Problematics of Childhood: The Biopolitical Management of Children and their Modes of Resistance

Abstract

This dissertation offers a new theoretical paradigm for understanding the political subjectivity of children in Occidental society. Whereas much of the contemporary research on children by political scientists employs a liberal legalist framework that is organized around the rights of parents and children, this dissertation instead turns to the work of Michel Foucault. It does so for two reasons. First, it uses a Foucauldian lens to analyze the ways in which childhood is problematized within Western culture. While the notion of the child at first appears to have a stable, unchanging meaning, its meaning is instead fluid and defined by certain political processes that co-opt the child to pursue a strategic goal. Second, this dissertation employs Foucault’s work to assert that the politicization of children operates by managing children at the level of the population indicative of a regime of power that Foucault refers to as biopolitics. To this end, it explores several case studies that show, in different ways, how children are used within Western politics as a means of either preserving, or producing, a particular vision of society and its subjects. Such an analysis recasts the intersection of politics and childhood as being anchored in domination, rather than liberal notions of freedom and equality. However, this dissertation also examines moments wherein children resist attempts by biopolitical apparatuses to force them to submit to such desires for the population, revealing the possibility for overturning this oppressive order. It argues that such forms of resistance, rather than the remedies provided by liberal legalism, are the only ways that the oppression of children can ever be overcome.