Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (review)

This is not a book about children. Rather, Claudia Castañeda reviews five locations where the figure of the child becomes a vacant, productive space that adults fill with constructed theories of their own subjectivities, their own becoming, and the nature of the human. Castañeda's work builds on Donna Haraway's theory of "material-semiotic" objects, focusing on how children's bodies can become—materially and semiotically—sites where adults construct difference.

Castañeda's five chapters are linked thematically rather than topically. She explores the child figure in nineteenth-century developmental biology in a rereading of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." She argues that the child figure allowed developmental scientists, including Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Robert Dunn, to create narratives in which "the child was seen as a bodily theater where human history could be observed to unfold in the compressed time-span of individual development" (p. 13). This developmental story allowed scientists to embody in the child figure theories of human differences in race, class, sexuality, and gender.

From nineteenth-century developmentalism, Castañeda jumps to brain research in the 1990s. Her focus here is Human Behavior and the Developing Brain, a 1994 volume edited by Geraldine Dawson and Kurt W. Fischer, who reject strict biological determinism and argue for a complex interrelationship between brain and behavior. Castañeda contends that these emerging views of neurobiology reproduce Anglo, U.S., and middle-class values of education and child growth, values that describe children as potential to be fulfilled or squandered.

Castañeda next shifts from scientific to cultural discourses of child bodies, beginning with transracial and transnational adoptions. Drawing on feminist discussions of reproductive technologies to discuss debates about "matching" races of parents to adopted child, she draws on the writings of Elizabeth Bartholet—an adoption advocate and human-rights lawyer—arguing that she evacuates social, cultural, and historical factors at play in constructions of racial difference. On the transnational scene, Castañeda finds Bartholet's argument echoed in Benetton advertisements that reduce race to color and purge it "as a signifier of specific histories linked to contemporary social, political, and cultural worlds" (p. 101).

Moving on, Castañeda considers commonplace Central and South American stories of organ theft. She uses arguments about the truth of these stories to consider whose evidence counts as factual. Many argue that no danger to actual children exists, but rather that the stories are signifiers: symbols of other truths, often drawn from myth or history. Castañeda suggests that some "factual" arguments denying these "rumors" should receive scrutiny similar to organ-stealing stories themselves because they often build on constructions of technological differences between rich and poor countries. With organ-stealing stories, the child figure travels across global boundaries, but what counts as "fact, evidence, truth, and reality" (p. 140) about the child as material and semiotic figure is situated and partial.

Finally, Castañeda considers theorists' figurations of the child. Here, she argues that the child becomes a "resource, as a space or form through which the (adult) subject re-forms itself" (p. 143). She reads several French theorists, including Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, as figuring childhood as an empty space of becoming, a space not of being but of possibility. She also reads feminist critic Valerie Walkerdine's work on young girls as emptying the subjectivities of actual girls and refilling them with Walkerdine's adult figurations of her own childhood. Finally, Castañeda re-theorizes the child not as an empty figure to be filled with adult interpretations but through the surprising, chaotic, and wild figure of nature: "The subject in my refiguration is not materially grounded in the child, but instead in the agency of nature that realizes bodies and embodiment" (p. 169).

Even though Castañeda's work builds more on literary and feminist scholarship than on historical evidence, historians of technology may find...