The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

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 has famously and persuasively illustrated how the privatization of dependency relies on women as caregivers for dependents and, in turn, makes women dependent themselves.⁵ Many others have also taken issue with the deeply embedded and all but mandatory equation of woman and caretaker and with the resulting disadvantages women face.⁶

Feminist jurisprudents have proffered a variety of resolutions for the problematic aspects of this equation. These solutions are adult centered and primarily concerned with sex or gender equality, particularly regarding the responsibility for care. For example, Fineman has proposed public support for dependent care. Maxine Eichner accepts this theory but broadens and deepens it, suggesting that employment, family, and other social systems must be reformed to reflect multiple levels of dependency, including dual parental responsibility for children, the conceptual disaggregation of women from caregiving, and dismantlement of the single breadwinner model.⁷

Critical race feminists in law and other disciplines have delved more deeply and broadly into the problematic aspects of privatized dependency, illustrating how race, gender, class, and age intersect in the privatization of dependency. These feminists examine how wealth is structurally located in and transmitted through families in a manner that maintains economic stratification and racial identification and barriers. They illustrate how this transmission is related not to family functioning but instead to the conditions of the communities in which families live. For example, the relocation of production to the suburbs, the demise of public transportation, the stratification of housing along racial lines, and the localized funding of schools all serve to create and maintain cleavages of opportunity that diminish the prospects for children in families without economic capital and connections while reinforcing the prospects for children in families with such capital. This analysis challenges the myth of the autonomous liberal subject by illustrating how much of adulthood is predicted by the location of childhood rather than by personal choice and motivation.⁸ This is true for both the child and caregiver, because the parents, whether biological or social, transfer their social capital, race, and class to the child, while the caregiving constrains the parent’s options and resources.⁹

Nevertheless, feminists note that despite these dynamics, legal regulation rewards and blames mothers for the status of their children, putting bad mothers at risk of losing their children.¹⁰ Thus, these structural conditions that serve to all but monopolize wealth and poverty challenge feminists to view children not as a burden but as a privilege that has been and continues to be hard won for poor women and women of color. African American women in particular have fought for generations to rear their children free from state or state-sanctioned interference and to prevent their children from being removed. In contrast to those feminists who view the domestication and privacy of child rearing as isolating and burdensome, critical race feminists value the opportunity to care for their children in the home and want better present lives and futures for their children.¹¹

Feminism’s illumination of both the oppressiveness of the mandatory association of women with child care and the power and privilege of motherhood renders feminist jurisprudence’s relationship with children complicated. The vulnerability of children creates dependency, which can be a burden for the caregiver, who in turn becomes dependent because of the caregiving. The natural connection between women and children, through the operation of motherhood, causes other problems for women because it conflates womanhood and motherhood, binds women to constricting social scripts that relate to ideal images of mothering, and effectively undermines women’s full and equal political and economic participation.¹² Feminists have also exposed the interrelated patriarchal, male-centered structures of the home and market, structures that are built on, and sustained by, the assignment of domestic labor to women.

Despite their disagreements regarding children, race, and class, feminists have made progress in disaggregating women from compulsory motherhood, dismantling many aspects of patriarchy within this system, and achieving political power and authority. These achievements have no doubt changed women’s lives, even if feminism has not been successful in dislodging men (noncaregivers) from the center of social organization. These successes can be attributed to many things, not the least of which is women’s leadership in the intellectual, legal, and political movements that have led to these reforms.

Feminist jurisprudence also may have helped children by helping care-givers, but feminists have not systematically applied feminist methodologies to children.¹³ On the contrary, as Leena Alanen has observed, feminists have largely failed to critically examine childhood, and this failure has limited both the advancement of children and of feminism.¹⁴ To the extent that feminism seeks to politicize children, it is as dependents, not agents. In regarding children as dependents, feminist jurisprudence has, somewhat ironically, assumed childhood to be primarily a privatized space. It is not surprising then that feminists have continued to struggle with liberatory and inhibitory aspects of dependency and the woman-child relationship.

While feminist legal theorists have recognized that motherhood—the privilege of rearing children—is an important aspect of autonomy and constitutes political action, they continue to struggle with the burdens of dependency because feminist jurisprudence does not confront childhood. Childhood studies exposes the artifice of childhood itself and asks why children do not have moral or political claims or authority. It also asks what it might mean for women if children did have these claims. If feminist jurisprudence viewed childhood as political, and not natural, private, or dependent, it might gain insights into why children’s care is privatized and why this care requires so many trade-offs for caregivers, what children gain and lose from this seclusion, and who else gains and loses under this regime. Once the child is at the center, the political subject or citizen does not have to be understood as the unattached liberal subject but can become something or someone else—a dependent being, a caregiver, or a developing child. Feminist jurisprudence might also imagine what care and caregiving would be if needing or receiving care was privileged.

Child-centered jurisprudence has also failed to apply lessons from childhood studies to children and, like feminist jurisprudence, has embraced the psychological model of childhood as a private place of need, vulnerability, and development. While feminist jurisprudence’s fundamental method of denaturalizing women is to distinguish sex and gender, child-centered jurisprudence has not sought to distinguish age and childhood. Instead, it has assumed children’s dependency and privacy. In contrast to feminist jurisprudence, which asks political questions regarding the law’s construction of women as private and dependent (and also at the same time as care giving), child-centered jurisprudence is generally concerned with narrow legal questions of children’s rights and children’s representation; that is, it addresses what rights children have or should have vis-à-vis the state or their caregivers and what duties their legal representatives owe them. This inevitably (i.e., naturally) private, vulnerable, and dependent child is reminiscent of the naturally private, vulnerable woman of the prefeminist past.

There is no self-conscious, named, or well-developed school or methodology regarding childhood jurisprudence. This is not to say there are no legal writings or critiques regarding children and the law; however, unlike feminist jurisprudence, which has deconstructed woman, existing child-centered jurisprudence has not deconstructed the child, childhood, or dependency. Instead, child-centered jurisprudence has focused primarily on children’s dependency and vulnerability in the context of their relationships with parents, the state, and educational systems. As a result, child-centered jurisprudence is largely unconcerned with the political nature and purpose of childhood and assumes dependency and privacy as givens. Unlike the woman at the center of feminist jurisprudence who is complex, multifaceted, and autonomous, the child at the center of child-centered jurisprudence is a developing being in need of protection and education during a legally and perhaps cognitively defined period of childhood. Moreover, it is not uncommon for child-centered jurisprudence to construct the family as the problem. Owing to the feminization of family, the problem in some strands of child-centered jurisprudence may be the mother, because these strands reflexively accept the privacy of childhood and uncritically place both responsibility and blame on the caregiver.

Child-centered jurisprudence thus misses opportunities to empower children and their caregivers. It does not question why children have so little authority outside the family, why caregivers are often disadvantaged through the caregiving, and why children are not more central in the law. Instead, child-centered jurisprudence extends to two primary inquiries: children’s rights and children’s legal representation. Children’s rights jurisprudence generally consists of and comments on two types of rights: quasi civil rights and dependency rights. Both categories construct children as dependents and measure their freedom and rights accordingly. Quasi civil rights are like adult civil rights but may be cabined by children’s youth. These rights include the right to be free from coercive state intervention and to receive equal treatment among dependents, to receive procedural due process protection, and to be granted modified versions of several of the constitutionally guaranteed substantive freedoms adults enjoy. Dependency rights center on children’s vulnerability and dependency and sometimes overlap with quasi civil rights, particularly in the context of educational rights or in the case of those who advocate that children have a right to be free "from the shackles of their parents’