Introduction to Biopolitics, Risk, and Childhood

Abstract

Across time, children in Western cultures have been understood as threatening beings aligned with satanic influences, as miniature adults, as fragile creatures of God, as delinquents, and as vulnerable, at-risk beings. In exploring these historically specific formulations of childhood, academic and cultural observers have drawn attention to the complex ways in which social identities are forged in time through institutional positionings, technologies of government, risk-communication systems, and everyday practices. Analyses of childhood reveal that symbolic formulations and preferred and denigrated strategies of raising children point to changing socioeconomic problematics and strategies of government. Childhood is not a natural space but rather is carved out by culturally and historically specific technologies of government.