A joint proposal from Kimberley Reynolds and Nicholas Tucker (UK)

There is a growing body of work which points to the increasingly problematic nature of the representation of children in western culture. For instance, in her study of pictorial representations of children, Pictures of Innocence (1998), Anne Higgonet suggests that childhood in western cultures is in crisis. This crisis comes from a failure to renegotiate the dominant construction of childhood, which has its origins in the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth century and celebrates childhood as a time of sexual, social and psychological innocence. The image of the Romantic Child, she argues, is at odds with new and challenging images of childhood advanced through virtually every form of media and which Higgonet labels the Knowing Child.

Commodification rather than sexuality is the primary concern of Jack Zipes in Sticks and Stones (2001), but he too sounds a warning note. Taking the Harry Potter series as paradigmatic, he bemoans the role played by some forms of children’s literature in ‘the process by which we homogenise our children. Making children all alike is, sadly, a phenomenon of our times.’ At a time when many cultures are working to refashion themselves as multicultural, and images of childhood play a significant role in this process, the extent to which images of childhood are eroticised, commodified, politicised, and homogenised needs to be explored.

These are just two of the many recent attempts to explore changing images of childhood in culture. However, they usefully summarise a number of debates, and map the context against which many children’s books are now written and read.

This session and the papers submitted in preparation for it will look at the tensions which now surround the representation of children in contemporary media and the ways in which these interact with juvenile reading. Children’s bodies, lifestyles and aspirations have become the target of commercial forces as never before. The Internet also offers children what appear to be new ways of imaging themselves, freed from visible labels based on sex, race, class, wealth and other mechanisms usually inscribed in images of children and childhood. However, the role of electronic communication in the construction of images of childhood is itself problematic, playing, for instance, an increasingly large role in the dissemination of pornography, not least through the activities of adults who masquerade as children and who are becoming ever more expert at infiltrating the cyber meeting places at which the young tend to congregate.

Because we are now highly alert to the potential for arousal in images of childhood - however they are generated and for what ostensible audience - parents, publishers, educators and others with responsibility for children have become ever more vigilant in seeking out and identifying ways in which images of childhood may be abused. This vigilance is, however, at odds with many manifestations of contemporary fashions, which have affected the way children look, behave and are presented. These fashions often choose to focus on children’s bodies. In advertising campaigns, music videos, youth magazines and television programmes, children’s bodies are often presented as sexually provocative, with the children themselves coming over as knowing participants in this process. Such images have the potential both to stimulate desire for children and a powerful desire to protect them. Yet by letting our fear for children dominate behaviour, we risk stifling the range of contacts and expressions that are part of an adult’s legitimate repertoire of affection. Because some individuals may abuse children all interactions between adults and children are potentially suspect.

Within this cultural climate, the role of children’s literature is both fascinating and potentially liberating. Children’s texts inevitably respond to current constructions of and aspirations for childhood. During the twentieth century, literature for children provided considerable information about attitudes to childhood, parenting, health and beauty, ideas of self, and about what constitutes psychological health and acceptable behaviour. At times these images have been accused of being too exclusively preoccupied with representing and addressing white, middle-class, traditionally gendered, able-bodied, children in nuclear families. Today this monolithic image of childhood has been replaced - or at least supplemented - by texts and illustrations that depict a wide range of social types and life styles.

Because, with a few notable exceptions, children’s literature has nothing to sell other than itself, it arguably offers its young audience a forum which is comparatively free from the commercial pressures that drive its competitors for children’s time and attention in the market place. In many ways, the private nature of reading and the skills it requires work to create a unique space in which children can try on and experiment with a range of possible identities. Using the pre-session papers and a multi-media visual show prepared by the leaders and supplemented by other participants, this session will seek to explore the role children’s literature has played in generating, reflecting, and shaping images of childhood. The session will end by considering the way the range of available images has broadened to encompass a spectrum of physical, social and individual differences, so offering young readers increased variety in the on-going process of working out the particular nature of their own identity, but also identifying significant areas of silence and stasis in currently accepted ways of representing children and childhood to young readers.

By July 2001, to publish discussion papers by the two forum leaders on the IRSCL conference website (we would hope that as delegates register they will be directed to the papers). These papers will not then be read during the session, but discussed.

The papers will include an invitation for delegates who want to participate in the session (ideally the group size would be limited to no more than 30). Participation may take the form of discussing the papers, or responding to them by bringing in pictorial or textual images/evocations (slides, OHTs or videos) and ideas which will be shared with the group. Those who intend to bring in images will need to register with the leaders at least three weeks prior to the Congress.

At the end of the session the leaders will draw together the points made, and suggest areas for further research and potential collaboration.

See message by the presenters

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