Short description:

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.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

List of Figures

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