Who is the ‘child’ and what is ‘childhood’?
Childhood studies, as the name suggests, emanated from and thrives because of an interest to understand and destabilise the categories of ‘child’ and ‘childhood.’ Two question that perplex childhood studies scholars are: what is the nature of this category and how has it been determined? What marks the distinction between the category of ‘child’ and ‘adult’ and why? In this paper, I aim to share some of the ways in which these two questions have been approached by scholars of the past while highlighting the aspects that are missing from these conversations.
Part 1
What is the nature of this category and how has it been determined: Not objective, but ambivalent
Scholars have argued for the fact that childhood is not an objective category (Breslow 6) but a container for a series of investments (Breslow 7) that have multiple, contested and ambivalent meanings (Brelow 6). So, what are these investments, how do they bring about ambivalent meanings and for whose sake? By looking closely at ‘investments’ such as innocence, age, economic need, protection and the law, and tracing how broadly they have changed over time, between cultures, across geographies, and more specifically because of class, caste, race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, etc, scholars of childhood have revealed ambivalent meanings of childhood. Through an ‘intersectional’ approach, and based on evidence from the past and present, an argument is thus made for the absence of an ‘objective’ category of childhood. In this section, I first provide further details of how childhood studies scholars have considered a few of the aforementioned investments. Next, I elucidate the ‘intersectional’ approach and question aspects of its merits. Finally, I analyse the overall claim that changing and multiple investments imply the absence of an objective category.
One instantiation of the changing investment in childhood observed over the last century is in relation to children and work. As Zelizer puts forth in The Priceless Child, children who were once considered economically useful are being expelled from the “cash nexus” due to changes in economic, occupational and family structures (Zelizer 11). For instance, with industrial capitalism, there was an increase in demand for skilled, educated labour force, and with the increased domestication of middle class women in the 19th century, falling birth and mortality rates in the 20th century, children were expected to be nurtured differently (Zelizer 11). The same children were being “sacralized” as “emotionally priceless” and economically “worthless” (Zelizer 11). Although this phenomenon is not noticeable for many children around the world, in the present, the compulsory schooling acts and strict labour laws are evidence of the growing push for all children to occupy a “domesticated, nonproductive world of lessons, games and token money” (Zelizer 11). In this manner, we see how the definition of childhood (or a ‘good’ childhood) is also a function of the economic investments of society at any given point and is moreover based on whether the society values present workers or future workers.
A second instantiation of the altering investment of childhood is made visible through Bernstein’s interrogation of the uneven attribution of childhood innocence. In Racial Innocence, Bernstein shows us how, in the second half of the 19th century, white children became laminated to the idea of innocence while images of non-suffering black pickaninies emptied black childhoods of innocence (Bernstein 64). Relatedly, and prior to Bernstein, Fanon had shed light on how infantilisation was central tactic of colonial subjugation (Breslow 3). Carrying this analysis further, Rollo locates the historical binary opposition between the fully adult human and the sub-human child an essential framework in early-modern philosophical and scientific construction of White superiority (Rollo 309). In other words, Rollo urges us to see how the figure of the child is not only used as a metaphor/rhetorical trope/strategic tool to infantilise groups of people, but also how it relies on an assumed dichotomy between a human adult and subhuman child. Along similar lines, Rollo also traces how the idea of epistemic innocence (i.e., the lack of worldly experience and knowledge) and sexual innocence served to colonially assimilate Indigenous youth in the former case and fetishise youthful purity in the latter case (Rollo 319). By deconstructing the idea of childhood innocence, we learn how the definition of child (or a ‘good’ child) is also a function of investments in race, indigeneity, sexuality and colonialism.
