Concepts of Youth

Abstract

Concepts of youth emerged at the forefront of a strikingly diverse range of projects in modern times. Youth embodied concepts of enhanced productivity and improved work culture in the ‘age of the masses.’ It emerged as a norm to be recaptured through surgical or cosmetic procedures, as a craze for medico-scientific body fashioning swept the globe from the early twentieth century. It served dreams of liberation that ranged from imperial expansion to anti-colonial nationalism and pacifist internationalism. Youth’s distinctiveness from childhood and adulthood, its separateness (accentuated by the state’s encroachment upon and disempowerment of the family) and seeming wholeness suited it to such mass projects. Its purported malleability placed it at the mercy of its social environment but undergirded its viability as a source of (potentially limitless) moral improvement. The seeming conceptual unity of youth allowed it to be fitted it to a variety of modern projects. Such was its potency that youth arguably became the pre-eminent symbol of modernity.