Overview

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 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. The Introduction and Chapter Six of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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9781032563527

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Lucia Hodgson is Researcher in the Swedish Institute for North American Studies (SINAS) and the Department of English at Uppsala University in Sweden. She is the author of Raised in Captivity: Why Does America Fail Its Children? She has published widely on nineteenth-century childhood, including in Early American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, Journal of Juvenilia Studies, and The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the New Humanities. She is currently at work on the book project Taking Liberties: Slavery and the American Seduction Narrative. She is co-founder and co-editor of Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project. Allison Giffen is a Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the English Department and the Institute for Critical Disability Studies at Western Washington University where she specializes in nineteenth-century US literature and culture with an emphasis in disability, race, and childhood. She has published in such academic journals as Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Legacy, Women’s Studies, and ATQ and recently co-edited Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. She is co-founder and co-editor of Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project.

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