The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19th Century

This edited collection contends that the figure of the child is foundational to the workings of biopolitical power yet remains undertheorized. The study of nineteenth-century biopolitics offers a theoretical framework that promises to increase our understanding of how modern democracies manage their subjects. Recent scholarship has invigorated interrogations into forms of state governance that operate at the level of population, a biological phenomenon defined as a group of individuals linked by racialized fictions of biological commonality. This collection seeks to recognize and position critical childhood studies as essential to these interrogations. The essays theorize the role of representations of children and childhood as tools of biopolitical governance in America in the long nineteenth century. They variously explore how the interrelated and overlapping qualities integral to our understandings of the child and childhood are readily deployed by biopolitical power. The collection is organized into three sections that illustrate how these qualities enable the sorting of human beings into populations targeted for reform, exploitation, and disposal.

Lucia Hodgson is Researcher in History in the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University in Sweden. She has published widely on nineteenth-century childhood, including in Early American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, and Journal of Juvenilia Studies. She is currently at work on the book project, Taking Liberties: Slavery and the American Seduction Narrative under contract with SUNY Press. She is the recipient of a Swedish Research Council Project Grant (2024-27) for her study, ＂New Sweden Texas: Swedish Settlers and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Texas.＂ She is co-founder and co-editor of Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project.

Allison Giffen is a professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in the English Department at Western Washington University where she specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture with an emphasis in disability, race, and childhood. She has published in such academic journals as Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Legacy, Women’s Studies, and ATQ and recently co-edited Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature. She is co-founder and co-editor of Critical Childhood Studies: A Long 19C Digital Humanities Project.