A third instantiation of altering investment in childhood is observed in how age as a criteria for childhood has emerged and changed over time. In Sex, law and the Politics of Age, Ishita Pande carefully maps out how, for the sake of a practical and uniform application of the law, an arbitrary chronological age was selected to differentiate childhood from adulthood (Pande 51). Having arisen from the frenzied conversations around premature sex with child wives, various medical societies were debating the “physiological grounds” upon which the new age of consent should rest (Pande 36). Much of the debate was about puberty and its definition— it is a point in time? a period of one’s life? How does one standardise the physical and biological changes that come about? — and hence reached no consensus because of the messiness of individual differences. As the emphasis was on the physiological body though, the category of age shifted from being an artificial, arbitrary and yet a convenient signifier, into an embodied fact (Pande 34). Through such historical work, scholars aim to uncover the ways in which age as a distinction between childhood and adulthood is also a function of investments in the protective and universalising nature of the law.
Having discussed some of the varying investments attached to childhoods, I will address the method of ‘intersectionality’ employed by these authors. First, intersectionality is thought of as an analytical framework to recognise complex inequalities that arise by the simultaneous interacting effects of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and other categories of difference (Konstantoni 7). Drawing from this approach, childhood studies scholars aim to add age in relation to the other categories of difference when thinking about children’s lives (Konstantoni 17). Besides being an analytical framework, it is also considered to be a praxis of collective action that addresses asymmetries in power (Konstantoni 15). Here, I wonder about the responsibilities of adults, who are embedded in the asymmetries of power, when it comes to collective action. Although childhood studies scholars have extensive discourses on the role of power, agency and ‘voice’ when it comes to researching about and with children, I believe there is insufficient discourse on the ways in which adults must forego power to contribute towards a praxis of collective action.
The other concern I have regarding an intersectional approach is in relation to what Crenshaw highlights when offering this framework, which is that, “the problem of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw 140). At another point in the same essay, Crenshaw hints further at what she envisions when she articulates, “In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender). The praxis of both should be centred on the life chances and life situations of people who should be cared about without regard to the source of their difficulties (Crenshaw 147). Here, I understand Crenshaw to be telling us to pay attention to two things. First, to the ways in which people’s experiences have been moulded beyond the influences of identity categories that are created and re-enforced by structural/institutional factors. This, I believe, is a call to not only pay attention to categories of difference but also to commonalities between experiences of people across identities and to the individual differences between people within similar identity categories as well. Second, it is asking us to destabilise the ontology of categorisation that is based on othering and that re-enforces a self-other distinction. This can take place when ‘who I am’ is no longer merely defined/ determined by a common history of oppression but by unique possibilities of being/relating despite it. Hence, I believe that childhood studies scholars employing an intersectional framework must engage with the aforementioned complexities that Crenshaw draws our attention to.
Finally, in this section, I look closely at the overall argument against childhood as an objective category. I raise two queries. First, despite the fact that ‘children’ and ‘childhoods’ are fraught with contested meanings and varying investments, is there a commonality amongst these variations? Second, are there aspects of ‘children’ and ‘childhoods’ that one must consider besides the investments that vary across time, geographies, cultures and identities? Here, I wonder about the work of ‘brain sciences’ and body politics. I often think about how children embody unique positions when experiencing the world for the first time. Is there reason to hold onto a spectrum of categories (rather than a binary) that captures the range of factors influencing subjectivities? What are some reasons to retain the category of childhood, what purpose can it continue to serve and what should it determine?
In search for a response, I refer back to the psychoanalytical position offered by Breslow. Citing Rose, he mentions how childhood is primarily “a site of the adult’s psychic and discursive self-representation and thus adults use acts of projection and transference that, to varying successes, provide themselves with a sense of coherence” (Breslow 7). I understand this as an important insight for childhood studies scholars as it asks us to equally consider the category of ‘adulthood,’ its meanings and investments in itself, when exploring children and childhoods. If indeed “uneven deployments of childhood across various populations must be understood as a form of wish fulfilment, disavowal, and projection of political, subjective and group traumas and anxieties” (Breslow 15), when and how do we adults begin healing ourselves?
