Global Studies of Childhood
ISSN 2043-6106

CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text]

The Case of Children’s Literature: colonial or anti-colonial?

CLARE BRADFORD School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.271

Since Jacqueline Rose published The Case of Peter Pan in 1984, scholars in the field of children’s literature have taken up a rhetorical stance which treats child readers as colonised, and children’s books as a colonising site. This article takes issue with Rose’s rhetoric of colonisation and its deployment by scholars, arguing that it is tainted by logical and ethical flaws. Rather, children’s literature can be a site of decolonisation which revisions the hierarchies of value promoted through colonisation and its aftermath by adopting what Bill Ashcroft refers to as tactics of interpolation. To illustrate how decolonising strategies work in children’s texts, the article considers several alphabet books by Indigenous author-illustrators from Canada and Australia, arguing that these texts for very young children interpolate colonial discourses by valorising minority languages and by attributing to English words meanings produced within Indigenous cultures.

‘What Will Sophie Mol Think?’: thinking critically about the figure of the white child in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

LUCY HOPKINS University of Western Sydney, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.280

This article explores the ways in which discourses of whiteness and childhood intersect in Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things to position the Indian children in the novel in inferior relation to the figure of the white child. Drawing the novel into discussions of the ideal of the universal child that shapes hegemonic educational and international development responses to children, the author suggests that the discursive dominance of such a child figure is radically disempowering for the child who is not contained within its boundaries. In The God of Small Things the Indian twins’ experiences of ontology are consistently rendered invalid and inauthentic by the spectre of the white child, who appears as their British cousin, Sophie Mol. The author argues that the figuration of the child in this novel highlights the ways in which the universalism of the white child can work to exclude childhoods that exist outside this normative position. At the same time as it draws out the politics of exclusion, the novel can be seen to posit an alternative way of performing/enacting childhood subjectivity, which allows for multiplicity and the privileging of difference.

The Visual Poetics of Play: childhood in three Canadian graphic novels

CHERYL COWDY Department of Humanities, York University, Toronto, Canada

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.291

This article explores the ideological work of play as it is represented in three contemporary graphic narratives – Kean Soo’s Jellaby and Jellaby: monster in the city, and Mariko & Jillian Tamaki’s Skim, analyzing the relationship these texts create between urban spaces and the ‘innovative’ spaces of the panel and page. The author is interested in the various ways the graphic novel can be read as a ‘leisure genre’ (to borrow a term coined by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner) that creates a dynamic, interactive ecology, encouraging protagonists and readers to participate in a ludic, pediarchic poetics of play. The content and the formal properties of these texts posit ‘play’ dynamically in relationship to ‘flow’ as a subject of the texts’ critique, but also as an activity occurring in the liminal spaces in and between panels. The novels address readers as clever, sophisticated accomplices in the meaning-making process. Play is represented as subversive of adult authoritarianism and narrative domination, thwarting the co-optation and commodification of play in the cultures of young people.

Prostituted Girls and the Grown-up Gaze

UMMNI KHAN Department of Law, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.302

This article examines the representation of under-age girls in the sex trade through a comparative analysis of the social scientific monograph Gangs and Girls: understanding juvenile prostitution and the fictional novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals. Through a semiotic examination of the book covers, and a discursive deconstruction of the fairy-tale conventions of the textual content, the author considers how the ‘grown up gaze’ is both gratified and sometimes challenged. She further demonstrate that ironically, the fictional account in Lullabies offers a more nuanced consideration of the socio-economic factors that contribute to the abuse and sexual exploitation of children than the expert account in Gangs. The article concludes by suggesting ‘grown ups’ must be cognizant of the voyeuristic tendencies and the political pitfalls of adult renderings of girl prostitutes.

Economy’s Gaze: childhood, motherhood and ‘exemplary ordinariness’ in popular parenting magazines

SUE SALTMARSH School of Education, Australian Catholic University, Strathfield, Australia
ANNA NORTH Macquarie University, North Ryde, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.314

Images of children and representations of childhood experience are ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture. Books, films, television shows, advertisements, magazines, posters, computer games, websites – to name but a few examples – construct and reiterate multiple ways through which childhood is to be understood and undergone, regulated and recuperated, managed and maintained. In this article, the authors consider how one textual form, that of popular magazines, constructs childhood as an economic category ideally characterised by what they term ‘exemplary ordinariness’. The article analyses magazine cover images from Australia, the United States and Canada, and argues that images and written text together oblige parents to ensure that normative childhood experience is secured through exemplary parenting practices. Further, the authors argue that parents – and in particular, mothers – are incited to performatively produce their own exemplary ordinariness through attention to their own personal beauty, individual accomplishment and parenting practices. Their argument is informed by visual and cultural theories, and underpinned by the view that economic discourse formulates a gaze to which both childhood and parenthood are subjected. This is not to imply a reification of ‘the economy’, but rather it is to acknowledge the constitutive force of economic discourse and to interrogate its prominence in the images, rhetorics and practices of everyday life.

