Engendering postcolonial child/animal relations

Research output: Contribution to conferenceOther

Abstract

Alice’s rescue of the baby-that-turns-into-a-pig also marks the moment of transition in understandings of children and animals, alongside and through Empire, models of the family and industrialisation. This paper draws on the contested crossovers and substitutions of child-animal relations in English history and law to highlight, in particular, how gender relations and women’s social position articulate both emerging technical (scientific) and popular cultural configurations of ‘child’, ‘animal’ and ‘nature’. The emergence of the girlchild as the touchstone of interiority and subjectivity not only underpinned the exclusionary teleology of the ‘great chain of being’, but its paradoxes as well as oppressions still thrive. Some historical and contemporary examples of repetitions and reformulations of child-animals relations, drawn from both cultural and welfare contexts, are explored as indicative of postcolonial political possibilities.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2013
EventDogs, Pigs and Children: Changing Laws in Colonial Britain, Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law - SOAS, University of London
Duration: 13 Sept 201313 Sept 2013

Conference

ConferenceDogs, Pigs and Children: Changing Laws in Colonial Britain, Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law
CitySOAS, University of London
Period13/09/1313/09/13

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