The Children's Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities

Part 1. Questioning the Autonomous Subject and Individual Rights

15 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. JacqueQuestioning the Autonomous Subject and Individual Rights PART ONE 16 Part One line 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. 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, Questioning the Autonomous Subject 17 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...