions of queer theory including critical trans studies, queer Marxist transfeminism, queer negativity, queer of color critique, and affect theory. In essence, queer negativity is a theoretical tradition (anti-tradition?) that focuses on the disruptive, anti-normative drive of queerness that inherently resists hetero- and homonormativity. In short, queer negativity pushes back against attempts to assimilate queerness into normative systems and ways of being, including an ideal future through means of reproduction and assumpions of freedom through means of neoliberalism. It is about reckoning with discomfort, contradiction, and nihilism as a necessary means towards queer liberation. However, queer of color critque disputes and introduces a reorientation to queer negativity that universalizes Whiteness and centers intersectionality as a lens from which to view queer survival within the context of historical resistance and explores resistance through affects such as joy and hope stemming from queer and trans of color lifeworlds. Drawing from the works of Gill-Peterson citing CR Snorton, “the most urgent present task of trans of color critique [is] explaining the simultaneous devaluation of trans of color lives and the nominal circulation in death of trans people of color…this circulation vitalizes trans theory and politics precisely through the value extracted from trans of color death.” (Gill-Peterson, 2018).

Another framework that contextualizes this offering is the collective affect within queerness, which asks to center and explore how emotions, trauma, desire and pleasure influence queer life. The affective lens focuses on sensory experience and centers the body instead of abstract constructs (ie. identity) and the role of affective experience as a means to uphold or disrupt normed ways of being, thus inviting one to feel their way through queerness. For example, Malatino explores “how affect, in particular disgust and hate, structures relation, even as nonrelation, in and through space, and specifically how negative affect, or bad feelings, produce psychic bonds and collective energies in practices of trans and queer worlding. A commons is not a public but a counter to the structural violence engendered by the public/private divide so central to capitalist development.” (2022). In the previous excerpt, Malatino gracefully weaves aspects of queer Marxist transfemenism, which offers a critique of capitalism as a system that produces and normalizes gender and sexuality and centers trans labor, embodiment, and survival. The work of Raha in Transgender Marxism highlights “the various forms of socially reproductive labour that queer and trans people undertake under conditions of social abjection, stigma, and marginalisation, arguing that such work undergirds queer and trans community building and social support” (2021). Additionally, Spade eloquently shares, “A critical trans politics imagines and demands an end to prisons, homelessness, landlords, bosses, immigration enforcement, poverty, and wealth. It imagines a world in which people have what they need and govern themselves in ways that value collectivity, interdependence, and difference”. (2015). Finally, Mullan’s work powerfully uses a decolonizing framework to challenge dominant settler colonial models of mental health care and advocates for weaving ancestral knowledge and community healing as sites of resistance.

References

Gill-Peterson, J. (2018). Histories of the transgender child. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9781517904678.001.0001

Malatino, H. (2022). Side affects: On being trans and feeling bad. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/9781452968179

Mullan, J. (2023). Decolonizing therapy: Oppression, historical trauma, and politicizing your practice. W. W. Norton & Company.

Raha, N. (2021). A queer Marxist transfeminism: Queer and trans social reproduction. In J. J. Gleeson & E. O’Rourke (Eds.), Transgender Marxism (pp. 85–96). Pluto Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1n9dkjc.9

Spade, D. (2015). Normal life: Administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law (Rev. ed.). Duke University Press.