# data[].attributes.body
1. Madeline Lane-McKinley writes, "With innocence as its baseline, the liberal idea of children seeks to make natural (but also to moralize) a property relation between child and parent. 'Innocence' Is code for powerless -- a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human" (41).

2. Madeline Lane-Mckinley writes, "The child's imagination is one of the most vital modes we have for the project of ideologically disrupting capitalist realist epistemologies -- confronting the rationalist rebukes of liberalism that systematically infantilize revolutionary politics" (42).

3. Jules Gill-Peterson sites Franz Fanon, stating that he "deploys psychoanalysis in Black Skin, White Masks to, among other reasons, demonstrate how the inferiority complex of the colonized subject is manufactured by rigging the game in advance from childhood, or better yet, as childhood. Implanting in the colonized child an ideal of Western subjectivity, from which they are materially barred, means any program for decolonization will, as The Wretched of the Earth elaborates, depend on inventing a wholly different political education" (44).

4. Jules Gill-Peterson gives context to the figure of the child: "The very notion of care naturalizes the material and psychic dehumanization of children as fundamentally inferior people undeserving of respect. Perhaps unbelievably, the many harms done to children in the name of care are conventionally rationalized as part of loving them. This historical domestication of children is a record of primitive accumulation: the sexualizing and racializing practices that have robbed them of their bodies, minds, and souls, covered over by the idolatry of that squeaky-clean thing we call the child" (44).

# data[].attributes.body
Post 4 quotes from each of the texts on the child and childhood - which you read for yesterday's class and for today - that attracted your attention!

1. When you find quotes, copy or type the into the Padlet in a separate post-it (write your name on the top).
2. While inserting your chosen quotes in quotation marks indicate the page(s) of the Course Reader.
3. Frame your quotes - please ensure that the frame is linked to the quote in a grammatically correct way and with the correct punctuation.
4. When you are done, read over what your colleagues have contributed so far.
5. Comment of each of your peer's posts.

# data[].attributes.body
1. The author says, "Family and school together removed the child from adult society." (p 38)
2. The author argues, "Children come into this world, inspiringly,
without an ideology of property relations, yet with an undeniable need to be cared for." (p41)
3. The author assumes, "Little reaches more nauseating contradiction in the colonial and capitalist present than
the putative care for children." (p44)
4. The author says, "I had been made to forget her, or to think that she never existed
and had to be invented in adulthood, and I am grateful to have been reunited." (p46)

# data[].attributes.body
1)The author claims: "the concept of family, the concept of class, and perhaps elsewhere the concept of race, appears as manifestation of the same intolerance towards variety, and same insistence on uniformity"(Ariès, 40). We can see this intolerance in a lot of the points the author made throughout, for example the "monopoly" of education where the idea of class penetrated throughout the education system when the middle class family ceased to accept the mixing of children from different classes in the same schools.

2)After discussing the contrast between the idealized idea of children and vilified idea of adulthood, the author supported their claim that adulthood is guilty, complicit, and flawed by adding on that "implicit in this idea of adulthood is a version of neoliberal 'self sufficiency': the promise of an autonomous, market-mediated individualism, whose lack of social resources is a mark if independence" (Lane-McKinley, 41)

3)The author argues that "although the family form continues to be the primary intimate site of patriarchal and sexual violence, it is also among the only institutions left to shield against the onslaught of capitalist crises and state violence" (Gill-Peterson, 46).

4)Simone De Beauvoir consolidated his argument that boys' privilege of having a penis led to girls' so-called "penis envy" by concluding that "the great privilege that the boy gets from it is that as he is bestowed with an organ that can be seen and held, he can at least partially alienate himself in it" (De Beauvoir, 58).

# data[].attributes.body
Centuries of Childhood, Philippe Aries
1. The author explains the development of the idea of childhood as separate from adulthood, stating, "Henceforth it was recognized the child was not ready for life, and that he had to be subjected to a special treatment... before he was allowed to join the adults." (pp. 37).

The Idea of Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley
2. The author's first key proclamation is that "This idea of the child is indistinct from private property." (pp. 41)
The Child, Jules Gill-Peterson
3. A moving quote from "The Child" on page 46 is her description of a home movie featuring herself, in which she is shocked to see herself as she is now; "...me: loud, feminine, and impossibly confident, speaking and gesturing in exactly the ways I still do."
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
4. The first sentence of this chapter of The Second Sex powerfully states, "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman." (pp. 48).

# data[].attributes.body
In the first selection of the reader, the concluding chapter of Alfred A. Knopf's Centuries of Childhood, the author's observation about the rising concern for children's education that began to grow in the 17th century for education intrigues me. They write, "this new concern about education would gradually install itself in the heart of society and transform it from top to bottom. The family ceased to be simply an institution for the transmission of a name and an estate -- it assumed a moral and spiritual function, it moulded bodies and souls"  (Knopf, cr37). This is an excellent starting point to the later authors' discussion about the category of childhood because it situates historically the growth of moralistic and disciplinary education which became enmeshed with, and to a degree arose from, the romantic idea of "the child" as innocent property; a tabula rasa upon which the future moral fabric of society can be etched, but which is also inevitably corrupted into complicity with the material world. Knopf's observation about the disciplinary character of education highlights its liminality between the ideals of private, innocent family life and the busy importance of public existence; where the self-policing and conformity necessary for socialization into an ideal member of broader society are instilled, where within a tightly regimented disciplinary environment, the child's identity under the gaze of their peers is explored and their first relationships to institutional authority are formed.