The Spirit of Australia: learning about Australian childhoods in Qantas commercials

CHRISTOPHER DREW School of Education, Australian Catholic University, Strathfield, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.321

For over a decade the Qantas Spirit of Australia advertising campaign has worked to incite pride and nostalgia in Australian consumers. Its widespread success has led to four renewed television commercials, strategically released to coincide with key (inter)national sporting events, including the 2000 Sydney Olympics and the 2004 Rugby World Cup. All four Spirit commercials feature children singing Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home in picturesque global and national landscapes. As a result of the Spirit campaign’s widespread success, Peter Allen’s song has become almost synonymous with the Qantas brand. The iconic Spirit commercials are exemplary in (re)affirming the public consciousness towards Australian childhood identity. Exploring national issues of freedom, race, youth and adventure, the commercials are situated among diverse social signs that attempt to typify Australian children. Influenced by post-structural theoretical frames, the author analyses the ‘social’ semiotic dimensions of these advertisements. His intention is to contribute to understandings of the discursive constitution of Australian childhoods in advertising. The unique iconic status of the Spirit campaign, he argues, lies in its capacity to be commensurate with, and (re)affirm, Australia’s public perceptions of self and community.

‘Jesus! A Geriatric – That’s All I Need!’: learning to come of age with/in popular Australian film

KRISTINA GOTTSCHALL Faculty of Education, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.332

Popular film texts are powerful means by which Western societies construct, maintain, protect and challenge concepts of childhood and youth-hood. As a context where audiences learn about the self, their culture, and their place within it, popular film is understood here as pedagogic, that is, as a space where key lessons about the formation of subjecthood might take place, and at what costs. This article takes into account scholarship on popular culture as pedagogy, challenging narrow notions of popular film as a simple transmission of knowledge. Focused on how pedagogies might be at work, this article explores the use of humour, repetition, otherness, becoming and sentimentality within a selection of Australian films, and how they orientate audiences towards knowing the youth subject in particular ways. Questions of generation and how it is constructed as a commonsense battle between ‘young’ and ‘old’ are considered through the coming-of-age films, The Rage in Placid Lake (2003), Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger (2008), Crackers (1998) and Spider & Rose (1994).

Parents, Children and the Porous Boundaries of the Sexual Family in Law and Popular Culture

DAVID GURNHAM Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, School of Law, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.343

This article focuses on a perceived ideological overlap between popular cultural and judicial treatments of sex and conjugality that contributes to a discursive construction of parenthood and parenting. The author perceives that in both legal and popular cultural texts, there is a sense in which notions of ‘natural’ childhood are discursively constituted as being put at risk by those who reproduce outside of dominant sexual norms, and that signs of normative sexuality (typically in the form of heterosexual coupling) may be treated as a sign of safety. These ideas are rooted in ancient associations between fertility, sexuality and femininity that can also be traced in the historical development of the English language. With the help of commentators such as Martha Fineman, the article situates parents and children within a discourse of family which prioritises conjugality, with consequences for the ways in which the internal and external boundaries of families are delineated.

Luring Lolita: the age of consent and the burden of responsibility for online luring

ANDREA SLANE Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Canada

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.354

This article argues that sexual exploitation is the underlying harm that online luring offences should address, but that social anxieties about youth online sexuality have obscured this underlying harm. Through analyzing North American Internet safety materials and Canadian luring case law, the author finds that on the one hand risks of luring are generalized and on the other limited only to victims under the age of consent. The result is that very often older youth are made responsible for their own victimization, while younger ones are assumed to be victimized and hence denied avenues to sexual expression. By neglecting to analyze online interactions for the dynamics of exploitation, we do a disservice to older youths who are exploited while denying sexual autonomy to youth under the age of consent.

Writing Identity: gendered values and user content creation in SNS interaction among Estonian and Swedish tweens

PATRIK HERNWALL Department of Computer and System Sciences, Stockholm University & School of Communication, Media and IT, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden
ANDRA SIIBAK Institute of Journalism and Communication, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.365

Tweens (10‑14-year-olds) in Estonia and Sweden were interviewed about their experience and understanding of gender construction on social networking sites (SNS). The interviews indicate that peer culture is the most important dimension and a source of inspiration for the young when writing their identity online. Gendered norms and values are prominent in these activities, especially in the manipulated images being produced by the tweens. The latter practice is most explicit among the girls, especially when it comes to Photoshopping. The findings suggest that both girls and boys are well aware of what images are acceptable to publish as well as how to act and pose in front of the camera.

Social Orphans and Care at a Distance: popular representations of childhood in Ukrainian transnational families

ALEXANDER TYMCZUK Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Norway

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.377

International labour migration creates new relational, emotional and social challenges for migrating parents and the children staying behind. In Ukraine, children who grow up in a transnational household are not only a concern for the individual family, however, but also a phenomenon that is thoroughly discussed in the public sphere. In this article the author analyses Ukrainian media, as well as popular and individual ‘texts’ on transnational childhood and child care at a distance, and argues that there are two diverging models of care that underlie personal narrative texts and public texts: care as fulfilment of a child’s material needs, and care that necessitates physical closeness and constant face-to-face interaction. He also identifies diverging perspectives in the various texts on what are considered adequate alternative carers, and on what the relational and social consequences are of the separation of migrating parents from their children.

Children of Sudan: the fight for a future

STEPHANIE PEARSON College of Education, Kansas State University, USA

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.4.388

Throughout generations Sudan has been plagued with the violence of war, the rampant spread of disease, and the violation of human rights. At the heart of this conflict lie the children of Sudan who suffer the consequences in profound ways. This article explores various issues that children in Sudan face and discusses the key initiatives, of which the provision of education is one that is regarded as being essential to the survival of future generations. In January 2011 the Sudanese people of southern Sudan voted to claim independence from their northern counterpart. This article also examines future implications and the hopes for this new nation and Southern Sudanese children.

© SYMPOSIUM JOURNALS Ltd
PO Box 204, Didcot, Oxford OX11 9ZQ, United Kingdom
info@symposium-journals.co.uk
www.symposium-journals.co.uk