| ISBN13: | 9781032563527 |
| ISBN10: | 1032563524 |
| Binding: | Hardback |
| No. of pages: | 272 pages |
| Size: | 229x152 mm |
| Language: | English |
| Illustrations: | 6 Illustrations, black & white; 6 Halftones, black & white |
| 700 |
The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19th Century
GBP 135.00
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This edited collection contends that the figure of the child is foundational to the workings of biopolitical power yet remains undertheorized. The collection is organized into three sections that illustrate how these qualities enable the sorting of human beings into populations targeted for reform, exploitation, and disposal.
This edited collection contends that the figure of the child is foundational to the workings of biopolitical power yet remains undertheorized. The study of nineteenth-century biopolitics offers a theoretical framework that promises to increase our understanding of how modern democracies manage their subjects. Recent scholarship has invigorated interrogations into forms of state governance that operate at the level of population, a biological phenomenon defined as a group of individuals linked by racialized fictions of biological commonality. This collection seeks to recognize and position critical childhood studies as essential to these interrogations. The essays theorize the role of representations of children and childhood as tools of biopolitical governance in America in the long nineteenth century. They variously explore how the interrelated and overlapping qualities integral to our understandings of the child and childhood, particularly impressibility, development, and mediation, are readily deployed by biopolitical power. The collection is organized into three sections that illustrate how these qualities enable the sorting of human beings into populations targeted for reform, exploitation, and disposal.
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Preface: Unmanageable Bodies: Where Childhood Studies and Biopolitics Meet
Sarah Chinn
Introduction: The Biopolitics of Childhood
Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen
Section I: Heredity
1. Jacob Riis, Luther Burbank, and the Training of the American Child
Christa Holm Vogelius
2. ?Send the Little Patient to the Hospital at Once:? Early Eugenics at North Carolina State Hospital?s Epileptic Colony
Elisabeth McClanahan Harris
3. The Biopolitics of Sexual Consent in Lydia Maria Child?s Reform Fiction
Lucia Hodgson
4. ?Relics of a Race Never Yet Seen?: Archaeologies of Nineteenth-Century Child Bodies
Laura Soderberg
Section II: Death
5. Innocent Specimens: Depicting Enslaved Childhood through the Lusus Naturae
Rebecca M. Rosen
6. Arrested Development: Disability and the ?Feebleminded? Black Boy in St. Nicholas: Scribner?s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys
Allison Giffen
7. Newsboy Necropolitics: John Ellard, Disability, and Black Absence
Manuel Herrero-Puertas
8. ?The Blight?Sooner or Later?Strikes All?: Childhood and the Biopolitics of Racialized Lynching
Maude Hines
Section III: Family
9. Queer Ontologies: Categories of Age before Developmentalism
Gabrielle Owen
10. Biopolitics and Youth Border-Crossing in Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton) and Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa): Children?s Bodies as Sites of Contention Between White State Power and Families of Color
Sarah Ruffing Robbins
11. Twilight Talk: What Every Girl Ought to Know about Sex Education in Louisa May Alcott?s Eight Cousins
Stephanie Peebles Tavera
12. The Sentimental Biopolitics of Louisa May Alcott?s Little Women
Kristin Proehl
