Childhood, Playing War, and Militarism: Beyond Discourses of Domination/Resistance and Towards an Ethics of Encounter

The military-industrial-entertainment complex is immensely powerful. War and peace are no longer highly differentiated zones in British and American societies. War has entered, uninvited, into our homes and taken up residence. Bourke, 2014: 12 Introduction Until relatively recently, the notion that children could be considered meaningful political actors was rarely considered within either academic studies or more generally in public discourse (see Beier, 2015). This chapter seeks to argue that, in part, this has been because of the ways in which political acts, (in this case, specifically resistance), have come to be defined and understood. Hughes (2020) has recently argued for a re-thinking of what counts as resistance, not least in relation to the ‘logic of intention’ that has, to date, formed a central part in its definition. When conceived only as an intentional act, with pre-determined outcomes and goals, it is difficult to recognize the potential capacity of children enacting such political agency. Here we use the example of children playing with war toys as one means of thinking differently about their political agency in general and their ability to enact resistance in particular. The study of popular culture and global politics has also suffered at times from an unwillingness to ascribe political agency to the consumers of various forms of popular culture, and studies have frequently taken as their starting point that the power-laden ideological meanings of any given cultural text or artefact are capable of overwhelming audiences and consumers (for critiques of these positions, see Sharp, 2000; Dittmer and Gray, 2010). With regard to both the political lives of children and the politics of popular culture, there is a sense that the task of the critical academic is to uncover or decode the ways in which the lives of children, on the one hand, or the political lives of audiences and consumers, on the other, are overwhelmed or dominated by powerful external others. Resistance is sometimes offered as a possibility for critical or knowing audiences with regard to forms of popular culture, but it rarely features in accounts of the ways in which childhood and the political intersect. We briefly return to this theme in the conclusion.

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