AHA Session 32
Thursday, January 5, 2023: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Regency Ballroom C1 (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Foor Mezzanine)
Chair:
Camille Owens, Harvard University
Papers:
Comment:
The Audience
Session Abstract
In his polemical No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman wrote that the child “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics”, “the emblem of futurity's unquestioned value” and the basis, in Edelman’s view, of U.S. national politics. The child is future stuff, it seems. This panel brings together critical inquiries into the “child” as an emblematic figure, both a basis of future politics, a site of anxiety, a problem to be solved, exploring how contingent meanings of race, gender, etc are constituted and contested in relation to the child. Focusing on the US from the 19th century to the present, the papers presented explore childhood in various contours: in its relation to contemporaneous debates about evolution and philosophy of history; as connected to anxieties about race, motherhood, and nation; and ideas of racial progress and betterment, or, conversely, degeneracy. The presenters in this panel, thus, bring renewed attention to how ideas of childhood have been and continue to be connected to anxieties about the future of the U.S. nation state and how these moral and political investments in “the child” have played out in scientific, medical, and political-economic considerations of human life. This panel speaks to emergent work in childhood studies, drawing from works that have interrogated how ideas of our moral duty to children, as well as notions of childhood “innocence” and “immaturity”, have re-scripted racial logics of depravity, righteousness, and propriety–fundamental categories to political ideas of citizenship and belonging. With questions about “the future” of U.S society taking up increasing urgency in this current political moment, this panel also speaks to scholars interested in theorizing an ethical horizon outside of the logics and imperatives of biological reproduction.
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