The Future and the Fetish: Children, Climate Distress, and Disability in Richard Powers’s Bewilderment

Building on previous accounts of the figure of the child, this essay attends to how that figure is generally constituted within environmental discourse, and, more specifically, in Richard Powers’s Bewilderment. The child has two faces in this reading, as alternately extraordinary and endangered, resilient and imperiled, in a way that reflects a wider cultural imaginary through which the figure of the child is often refracted. If the child as savior often serves both to alleviate adult anxieties about the climate crisis and to exculpate adults for their failure to act in the face of that crisis, representations of the endangered child often subordinate concerns about environmental futures to preoccupations about the continued viability of the dominant family form. Even as this essay explores the fetishistic function of the child, what remains at stake in this exploration are the interests of real children, as well as the possibilities of more-than-human futures.