In The Idea of Children, Madeline Lane-McKinley describes how the perfect category of "the child" is deployed politically, and tries to form an alternative politics regarding children in order coherently counter the lodging of conservative ideology within concern for the welfare of children. They arrive at a description of a "crisis of care," a condition intensified by the conflicts between earning money and practicing care, arising from the realities of neoliberal economics. "With the dissolution of the family wage, this ‘care crisis’ must be understood more systemically [...] The focus on care presents an opportunity for broadening and making legible a politics of family abolition.
However, this opportunity will be missed without a keen sense of the demands of care, particularly the labors performed seemingly out of love under social conditions of No Alternative" (Lane-McKinley, cr42). The author's wording of this last sentence struck me particularly. The work of social reproduction, of initiating children into the complexities of human existence, guiding them towards prosocial behaviors, attending to their emotional development -- the time and space for this intensely personal labor to occur are continually marginalized by the demands of society on the economic labor of parents. Sometimes the labors performed "seemingly out of love" push the limits of peoples' capabilities; one's own life is brought into comparison with idealized normalcy. To admit that one has been pushed near or beyond their capacity to care for their own child by the impossible dual demands of economic sufficiency and ideal forms of caretaking comes into direct conflict with the expectations of ourselves -- laid upon us by others and often formatively internalized in the disciplinary environment of the education system -- that we ought to be "good people," and so the half-truths which constitute our ideal selves must be acted out continually and with a titanic effort which is only possible in the desperation of one's fear for the extinction of their own redeeming qualities. There is No Alternative, Lane-McKinley says in reference to the dominance of neoliberal economics, in recognition of capitalist realism -- but there is also no alternative to social reproduction. It is quite literally essential to the survival of a society and ostensibly the end to which all our social labors are oriented. There is No Alternative because the alternative is death; of our own internal selves in the present, of the afterlives borne out in our legacies, and of our entire societies.

Jules Gill-Peterson describes in The Child the same ideal category which Madeline Lane-MicKinley describes, but from a more overtly personal angle which focuses on the role that psychoanalysis plays in the formation and perpetuation of the child category, especially in the context of colonial legacies of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. In their second paragraph, they write, "childhood may be one of the only socially degraded statuses that, in theory, every person passes through. No wonder, then, that psychoanalysis should have discovered the apparent amnesia about it in adults. Somehow, once it becomes memory, we ironically cannot remember what it really felt like to be children in the present tense.[2] (To which we might respond, of course, who would want to remember that?) But in truth, we know that many groups of people are structurally deprived of anything like a childhood in the first place, or they experience infantilization throughout their lives. These are two of the many denials effected by the ideology of the child. Childhood is only shared retrospectively by those adults who made it out" (Gill-Peterson, cr44). This passage stood out to me because it describes the distance between our adult selves of the present and our child-selves of the past, which can sometimes be magnified by the idea of ideal childhood but more often is grimly foreshortened. This foreshortening arises either from the feeling of having been brought to adulthood too soon by harsh realities or cruel twists of fate, or alternatively by having one's adult political imagination and aspirations deemed irresponsible, foolish, fanciful, and unrealistic -- by having one's political agency blunted by infantilization. Initially I wondered about how this argument related to the author's criticism of idealizing the innocence of childhood, while it seemed to take for granted the sense of a premature loss of such innocence, or more accurately, the early and acute realization of the precarity of life, that our worlds are in fact deeply subject to dispassionate and even malicious forces far beyond our personal ability to control or change. They problematize it mostly insofar as it relates to disparities in social privilege, which is a fair criticism. It is one thing to grasp such precarity in the context of a universe governed by cause-and-effect which defies narrative explanation and looks to us so much like chaos, and quite another to apprehend that one is being specifically targeted by the old and cruel projects of large groups of people, and abandoned by the callousness of even larger groups.
I was also struck particularly by how Gill-Peterson ended their essay. The exploration by the adult of their own past selves reminds us that despite the projects of socialization, the society which configures and delimits the self, which creates the conditions under which our own family relationships must exist before we are even able to speak -- despite the distance created by all these factors over time, no one can truly leave behind behind the selves they once were.

This topic of the development of self is described in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and is particularly well summarized by their description of the origin of the self-image: "fleeing his freedom and subjectivity, [the child] would like to lose himself within the Whole: here is the origin of his cosmic and pantheistic reveries, of his desire for oblivion, sleep, ecstasy, and death. He never manages to abolish his separated self: at the least he wishes to achieve the solidity of the in-itself, to be petrified in thing; it is uniquely when he is fixed by the gaze of others that he appears to himself as a being. It is in this vein that the child’s behavior has to be interpreted: in a bodily form he discovers finitude, solitude, and abandonment in an alien world; he tries to compensate for this catastrophe by alienating his existence in an image whose reality and value will be established by others. It would seem that from the time he recognizes his reflection in a mirror—a time that coincides with weaning—he begins to form his identity[2]: his self merges with this reflection in such a way that it is formed only by alienating itself" (Beauvoir, cr48). The tensions between wholeness and individuation, which arise in this stage of life are enduring features of the human condition and our relationships to them can become foundational to our identity. The first line in particular stuck out to me -- that we undertake our projects of self-creation "fleeing [our] freedom and subjectivity," things we ostensibly reach for in the process of growing up.

# data[].attributes.body
1- Madeline Lane-McKinley ," The Idea of
Children"
the writer here claims that, "Innocence is code for powerless — a way to fetishize the child as both dependent and sub-human.
(page41)
2-"Jules Gill-Peterson  "the child
the writer here claims that "Childhood may be one of the only socially degraded statuses that, in theory, every person passes through. No wonder, then, that psychoanalysis should have
discovered the apparent amnesia about it in adults
(page 44)
3-"Simone de beauvoir "the second sex
the author says here that "Many boys, frightened by the harsh independence they are condemned to, thus desire to be girl"
(page 51)