Part 2
What marks the distinction between the category of ‘child’ and ‘adult’ and why? Temporality and performativity
Since ‘all’ children become adults one day, irrespective of other attributes, is it just time that differentiates childhood from adulthood? Qvortrup argues in Childhood as a structural form that childhood has no temporal beginning and end and therefore, cannot be understood periodically (Qvortrup 23). Instead, it must be understood as a permanent form of any generational structure (Qvortrup 23). In other words, while each child in fact travels through childhood into adulthood, childhood as a structural form can never turn into anything else, and especially not adulthood as a structural form (Qvortrup 27). This phenomenon, he says, can be understood by comparing it to other social categories such as gender or class categories. Just as gender groups will continue to exist as long as there are differences between the life worlds of females and males, generation categories will exist too. Simultaneously, they will be subject to change due to changing societal parameters and may also change size and composition, but will continue having a permanence (Qvortrup 27). I argue that Qvortrup presents a circular argument as the reason for ‘the difference between life worlds of females and males’ is the creation and perpetuation of these categorisations to begin with. In other words, Qvortrup only considers how categorisations are perpetuated by differences in life worlds, but not how differences in life worlds were created by categorisations. Just as the construction of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as distinct categories with ‘mutually exclusive’ attributes moulded the life worlds of different people who fell under these categories, categorisations of ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ could have preceded the differences in life worlds. Furthermore, Butler’s response to how gender is constituted in time is insightful when contemplating whether generational categories can be moulded in time. She says, “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Garlen 57). Similarly, “childhood” is not simply a descriptor of human development or an innate characteristic of human existence, but rather an identity instituted through habitual acts (Garlen 57). So, if childhood has temporality, when does it begin and how does it end and who decides?
I finally refer to queer theory and some of its contribution in this area. Stockton, in Growing Sideways, focusses on how delay is seen as a feature of a child’s growth: children grow by delaying their approach to the realms of sexuality, harm and labour (Stockton 62). She is referring to the societal practice of gatekeeping children’s participation in sexuality, labour and harm with the rationale that it is crucial for their wellbeing and growth to remain outside these realms until adults declare for it to be otherwise. Consequently, children grow “sideways,” i.e they defy the usual sense of growing “up” in a linear trajectory toward full stature, marriage, reproduction, and in the relinquishing of childish ways. Growing sideways, in contrast, is a mode of irregular growth involving odd lingerings and wayward paths. In this manner, by breaking away from a natural/developmental conception of “growing up”, queer theorists unsettle the distinction between “childhood” and “adulthood” as that which is separated by a necessary temporal order. If we are now to learn about growth as something besides a teleological end presupposed by the idea of “growing up” and if we are to understand “childhood” as something besides a function of delay, what undefinable space will we encounter and where will we go from here?
Works Referenced
(1). Breslow, Jacob. Ambivalent Childhoods. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
(2). Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence : Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York University Press, 2011.
(3). Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “‘Difference’ through Intersectionality 1.” Dalit Feminist Theory, 1st ed., Routledge, 2020, pp. 139–49, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429298110-15.
(4). Garlen, Julie C. “Interrogating Innocence: ‘Childhood’ as Exclusionary Social Practice.” Childhood (Copenhagen, Denmark), vol. 26, no. 1, 2019, pp. 54–67, https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218811484
(5). Konstantoni, Kristina, and Akwugo Emejulu. “When Intersectionality Met Childhood Studies: The Dilemmas of a Travelling Concept.” Children’s Geographies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 6–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1249824
(6). Pande, Ishita. Sex, Law and the Politics of Age : Child Marriage in India, 1891-1937. Cambridge University Press, 2020
(7). Rollo, Toby. “The Color of Childhood: The Role of the Child/Human Binary in the Production of Anti-Black Racism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 49, no. 4, 2018, pp. 307–29, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934718760769.
(8). Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke University Press, 2009.
(9). Qvortrup, Jens., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
(10). Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman. Pricing the Priceless Child : the Changing Social Value of Children. Basic Books, 1985.
