NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

"At the Crossroads of Children's Studies and American Studies:

Intersections, Possibilities, Challenges"

Childhood Studies and Feminist Critical Race Studies

Lucia Hodgson

In the recently published Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, Rashmi Varma documents and promotes a "feminist critical race studies" that can intervene in our tendency as scholars to analyze race and gender separately, as distinct systems of power. Varma argues that race and gender "are in fact historically interwoven with each other, forming a dense fabric that constitutes society itself." For Varma, the "task of a feminist critical race studies is precisely to help us to read the weave of race and gender in society, and to offer tools for dismantling embedded structures of domination and oppression." As Varma suggests, maintaining the two vectors of analysis—feminist theory and critical race theory—in sight simultaneously requires new analytical strategies and methodologies. I propose that one of the most significant contributions that Childhood Studies can make to American Studies is to provide a disciplinary site for developing such strategies and methodologies. In this short paper, I will briefly critique three studies that attempt to think race and gender simultaneously for clues about how an explicit theorization of child subjectivity can facilitate a feminist critical race studies approach.1

Robyn Wiegman's 1995 study, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, analyzes the "corporeal logics of race and gender that underlie the 'universal' status of the Enlightened subject."2 Wiegman investigates the way in which the "historical convergence of 'blacks and women'" has "become wedded in the cultural symbolic as our primary figure for the complicated relationship of race and gender."3 Wiegman cites Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin as "one of the few popular moments in the literary landscape of this nation in which a white woman has sought to grapple, however inadequately, with the social consequences of both Western notions of gender and U.S. structures of racism."4 For Wiegman, Uncle Tom's Cabin challenges the nineteenth-century equation between blackness and inhumanity by feminizing, and thus humanizing, the enslaved. Wiegman's analysis acknowledges in passing that "the African was cast in terms of emotional and intellectual infantilism,"5 but adulthood operates in her analysis as an unmarked condition of personhood, both feminine and African-American. This despite the way childlikeness is both the site of a dense discursive overlap of femininity and racial alterity, and simultaneously the incarnation of the whiteness that grounds the Enlightenment discourse of human difference.

The absence of Little Eva from Wiegman's discussion of Uncle Tom's Cabin signals the limitations of her concept of womanhood. The omission of black and girl children from the blacks/women analogy reenacts the disenfranchisement of childhood instituted by liberal theory. It assumes that the denial of consent to young people is not inherently unproblematic, as if adult power over children—adult male power and adult female power—cannot be abused. And the omission of black and girl children reinforces the associated belief in the innate irrationality of those bodies found to be non-adult and under-developed. Because she has not theorized age, Wiegman's investigation of the American cultural analogy between "blacks" and "women" cannot encompass the paradigmatic relationship between Uncle Tom and Little Eva. This version of the blacks-and-women symbolic gestures toward its immersion in the discourse of childhood. A focus on the female child subject can illuminate how the nineteenth-century infantilization of adult white women undermines the humanity accorded through feminization, and reasserts the political disenfranchisement of even and especially feminized adult African-Americans.

In her 2004 monograph, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon revises Carole Pateman's important work on the way in which the universality of social contract theory relies on an implicit sexual contract that excludes women from political participation. In her feminist critique of liberal theory, Pateman argues that the civil freedom accorded to men by contract theory presupposes the subjection of women to men. Pateman also argues that sexual difference is more fundamental to liberal theory than any other narrative of human difference, including racial difference. She writes that "the fact that women are women is more relevant than the differences between them." Thus, for Pateman, the social contract perpetuates a "sexual contract" that "establishes men's political right over women" and "sexual difference is the difference between freedom and subjection."6 Dillon's analysis recognizes the whiteness of liberal womanhood, but maintains nonetheless the primacy of gender difference in her narrative of how "liberalism scripts the interrelated public and private lives of citizens of the liberal state." Dillon argues that "the primary form of constraint, or 'structuration,' effected in the literary public sphere of the eighteenth century concerns the becoming binary of gender and the becoming heterosexual of desire," and that "the structure to which the subject consents (in order to become a subject) is one that primarily concerns newly configured forms of gender and sexuality."7 With regard to black women, Dillon suggests that liberalism's exclusion of African-Americans of both genders from the fiction of the modern liberal subject establishes them "in an externalized—but foundational—position" to that subject "related to private property," and, consequently, as silenced in the public sphere.

