Civilizing childhood: The rational alienation of adult-child relations.

摘要

The dissertation's foundational claim proposes that the increasingly enmeshed and complicated state of adult-child relations in contemporary U.S. culture is the paradoxical, yet logical outcome of the intensifying rationalization of society. Over the course of four chapters, the dissertation develops and establishes the assertion that the destructive fallout of this intensification is two-fold:; [1] As the acceleration and depersonalization of social life circumscribe and diminish adults' capacity for power, feelings of competency and control are increasingly, though unconsciously, secured through the perpetration of psychic and/or physical violence/aggression upon already-disempowered children;; [2] The unparalleled expansion of technology and capital into the most intimate aspects of social life (e.g., in the form of psychotropic drug therapies, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, etc.) is leading the already established commercial objectification and commodification of childhood to its logical (i.e., rational) conclusion: the standardization of the child her/himself.; Documenting adult anxieties engendered by the shifting, unpredictable sands of socioeconomic and political life upon which the foundation of childhood is continuously (re)built, the dissertation asserts that in addition to the increasing availability of emerging technologies, these anxieties are at once what motivate and make possible new and troubling forms of domination: Providing one's child with a daily dose of potentially hazardous chemicals to improve her grades or requesting invasive prenatal tests to assure a "normal" infant is driven as much by anxiety as it is by love, though in this culture of mystification, the two become seamlessly one and the same.; This analysis sheds light upon adults' psychic need to dominate children in historically and culturally specific ways. Although adult-child domination is obviously not new, the ways in which this domination presently manifests is. In this era of "parental rights," genetic testing, Ritalin, and "out-of-control kids," adults have yet to acknowledge the psychic and bodily perils of contemporary childrearing practices. Failing to reflect upon the ethical, moral, and practical implications of these emergent forms of domination unnecessarily places already vulnerable children at increased, though unacknowledged risk. In short, an intended "history of the present," the dissertation is at once a project of liberation and requisite demystification.