Symbolic Childhood

In a dozen original essays, contributors to Symbolic Childhood engage directly with the politics of representation by scrutinizing the connection between the exercise of power and portrayals of children and childhood. The volume as a whole construes childhood not as a given category, transparently understood, but as a thoroughly social artifact infused with contradictory and inexact meaning. As a social construct, childhood is thus approached as an active production which can be taken apart and reconstructed in a variety of ways, and for a variety of purposes. Chapters examine a range of issues and topics, including: precocious and gifted children, gender, sexuality, innocence, school shootings, cartoons, video games, adoption, street children, and feral children.

Autorentext

The Editor: Daniel Thomas Cook received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago and is currently Assistant Professor in the Departments of Advertising and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has published a number of articles examining the commodification of childhood and is currently working on a manuscript on the rise of the child-consumer in the United States in the twentieth century.

Zusammenfassung
«Daniel Thomas Cook and his contributors not only mark the differences between experiences and representations of childhood, but analyze how each influences the other. How adults imagine, portray, and prescribe children's behavior changes and varies greatly from one historical setting to another. Here is an exceptional opportunity to learn how and why.» (Viviana Zelizer, Princeton University, author of Pricing the Priceless Child)
«'Symbolic Childhood' adds to research and readings of the so-called new childhood studies, in a highly original and diversified way. In an enlightening introduction, Daniel Thomas Cook places the chapters within this new field - a field with which the book is congruent and from which it departs. Here is work that both supports the view that children are extremely complex and different, and demonstrates continuity and coherence in children's life worlds -historically, culturally, symbolically.» (Jens Qvortrup, Director, Norwegian Centre for Child Research, and co-editor of the journal, 'Childhood')

Inhalt

Contents: Daniel Thomas Cook: Introduction: Interrogating Symbolic Childhood - Harriet Strandell: On Questions of Representation in Childhood Ethnography - Mary Lorena Kenny: Orators and Outcasts, Wanderers and Workers: Street Children in Brazil - Adriana S. Benzaquén: John, Genie, and Kaspar: Some Recent Scientific Uses of Wildness, Confinement, and Abuse - Roblyn Rawlins: «Long Rows of Short Graves»: Sentimentality, Science, and Child-Saving in the Construction of the Intellectually Precocious Child, 1870-1925 - Kathryn Libal: Realizing Modernity Through the Robust Turkish Child, 1923-1938 - Janice Hill: Governing Children: The Boy Scouts, the Girl Guides, and Visions of Canadian Nationhood, 1880-1921 - Sara K. Dorow: «China 'R' Us»?: Care, Consumption, and Transnationally Adopted Children - Mark D. Jacobs: The School Shooting as a Ritual of Sacrifice - Susan B. Kaiser/Kathleen Huun: Fashioning Innocence and Anxiety: Clothing, Gender, and Symbolic Childhood - Jeffery P. Dennis: The Heterosexualization of Boyhood - Chandra Mukerji/Tarleton Gillespie: Recognizable Ambiguity: Cartoon Imagery and American Childhood in Animaniacs - Stephen Kline/Greig de Peuter: Ghosts in the Machine: Postmodern Childhood, Video Gaming, and Advertising.