Technologies of ‘the child’: Towards a theory of the child‐subject

This article argues that ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ function as points of aporia and anxiety in the field of subject theory and it outlines the possibilities for a theory of the ‘child‐subject’. The paper describes the current historical moment as one of ‘child panic’, outlines existing scholarship on constructions of childhood, points to the blindness of theory to the foundational category of ‘the child’, suggests how some of poststructuralist theory's insights can be turned to the question of ‘the child’, and asks what light a consideration of the ‘child‐subject’ can shed on emerging theories of citizenship. It concludes by drawing a parallel between late nineteenth‐century anxieties regarding childhood ‘white slavery’ and current instances of child panic, suggesting that ‘the child’ becomes a site of increased anxiety and surveillance in response to the dismantling of the humanist subject by, e.g., evolutionary theory, early psychoanalytic theory, or poststructuralist theories of the subject. The paper is informed by the following questions: what kinds of activities does an idea of ‘the child’ authorize? and what kinds of symbolic management does an idea of ‘the child’ enable?