CFP: Disciplining the North American Child (3/21/05; MLA '05)

Proposed special session for MLA Annual Convention
December 27-30, 2005
Washington DC
CFP Deadline: March 21, 2005

Disciplining the North American Child

In an endnote to Part III of Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
writes that he will draw examples from the discourses of "military,
medical, educational, and industrial institutions" to illustrate the
ways in which power, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries,
produced disciplinary knowledge that operated as "general formulas of
domination." He adds: "Other examples might have been taken from
colonization, slavery and childrearing."

This proposed MLA Special Sessions panel seeks to contribute to the
emerging interdisciplinary field of American Children's Studies by
eliciting papers on the ways in which disciplinary knowledge about
children enables the perpetuation of social hierarchies that
discriminate and subjugate on the basis of race, gender, class,
sexuality, and ability. How does the configuration of childhood in
American literary, philosophical, historical, social science, and
other cultural discourses contribute to the deployment of young
bodies into particular developmental trajectories? How does the
category of "youth" shape subject formation, social identity and
social roles? More specifically, how are children's bodies deployed
to reproduce white male hegemony? And how do narratives involving the
child figure and textual children's voices resist and/or conform to
such deployments? Papers should concentrate on North American culture
from 1600 to the present. Papers dealing with the pre-1850 period are
particularly welcome.

Possible topics include:

- the relationship between figurations of the child and the ongoing
racialization of American culture, including the fabrication of
whiteness
- the infantilization of women
- the role of conceptions of childhood in rationalizing corporal and
criminal punishment practices
- significance of the "child" in the formation of middle-class identities
- the consequences, intended and unintended, of characterizing Native
Americans as child-like
- the links between a historical understanding of discourses
concerning the child and contemporary rhetoric
- concepts of childhood which are suppressed or excluded in any given
period and why

Please send a 1-2 page abstract and short cv to Lucia Hodgson via
email at lhodgson_at_usc.edu by March 21.

Participants must be members of the MLA by April 7.

Lucia Hodgson
ABD PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Southern California

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP_at_english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj_at_english.upenn.edu
         ==========================================================
Received on Fri Mar 04 2005 - 09:55:39 EST