The Fetish of the Child: Fantasy, Object, Desire, and Commodification

• In Event: The Monstrous Other: Exploring the Intersections of Youth Culture and Critical Pedagogy in a Monster-Making World

Abstract

The designation of the child as the educational unit expresses the desire of adults to avoid each other, as if we could work out the divisive issues of our society not in the factories, neighborhoods, churches, or legislatures, but in the schools. We must relinquish our fascination with the child…
Grumet, 2010, p. 74

Increasingly the lives of children, even the very youngest of our children in early childhood settings, are “greatly controlled by an administration enraptured by a ‘cult of efficiency’ (Stein, 2001)…enmeshed in education’s perceived importance in the fight against deficient workers” (Heydon & Iannacci, 2008, p. 155). As jagodzinksi (2004) writes, “When it comes to the question of youth, globalized capital seems to be blurring any smug romantic claim by the West of still having a protected time of “childhood.” The pressure of educational institutions to become more “pragmatic” and accountable to industry’s needs is no longer in dispute (p. 26). Perhaps more problematic is the seduction of the teaching profession (Taubman, 2009) and the romantic delusions of a teachers about their responsibility for the “vulnerable child” and her ability to right “all the injustices and inequities that undermine our lives” (Grumet, 2010, p.74).

This work attempts to explore the interconnectedness of (inept) developmental psychology, post/modernism, constructs of the fantasmic child (jagodzinski, 2004), and the discourses about children and youth that shift “social failings in the society to questions of individual character [enabling] social policy [that] moves from the language of social investment – creating safety nets for children – to the language of containment and blame” (Giroux, 1997, p. 16-17). Moreover, this exploration will consider the possibilities that come post- realization that the “child” is not what we (adults and society) thought s/he was and that s/he is incapable of fulfilling our adult fantasies and visions of our past/present/future selves. Our inability to “see” the child, leads us to viewing them as “monster” – a contested object (jagodzinski, 2004) in the postmodern era (Slattery, 2006). But does this open space for liberation? Freedom?

Beyond the theoretical considerations, this work engages the increased rhetoric about “saving” or “preparing” young children not just from illiteracy for literacy or poverty to productivity, but from themselves and their families. Society, even parents and purportedly benevolent educational and social workers, find themselves enmeshed in anxieties and fear about losing control of their children and resort to disciplined, punished, and hyper-surveillance in programs, schools, and centers putting the care of their children in the hands of others.

This paper is an attempt to use “Language as saying in an ethical openness to the other” (Levinas & Kearney, 1986, p. 29) – an attempt to “surrender to the other, declare one’s peace and undo the temptation to conquer” (Heydon & Iannacci, p. 159) and find “openness without excuses, evasions or alibis, delivering itself without saying anything said” (Levinas, 1991, p. 143).

Author

• Jennifer L. Milam, The University of Akron