The Dialectics of Oppressions: Resisting the Negation of Childhood through Violence (original) (raw)

Mighty Mother, Mightier Child: Interrogating Oppressive Temporalities and Punishment in

Narratives of Criminality, Punishment and Social Justice in Children’s and Young Adult’s Literature, 2022

In The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature, Clémentine Beauvais asserts that “[c]hildren and adults draw their imagined otherness relative to one another from the fact that they have overlapping but distinct temporalities”(18). She makes use of Nikolajeva’s concept of “aetonormativity” in analyzing the dynamics of power within the adult-child dyad, wherein the child possesses the latent potentialities of the future while the adult is “the owner of a longer time past with its accumulated baggage of experience” and adds that “[to] be mighty is to have more time left, to be authoritative is to have more time past”(19). In this paper, we have attempted to interrogate the ways in which the adult endeavors to contain and assert control over the “temporal otherness” of the child through punishment, surveillance, and coercion. We have analyzed the depiction of such control through the use of repressive technologies in the following media– Disney and Pixar’s 2022 film Turning Red, the episode “Arkangel” from the Netflix series Black Mirror, and the episodes “Mother’s Remote” and “The Last Day of Molly” from On Children. All of these narratives share a common thread of depicting an overprotective mother figure, herself imprisoned by her Sartrean “Bad Faith”, imposing repressive control over the child, that the child breaks out of, through death or some other form of metamorphosis. The presence of inter-generational trauma and cyclical temporalties in these narratives are also analyzed. Keywords: Punishment, Temporality, Surveillance, Aetonormative, Repressive Technology Works Cited Beauvais, Clémentine. The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015. Nikolajeva, Maria. “Theory, post-theory, and aetonormative theory.” Neohelicon, vol. 36, no. 1, 2009, pp. 13-24.

Stuck in Suffering: A Philosophical Exploration of Violence

Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2022

This article considers and evaluates some of the elastic applications of the term 'violence'. Some of the most well-known applications are structural, symbolic, epistemic, psychosocial, and linguistic violence. Should these phenomena be understood as violence-proper or are these merely provocative hyperbole? Some scholars are openly resistant to these elastic applications, arguing that calling these phenomena 'violence' is no more than conceptual carelessness. The question we are interested in is why people continue to be drawn to the image of violence to typify certain phenomena that cause suffering. We identify that it is the temporal extension (i.e. the experiential duration) of the experience of stuckedness in suffering that unifies these conditions. In close, we offer some reflections on the relationship of law to (what is called) violence and where it can mitigate stuckedness.

On Childhood and Violence

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1998

I suppose most people have an opinion on the subject of childhood and violence, but few people have an informed opinion. It is a bit intimidating standing here to realize that some of the people with informed opinions are probably in this room. I am not an expert and in many ways it feels a presumption to give this lecture. I think all I can do is to offer you my observations on what is, I suppose, the most notorious case of childhood violence in recent years, that of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, whose month-long trial for murder in Preston, as Ann has said, I attended four years ago this month. I want, in effect, to tell you a story. I'm encouraged in this by noticing how often, in books of psychotherapy-those few I have read-and indeed in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, a narrative of some kind (usually a case history) is used to illustrate some theoretical point. I hope to weave in my thoughts and conclusions as I go along, but there is just one thing I would like to emphasize at the beginning. The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child recognizes the right of every child alleged as, accused of or recognized as having infringed the penal law to be treated in a manner consistent with the promotion of the child's sense of dignity and worth... and which takes into account the child's age and the desirability of promoting the child's reintegration and the child's assuming a constructive role in society. Naively, perhaps, I went to that trial in Preston with some such underlying assumption of good will, imagining that all those professionally involved with the Bulger case-lawyers, social workers, teachers, police officers, journalists and psychiatrists-would want to elucidate the circumstances and the motives of that terrible crime, and would constantly have in mind the reintegration and the rehabilitation of the children involved. I was wrong. Few of them did. This was an adult murder trial, with the two ten-year-old boys at its centre viewed by all but a few there as practised and cunning adult criminals. Hence, I think, most of our thinking about this case has been badly skewed from the start. A reminder of the circumstances. The two boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, truanting from school on the Friday before the February half-term, had enticed the toddler James Bulger away from his mother, walked with him for over two miles to a railway line, and there, as darkness fell, with bricks and an iron bar, battered him to death. The body was found two days later, severed by a passing train. Video images from the shopping centre security camera had captured the abduction on film. The poet and journalist BLAKE MORRISON is author of the memoir And when did you last see your father? and of As If, a quest for the`Why' of the killing of James Bulger.