The Children's Table

Childhood Studies and the Humanities

Anna Duane

• Editorial: University of Georgia Press
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780820345598
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Études des enfants en sociologie

Like the occupants of the children's table at a family dinner, scholars working in childhood studies can seem sidelined from the "adult" labor of humanities scholarship. The Children's Table brings together scholars from architecture, philosophy, law, and literary and cultural criticism to provide an overview of the innovative work being done in childhood studies—a transcript of what is being said at the children's table. Together, these scholars argue for rethinking the academic seating arrangement in a way that acknowledges the centrality of childhood to the work of the humanities.

The figure we now recognize as a child was created in tandem with forms of modernity that the Enlightenment generated and that the humanities are now working to rethink. Thus the growth of childhood studies allows for new approaches to some of the most important and provocative issues in humanities scholarship: the viability of the social contract, the definition of agency, the performance of identity, and the construction of gender, sexuality, and race. Because defining childhood is a means of defining and distributing power and obligation, studying childhood requires a radically altered approach to what constitutes knowledge about the human subject.

The diverse essays in The Children's Table share a unifying premise: to include the child in any field of study realigns the shape of that field, changing the terms of inquiry and forcing a different set of questions. Taken as a whole, the essays argue that, at this key moment in the state of the humanities, rethinking the child is both necessary and revolutionary.

Contributors: Annette Ruth Appell, Sophie Bell, Robin Bernstein, Sarah Chinn, Lesley Ginsberg, Lucia Hodgson, Susan Honeyman, Roy Kozlovsky, James Marten, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Carol Singley, Lynne Vallone, John Wall.

PART ONE
Questioning the Autonomous Subject and Individual Rights

Childhood studies, a field designed to dismantle inaccurate and often destructive definitions of childhood, has yet to come up with a consensus on what we mean when we say “child” in the first place. If the child is socially constructed, as Philippe Ariès has argued, and as many of our contributors take as a given, how can we possibly hope to work through those constructions to extract an authentic person? As the conversation moves between the humanities and the social sciences, between archivists and activists, childhood studies struggles with the question of how to bridge the relationship between the rhetorical child (the cultural construct of “childhood”) and the historical child (actual young people making their way in the world). In many ways, the tension within this increasingly multidisciplinary field echoes the larger tension between the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences, a tension too often reduced to the divide between imagination and reality, theory and practice. The autonomous subject, itself a creation of Enlightenment theory, often renders both humanist and scientific analyses of children as teleological narratives that root for the incomplete subject to evolve and grow into a self-reliant citizen. As the chapters by Annette Ruth Appell, Lucia Hodgson, James Marten, and John Wall illustrate, the fantasy of a fully autonomous person prevents us from a realistic analysis of children as individual and social subjects.

Within childhood studies, as well as in the academy as a whole, different types of work can be assigned different ethical and scholarly value. Jacqueline Rose has famously argued for the “impossibility” of children’s literature, because of the partial status of the child who is the ostensible audience for those books.¹ Similarly, one might suggest, our knowledge of “real children” will always be largely speculative and deeply flawed. Perhaps, this argument runs, the most rigorous and authentic mode of scholarship is one that admits our own epistemological limitations. We can never truly move past our own constructions of children, but we can critique the damage such constructions can do and work to revise them in ways designed to promote human rights for all children. The counterargument suggests that spending scholarly resources on the rhetorical child neglects the more pressing and immediate needs of children living in dire circumstances in the developing world. In the last section of this volume, Lynne Vallone muses on this division and on the implicit assertion that “research that concentrates on children’s rights in the neediest parts of the world somehow ‘trump[s]’ the work of those who are concerned, for example, with the social and political constructions of childhood” (243). Yet this scholarly hierarchy falsely suggests that we can indeed separate actual subjects from our literary, cultural, and political notions about them—notions deeply shaped by an investment in autonomy that renders the child’s dependence and vulnerability a block to full engagement and full humanity.

