Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes?RachelRosenKatherineTwamley (eds) London: UCL Press, 2018, ISBN 9781787350649, 285pp., £40 (hb)

At the present moment, more than ever before, the figure of the child is increasingly visible within the arenas of politics and policy. Yet, children, commonly assumed to be vulnerable and unreasonable, continue to be excluded from decisions about their very future. The responsibility for managing the child’s assumed vulnerability also falls on the mother or other women in care-giving capacities, who are themselves positioned within complex matrices of power and subjugation. The particular dialectic of the woman and the child therefore is one that is marked by several conceptual and practical entanglements that warrant attention. Feminism and the Politics of Childhood: Friends or Foes? Is a timely intervention that unpacks this fraught relationship. Troubling the binary relation implied in the subtitle, the authors in this volume imagine the relationship between women and children in ways that encourage ‘generous encounters’ across these lines. A central analogy invoked by the editors, therefore, is that of ‘borderlands’ or ‘boundary crossings’—dialogues in the liminal spaces between childhood studies and women’s studies, academia and ‘publics’, and across different and situated cultural contexts globally—importantly invoking Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1987) post-colonial feminist concept. Extending the de-colonial impulse of shifting epistemic structures, the volume offers a number of lenses through which to understand not only the woman-child dialectic, but also the volume itself. Thus, we have three overarching sections: The first, ‘Tense Encounters: Gender and Generation’, is a conceptual journey through the ways in which reciprocities and divergences are created between women and children with specific references, for example, to the bedroom tax in the UK, community-based organising by Grassroots Women in Vancouver, Canada, and community homes in Bogotá, Columbia, among others. The second, ‘Life’s Work’ is centred on specific examples like Indigenous Opokaa’sin kinship structures, Conditional Cash Transfers in Argentine social programmes and care labour in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam, to open up the connections between life, love and labour that define those positioned as ‘women’ and ‘children’. Finally, ‘Political Projects and Movement Building’ explores the challenges ahead and suggests ways forward towards imagining meaningful and egalitarian relations between and for women and children based on examples like early childhood education in Indonesia, responses to domestic violence in England and representations of ‘vulnerable girls’ in the Too Young To Wed photo exhibit. Moreover, beyond these three overarching sections, there are other themes that underpin the volume. For example, while reading the volume, one could keep in mind ‘a relational lens’ that challenges the liberal concept of the autonomous individual and looks instead at social relations as ‘simultaneously ones of love, reciprocity, oppression, struggle and exploitation’ (10). Further, in pushing the boundaries of how we perceive woman and child relations, the editors potently use the ocular metaphors of ‘looking in’, ‘looking out’, ‘looking back’, ‘widening the frame’ and ‘breaking away’. Finally, the contributions themselves offer a range of alternative ‘concept-metaphors’ arising from firmly situated experiences. Rachel Thomson and Lisa Baraitser, for example, suggest the concept of ‘weaning’ to understand a mutual and gradual separation of the mother and child (and consequently women’s studies and childhood studies) but in a way that acknowledges their relationality or ‘the potentiality to become two’ (69), another equally evocative (albeit borrowed) concept-metaphor. Gina Crivello and Patricia Espinoza-Revollo use Janna Thompson’s concept of ‘temporal vulnerability’ to draw attention to the way vulnerability is experienced, and care-relations enacted accordingly, through various phases of one’s life-course. Erica Burman suggests a ‘struggle-in-relation’ which focuses on the structural and material conditions that construct the binaries of ‘woman and child’ or ‘feminisms and childhoods’, along with usefully borrowing the concept of ‘growing sideways’ from disability and queer theories. This volume holds a wide appeal—speaking on the one hand to activists, policy-makers and governmental and non-governmental organisations concerned about issues related to childhood and gender, and on the other, to academic disciplines like childhood studies, women’s and gender studies, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, sociology and politics. The paucity of children’s voices in such a volume is certainly an unfortunate limitation—one that the editors are explicit about. Perhaps, volumes such as these can further foster dialogues between feminist research ethics, qualitative methods developed within childhood studies along with more localised knowledge about inter-generational interactions to device ethical and meaningful ways of engaging with child-participants in research.

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