Forever young, forever helpable: The performative submissiveness catch in juvenile courts

Socio-legal research has traced the rise of hybrid legal regimes that combine punitive and welfare logic. This article advances this scholarship by theorizing what performative legality—legal practices where speech acts, rituals, and staged interactions shape subjects, but with the ultimate authority monopolized by state actors—does within such hybrid systems. I develop the concept of the Performative Submissiveness Catch to describe the paradoxical demand that individuals must perform both submissiveness (to qualify for help) and competence (to deserve autonomy), creating an impossible double bind that deepens dependency. By analyzing this double bind, the article demonstrates how hybrid legal regimes can entrench endless supervision and epistemic disqualification through performative practices. Drawing on ethnographic observations of Israeli child protection proceedings, I demonstrate how hearings become a form of collective performance, where judges and social workers portray “ideal parenting” to parents, infantilize them, and deny the structural role of poverty. The Performative Submissiveness Catch thus reframes child protection as a case study in how Child Protection Law constructs dependency, not only through sanctions, but through the very rituals of adjudication.