Kid Stuff: Thinking Beyond Capitalism’s Commodification of Children

• In Event: Marxism, Feminism and Intersectionality: Imagining New labor economies

Abstract

This paper examines the figure of the child in Viability, Sarah Vap's 2016 collection of 159 brief prose poems. Vap draws upon the child to comment on contemporary bioeconomics, critiquing how the child works in the service of capital and the nation-state. Importantly, Vap reconnects national fantasies about reproductive futurism back to actual children, offering a revised understanding of how contemporary domestic economic and legislative policies actually undermine the very social vitality the child supposedly indexes. Her work thus speaks back to the commodification of children, offering a poetics of embodiment that rematerializes the abstract figure of the child.

Presenter

• Lisa Hinrichsen, University of Arkansas