Abstract
While theories of ‘American Empire’ are discussed across disciplines, little attention has been paid to how subjects of this empire are socially produced through the highly intimate process of raising children. There has been little examination of parenting as a performance of in/security. This chapter contends that examining the securitization of parenting practices is essential if we wish to better understand childhood and parenting in an age of American Empire. The chapter argues that a particular kind of subject—the children of empire—is produced through an assemblage of neoliberalism, biopolitics, militarism and play and is visible in parenting practices oriented around expert knowledge of risk and protection, the normalization of regimes of surveillance and sorting, and the cultivation of playful militarism that blurs the lines between violence and fun.
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Riggan, J. (2021). Raising the Empire’s Children? Everyday Insecurities and Parenting the Privileged in the United States. In: Beier, J.M., Tabak, J. (eds) Childhoods in Peace and Conflict. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74788-6_12
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