The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19th Century

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.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Preface: Unmanageable Bodies: Where Childhood Studies and Biopolitics Meet

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