Dillon's analysis of the occluded gendered and raced specificities of the liberal subject, however, cannot account for the public sphere presence of a Phillis Wheatley, who spoke neither as a slave, nor as a white woman, but as a white child. If we broaden the category of woman to include those under the age of legal majority, we can see more clearly how sexual difference in liberal theory complements rather than trumps racial difference. In Lockean social contract theory, childhood is the paradigmatic placeholder for all those presumed insufficiently rational to give consent to contract, and thus liberal theory infantilizes historically excluded adults including women and slaves. In order to make their generalizations about the primacy of sexual difference, Pateman and Dillon presuppose the adulthood of the excluded female, and the subjection of children to adults. Within liberal theory, white girls face at least two vectors of disempowerment—gender-related and age-related--and in their case gender does not outweigh age as an oppressive factor, as white boys in Locke's political theory are also denied consent to contract. The subjection of children complicates the feminist critique of liberal theory because the conscription of persons under twenty-one to disenfranchisement in the early modern period is a transgender and transracial phenomenon that operates through the rhetorical entanglements of sexual and racial difference discourse; childhood is both feminized and racialized, and one form of oppression does not clearly dominate over the other. Foregrounding the figure of the child reminds us of the extent to which liberal subjecthood presupposes an adult white male, whose superiority rests in his advanced age as much, if not more, than in his sex and his race.

Ellen K. Feder's 2007 book, Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender, argues that we need a third figure—the figure of the "family"—to adequately theorize the co-articulations of race and gender. Feder makes a compelling argument that race and gender are interrelated categories that nonetheless operate very differently: the deployment of gender is a function of disciplinary power within the family, while the deployment of race is a function of state regulatory power acting upon the family.8 Two of three of Feder's chapters on the production of raced and gendered identities in the second half of the twentieth century focus on the development of children: "Boys Will Be Boys" examines the diagnosis and treatment of Gender Identity Disorder, and "Of Monkeys and Men" explores the ideology of the 1992 Violence Initiative and the associated racist rhetoric that characterized African-American male youth as "conduct-disordered" and prone to asocial violence. Yet Feder never directly theorizes child subjectivity. The framework of the family regulated by the state, internally or externally, tends to conflate the interests of parents and children, and to obscure the agency of child members of the family, as if children are only acted upon by power—of either parents or government bureaucrats—in the service of the state. Centering the child figure in the analysis of gender and race formation can restore our appreciation of the political valences of children's behavior, whether they are "being good" or "acting out."

All three theorist that I have discussed—Robyn Wiegman, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, and Ellen K. Feder—make reference to Hortense Spiller's seminal 1987 essay, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," to support their argument that slavery "ungendered" African-American subjectivity. Yet none of these theorists has addressed Spiller's important theorization of child subjectivity. Spiller's attempt to think race and gender at the same time does more than foreground how kinship relations structure gender identity. Spiller's analysis clarifies how childhood operates as the site for the inscription of intelligible gendered and racialized forms of subjectivity. She writes, for example, that "the enslaved offspring . . . does become, under the press of a patronymic, patrifocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal order, the man/woman on the boundary, whose human and familial status, by the very nature of the case, ha[s] yet to be defined."9 This formulation suggests some of the ways that infantilization simultaneously feminizes, racializes, and dehumanizes its object. To theorize the production of race and gender difference without attention to age is to assume the primacy of adult subjectivity, even though historically, both adult females and non-white adults of both genders have been denied power through rhetorical infantilization.

Spiller's work highlights the crucial role that childhood studies can and should play in theorizations of race and gender difference. The child is the site of both gender development and racial formation, processes that occur simultaneously and interrelatedly over time. If we broaden the categories of "women" and "nonwhites" to include young bodies, our analyses will necessarily negotiate race and gender as systems of power that operate in tandem, and we can begin to recognize femininity and racial alterity as age-related categories of difference that operate in even more complex ways than we have yet been able to articulate.

Endnotes

1. Rashmi Varma, "On Common Ground?: Feminist Theory and Critical Race Studies," in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 232-233.

2. Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke I{, 1995), 180.

3. Wiegman, 8.

4. Wiegman, 194.

5. Wiegman, 64.

6. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1988), 2, 6.

7. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004), 42-43.

8. Ellen K. Feder. Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3-5.

9. Hortense J. Spillers, "'Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe': An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 74.

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