Becoming Child/Becoming Dress

Taking an example of play as a point of departure, the author marks out why children's bodies have become tricky subjects often demanding the night watchman of repression. Following Foucault and Butler, she foregrounds the interrelationship between desire, the lived performances of bodies and the sometimes shattering consequences of those frames of containment in which we inscribe children, including ‘girl’ and ‘boy’. The article then moves on to question whether Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation of ‘becoming’ offers a radical means for dismantling manifestations of the body, and in so doing, provides me with a space to consider alternative practices in relation to children and their bodies.