I've been interested for ages in puerility, the "clever schoolboy" as
a figure. Came across this (quite well-known, I think) passage in
Emerson the other day:

"The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain
as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy
attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in
the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner
on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on
their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad,
interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never
about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine
verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as
it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has
once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by
the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now
enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could
pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and
having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased,
unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable."

This is heavily gendered, in both more and less obvious ways; to be
healthily unconciliatory is to be boyish, not girlish. Emerson
generally holds to a virile conception of energy, force etc. - for
example, in "Friendship" he admonishes: "be not so much his friend
that you can never know his peculiar energies; like fond mamas who
shut up their boy in the house until he is almost grown a girl". I can
imagine what Eve Sedgwick might have said to that.

The meme-disseminating hordes of Anonymous represent a sort of
resurgence of puerility, often in a dark and violent mode; they can go
beyond cruel humour into astoundingly vicious misogyny. DSG, who draw
heavily on the iconography of Anonymous, are knowingly puerile (see
their propaganda posters here:
http://libcom.org/gallery/deterritorial-support-group-propaganda). I
think Lena Dunham (writer of Girls) has done a remarkably good job of
inventing a figure of female puerility, of claiming the energies of
puerility for (a specific class of) young women.

Dominic