Childhood in Literature, Media and Popular Culture

Literary, media and popular texts are a powerful means by which the broad category of childhood is constructed, maintained, protected and challenged. Whether cultural texts are produced for children or about them, their depictions of childhood provide important resources for those interested in exploring the logics and practices through which contemporary childhoods are imagined, produced and experienced. In recent years, scholars have considered how representations of children and childhood in cultural texts contribute to shared understandings and normative discourses about children’s place in the social world (Burman, 2008; Khan, 2009; Saltmarsh, 2011). Of course, representations of childhood and the discourses in which they are implicated are neither determined nor fixed. As Alan Prout points out, globalising forces in the latter half of the twentieth century have brought about economic, social and technological changes that have in turn been implicated in destabilising the representation of childhood as a coherent and knowable category: Traditional ways of representing childhood in discourse and in image no longer seemed adequate to its emerging forms. New ways of speaking, writing and imaging children are providing new ways of seeing them… These new representations construct children as more active, knowledgeable and socially participative than older discourses allowed. They are more difficult to manage, less biddable and hence are more troublesome and troubling. (Prout, 2005, p. 7) Giroux & Pollock echo these observations, arguing in relation to childhood in the United States that ‘[c]hildren are now seen as both troubled and troubling, as the perspective of the country shifts from viewing children as a social investment to seeing them as threats to be contained or punished’ (Giroux & Pollock, 2010, p. 21). For some, the pervasiveness of media and popular culture in the lives of children worldwide contributes to what is seen as an erosion of childhood innocence and imagination, producing instead new generations of individualistic, street-wise and tech-savvy young consumers whose identities rest on interaction through mediated images, online social networks and access to globally distributed commodities. For others, children’s safety and sanctity appear threatened because of a belief in the rise of children’s exposure to violence in the media, and because of the sexualisation and commercialisation of childhood and youth (Furedi, 2002). In response, some scholars identify both of these perspectives as moral panics that are overly reliant on nostalgic, idealised versions of childhood that overlook the complexities and ambiguities of everyday life for the majority of the world’s children (Robinson, 2008; Robinson & Davies, 2008; Kehily, 2010). Yet it is precisely these complexities and ambiguities that, despite moral panics

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