Adaptation studies has a kids problem

Abstract

While children’s books have proved fertile ground for the theorization of adaptation as process and product, adaptation studies has proved remarkably reluctant to explore the relationship between adaptation studies and childhood itself. This paper takes this hesitancy as its central focus, combining recent metacritical studies of adaptation and its theorization (Elliott 2018; 2020) with theory from the fields of children’s literature and childhood studies in order to demonstrate how adaptation studies has operated under what I will describe as the ‘anxiety of infantilization’. This paper will explore how this anxiety of infantilization manifests by engaging the work of three prominent scholars in the field—Deborah Cartmell, Thomas Leitch, and Kyle Meikle—and analysing the discourses of childhood that underpin their discussions of the relationship between adaptation and childhood. It will be my contention that existing discussions of the child and adaptation studies remain enmeshed in what Marah Gubar labels as ‘difference’ and ‘deficit’ models of childhood (2013; 2016), and that if we are ever to get out from under our anxiety of infantilization, we must find a way to Gubar’s third model: ‘kinship’ (ibid.).