The chapters in this section offer innovative and convincing responses to this perceived moral and practical imbalance between theory and practice, between “book children” and “real children,” by moving with grace and rigor between theories of subjectivity and individual young people whose difficult lives are shaped by those theories. In particular, each chapter offers new ways of challenging the seductive fallacy that supposes any of us can inhabit a position of unmediated independence. Drawing from legal, ethical, and philosophical theories of personhood, each chapter demonstrates how humanist inquiry and critique of the liberal subject is vital to moving both the study and the advocacy of children forward.

Appell’s contribution, the first in this section, draws from ideas cultivated in feminist thought to critique current practices of law that pose allegedly natural, objective definitions of both adulthood and childhood that are, in practice, inaccurate and damaging. She takes particular issue with the idea of the child as a primarily private subject. “With childhood safely ensconced in the family and without a voice outside of the home,” Appell contends, “the polity can avoid universal questions and answers about what children, as persons, need and want, what goods children, as a class, should have, and what material conditions, opportunities, and influences are optimal for all children.” She offers a new model for thinking about children as legal subjects and as citizens. Such a “jurisprudence of childhood” would give up the fantasy of a uniform childhood in favor of a contextual critical approach that acknowledges that children’s agency and their needs are distributed widely across the racial, socioeconomic, and political placements of their families.

Hodgson’s work on William Bennett’s racially biased social “science” traces a chronology stretching back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories of human development. As a literature specialist trained to understand the power of stories, Hodgson ably demonstrates the necessity of a humanist perspective that can unravel the historically racist narratives of human development that cast black children as forever stunted, unable to grow into the autonomous individual that both science and law suggests is the end result of a successful childhood. Hodgson’s work demonstrates the damage these concepts wreak by tracing their influence to decisions made by those with power over the lives of African American youth caught in the twenty-first century prison system.

Marten moves skillfully between the allegedly abstract and relatively privileged realm of historical Western children and the dangerous lives of children in the developing world today as he charts the study of children in wartime. While Marten is careful to acknowledge the difficulty of finding the voices of children in the past, he argues that to the extent that doing so is possible, it revises our understanding of children’s capabilities and liabilities, providing a portrait of childhood that runs counter to adult desires for it to be a realm of vulnerability and innocence. As Marten discusses the rich body of work on children in conflict, he provides evidence that children “understand war and are less shocked by it than adults might think” (57). Recalibrating our thinking about children in conflict does not simply realign adult ideas; it also demands a new way of thinking about how to advocate for young combatants.

Wall explicitly engages the larger question each chapter in this section is implicitly asking—once we become aware of how adult investments in various stories about children affect the lives of young people, what do we do? If our thinking about children has proven harmful to them, what new framework should we implement? Wall responds that we need nothing less than a “childist” ethics; “children,” he argues, “will take a central place in humanities scholarship only if there is a revolution on a similar scale” to those for other “minorities.” Of course, the effects of minority scholarship have exceeded the boundaries of the humanities to shape discourse in the social and hard sciences. Wall calls for a similar revolution that would permit us to engage the child as a full subject, as do the other contributors in this section and in the volume as a whole. As each chapter in this section illustrates, without a fundamental shift in how we think, even well-meaning advocates can wind up replicating the very oppressive structures they seek to undermine.

Notes

1. Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). For a persuasive response to Rose, see Perry Nodelman, “The Case of Children’s Fiction; or, The Impossibility of Jacqueline Rose,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 10.3 (1985): 98–100.

The Prepolitical Child of Child-Centered Jurisprudence

Annette Ruth Appell

Childhood studies scholarship has revealed that childhood, the category that holds, defines, and governs children, is to be a social construct contingent on time and place.¹ While young children are, generally speaking, vulnerable and dependent, the length, contours, and extent of that dependency, as well as the assignment of children to dependency, vary greatly across time, nation, geography, and race.² This central insight, that childhood is not natural, has yet to gain currency in legal studies. Although legal scholars have developed critical jurisprudence regarding race and gender, illustrating how these seemingly natural categories are socio-legal constructions that create and maintain power and privilege, jurisprudential studies have not interrogated childhood or explored the work that childhood performs in law and society.

