Rearticulating nationalist maternalism in and against global child rights discourse: a Child as method analysis

This paper focuses on a particular case of contested child custody between a mother and the Norwegian state that became a transnational cause célèbre in 2011 and more recently the subject of a Hindi language film (Mrs Chatterjee vs. Norway, directed by Ashima Chibber, Zee Studios 2023). Using this example to explore Nordic parenting, a key interpretive frame is identified: Child as method. Using this, discourses of gender, class/caste, culture, family and nation are shown to be both interrogated and consolidated by the transnational and national dispute, compromise and apparent resolution. It is argued that, while the clash between seemingly universal child rights and particular familial cultural practices destabilizes received gender and familial norms, only focusing on these risks occluding dominant institutional surveillance and regulatory practices around children—including such institutions as the law, psychiatry and psychology. Beyond the prevailing transnational binaries at play, this case helps pose wider questions about how parenting practices figure within the current cultural and political economies of nationalisms and corresponding geopolitics.