The Virtues of Childishness: Embodiment and Gesture in Becoming-Child

• In Event: Visual Inquiries Into Borders and Perimeters of Learning

Abstract

The figure of Donald Trump incites any number of gestures and smear words. Mainstream media portrayals position him as an idiot (Adams, 2017), a slob (Shephard, 2017), and yet most objectionably, a child (Brooks, 2017). So salient is the last identification that Comedy Central’s Daily Show (2017) created a browser extension that would turn any of Trump’s tweets into “their rightful state: a child’s scribble”. These provocations, however jocular (and warranted!), double as a sentiment around children’s status and position in Western society: as adults-in-the-making, in need of taming. While we romanticize childhood, children themselves “are leaky; they do not respect established boundaries. They wet the bed, spew up their food, have no respect for tidy kitchens or hoovered carpets” (Holland, 2004, p. 6).

In this paper, we examine the child-adult dichotomy, a boundary constituted and re-constituted through texts (in this case, photographs and developmental manuals), produced in schools for adults (i.e. teachers) by adults. Through images of children ‘learning’ in school and descriptions of ‘normal’ development, children are viewed as embryo adults (Woodrow, 1999), individuals always preparing for adulthood and yet, as Donald Trump, never quite being adult.

As early childhood educators working from post-structural theories (posthumanist and critical childhoods), we argue for new practices around children and childhoods. To do this, we explore two modes of inquiry, through art-making and art-tracing. More specifically, we engage in behaviors typically associated with the child. Through role-play, teething, and coloring are marked as stages of development for young children, we see them as research-worthy endeavors with the potential to re-constitute us, the just-as-leaky adults, in becoming-child (c.f. Deleuze, 1972). Moffett (2011) elaborates on art and drawing as “[a] thing for kids, and for those who prefer to remain kids, even if it means taking on a profession and mastering a formal tradition” (p. 135). Gilles Deleuze (1993), who oftentimes figured the child into his philosophy, explained that “[c]hildren never stop talking about what they are doing or trying to do: exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them” (p. 61). In a word, children inquire, and while imperceptible, their moves transgress and de-territorialize adult spaces.

We present several pieces of work produced in the act of research and process of inquiry. AUTHOR will present the story of a young child’s bite, juxtaposed with her & her partner’s biting, as well as her own drawings and images from a performance sewing herself into and biting her way out of a cocoon, rendering more porous the boundaries of “appropriateness” for both children and adults in both their interactions and their forms of expression. AUTHOR will show a process of tracing and coloring in photographs that 3- and 4-year-olds have taken. These moves and methods, though often attributed to children, are in our hands as adult-researchers, attempts to de-territorialize the academic space of research, to present possibilities for different ways that analysis can look and feel, and to mar the boundaries of child-adult.

Authors

• Katherine Gordon, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Tran Templeton, University of North Texas