"we need the child's body to write the triumph of revolution"

[mwb]

Continuing the discussion from Discussion: Child as Material with Mary Walling Blackburn, November 15th at e-flux:

Discussion: Child as Material with Mary Walling Blackburn, November 15th at e-flux

Beatriz Balanta continued this query, in regards to the use value of the child:
we need the child’s body to write the triumph of the revolution.
I begin to amalgamate examples of revolutions writ in child bodies…children as incorporated into the hippi commune, Post WW2 cultural revolutions structured through trauma (kinderladen and kibbutzim)…and so on.

The kinderladen and kibbutzim are particularly salient examples of the use value of the child, from the Frankfurt anti-authoratarian parent’s collective rising out of the social remains of post WW2 Germany to the shift in Israeli collective communities after the war. The child body is determined by larger social forces in both the inception and remains of both of these ideological convolutions.

[eseemege]

This conversation always makes me think of the film Los Herederos by Mexican filmmaker Eugenio Poglovsky, which looks at the relationship between children and work in a range of circumstances. The children working never seem weak, abused or victimised, they are just part of the engine that keeps the family afloat. The camera is at their eye level, their voices guide the narrative. Their families live in the countryside and need help running their farms, or making crafts to sell, or collecting crops in other people’s fields. Is it child labor when children are labouring alongside their family for mutual survival? Are children the working class heroes of the rural class or the typical poor family in the undeveloped world?

This film is about the inheritors of this world, and in this depiction the child’s body is strong, wilful and cooperative. The child’s ability and disposition to work are the promise of a better life and a steadier income for the family unit.

[k_math]

Images circulating on the internet of youth practicing parkour in devastated Palestinian communities caught my eye last week, and seem to suggest resilience in this war-torn area. Professionally shot photos of children twisting, flipping, and jumping over the rubble of bombed out and destroyed buildings seem to utilize the child’s body as a mechanism to dance over the destruction, as an instrument to write in triumph and erase catastrophe.

Business Insider featured such a story in October with the headline “7 Incredible Pictures Of Kids Turning A War Zone Into A Playground”

These stories and images use the child’s body to rewrite a story of devastation into one of triumph. The U.N. claims that 7 out of 10 killed in Gaza were Palestinian civilians, with a total of 495 children dead.

While the resilience of children in war-torn areas is astounding, one must ask how Business Insider, Buzzfeed, and others producing similar media, might benefit from using the child’s body in this manner; while it is certainly click-bait, it also seems to perpetuate the idea that the child and the people will triumph no matter how much destruction and devastation occurs. In the headline alone, we see the author give children the agency to transform their surroundings into a Western invention of childhood fun and play. In reality, these children are simply being children: finding space to play no matter the circumstances, while adult outsiders assign meaning and symbol to their actions.

[dxb]

I enjoyed your post. Late to the discussion but I thought of research in the history of childhood which emphaszies that the modern idea of children as being different fundamentally than adults, as having in their own way of living (boys will be boys, etc), is different from another idea of children as small adults. I think there’s even a way that clothing changed to reflect this shift in European history, from adult clothing in a small size to specialized children clothing. Difference in quantity not in quality or kind.