The legal construction of children in the United States as dependent—and of dependency as private, familial, and developmental—obscures both the contingency of childhood and the law’s role in creating and maintaining childhood. By defining children as vulnerable and situating them in the private realm, the law defines and regulates childhood as if it were natural and universal rather than political and diverse. This construction submerges questions about how children differ as individuals and by virtue of their membership in racial, ethnic, national, age, gender, and economic groups. This construction also limits interrogation of what the public might owe these dependent persons and what public roles children play. With childhood safely ensconced in the family and without a voice outside the family, the polity can avoid universal questions and answers about what children, as persons, need and want, what goods children, as a class, should have, and what material conditions, opportunities, and influences are optimal for all children. Instead, we ask what our own children should have and what they need for success.

Childhood is a transformative site within the context of a larger system that treats dependency as both autonomy promoting, as a relational and generational matter, and autonomy limiting, as a functional matter. In other words, the privatized dependency of childhood promotes the autonomy of adults, leaving them free to employ their values through child rearing and in training their own children to become morally autonomous democratic citizens upon adulthood; this privatized dependency also limits the autonomy of the child and the caregiver—the former lacking legal or political authority by virtue of being a child and the latter rendered dependent through the provision of private, unpaid care for dependent children. Moreover, childhood is a socially constructed category deeply connected to race, gender, class, and citizenship, in which children’s vulnerability and dependency perform differently along racial, class, and gender lines, factors that affect not only children themselves but also the adults on whom they depend.³ Unlike other subordinated groups, children will outgrow their subordination as children, but whether they will be subordinated as adults depends very much on their childhood, that is, their race, class, and gender, or perhaps more accurately the race, class, and gender of their parents.

Legal theory has not systematically explored from the child’s perspective the political aspects of locating this developing child in the family and then privatizing most aspects of the child’s dependency. Following the lead of feminist jurisprudence, a jurisprudence of childhood might ask the same sorts of questions about how the law constructs childhood. Whom does this construction serve? Who benefits from it and who suffers? How does the relegation of our future citizens to incapacity and need serve children and adults? Who thrives under these conditions and who does not? How much of children’s legal coverture is necessary and helpful? Why do children not have the right to vote? Why do children not hold political office?

Both feminist and child-centered jurisprudence share concerns about dependency and agency, but they each have different subjects (women and children, respectively) and categories of analysis (gender and youth, respectively). Feminist jurisprudence has delegitimized the legal incompetence and dependency of the female subject. By examining how law constructs gender, feminist jurisprudence has, at least in theory, denaturalized gender, taking women out of the private realm of family and situating them in the market and the polity, has shown that families are not prepolitical; removed women from dependency on fathers and husbands, and has freed them from the dependency that arises out of caregiving. In short, feminist jurisprudence treats women as moral agents and political and economic actors. Despite the significance of childhood dependency and vulnerability in feminist jurisprudence, feminist legal studies has not interrogated the structure of childhood the way it has gender. Even more surprising, child-centered jurisprudence, which addresses children’s rights and representation and sometimes age, has not questioned systematically, fundamentally, or critically the dependency and vulnerability that law and society assign to children. Instead, it assumes this dependency, vulnerability, and privacy, rarely with any reference to the central insight of childhood studies—that childhood is not natural.

In interrogating the legal category of woman (and man) and, relatedly, gender relations, feminist jurisprudence has shown them to be powerful and often confining political and social constructs. A major contribution of feminism and feminist jurisprudence has been the revelation that the liberal subject—the citizen—is autonomous, free, independent, and unattached. That is, the liberal subject is not a child, not a parent, most likely not a woman, and not poor. In short, the liberal subject is a white, middle-class man.⁴

This project has proliferated and has included the disaggregation of women from motherhood and motherhood from women, the destruction of coverture, the recognition of women and increased opportunities for them in the labor market, politics, and at home, and broad recognition of women’s agency inside and outside of the home and family. In a world constructed around gender roles and differences that privilege persons without dependents (we’ll call them “men”), singles them out for public life and economic rewards while depending on and yet largely ignoring those who care for dependents (we’ll call them “women”), dependency is problematic for women. Martha Fineman ha...