Innocence, Protection and Failure: Bringing the Child Subject to the Centre of the Politics of the Family. A Response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson

Abstract

In response to Davies and Robinson's article looking at how queer families are positioned and position themselves in relation to neoliberalism, this article brings the child to the centre of the debate to examine how reading the child subject in terms of discourses of innocence and protection might work to maintain the hegemony of the normative -that is, heterosexual, nuclear -family, and close down discussions of alternative family structures. In exploring how the child subject is positioned in relation to these ideas, the article draws on Judith Butler's reworking of Adorno's notion of 'ethical violence' to suggest that the constraining of possibilities for the constitution of children's subjectivities by limiting their access to 'difficult knowledges' around sexuality can be read as a kind of violence to the child subject. Turning to the children's voices that emerge from Davies and Robinson's research, it argues that children's failure to enact the position of the innocent child can be seen as a productive or generative space from which to begin to question the terms of this specious positioning. Thus, the article suggests that both the acknowledgement of borderwork as ethically violent towards the child, and the failure of the child to conform to the discourse of innocence together work to destabilise the normative positioning of the heterosexual, nuclear family.Anxieties about constructions of the normative family -and queer challenges to it -often emerge in relation to anxieties about the child subject. In this response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson's (2013) article in this issue, I bring the child subject to the centre to explore the ways in which the constructions of this subject shape -and are shaped by -hegemonic discourses of the family. In doing so, I also explore how a discussion of the child subject in relation to the queer family might engender a critique of the normalising of the heterosexual family. Thus, while much of Davies and Robinson's (2013) article looks at how the adult is constituted as a neoliberal subject in relation to choices -around consumption, reproductive technologies, adoption, foster care and education -which works to render invisible the ways in which regulatory practices around sexuality engender discrimination, I begin to unpack how the normative western child subject at the heart of this text is constituted in relation to what Davies and Robinson (2013), following Silin, here and elsewhere call 'difficult knowledges'. I draw out of this discussion of the queer family a constellation of terms -innocence, protection and failure -through which I explore how a focus on the child within the queer family might work to unsettle the dominance of heteronormative family structures.In establishing the terms of their article, Davies and Robinson (2013) draw on the notion of the normative child as a figure that acts as a regulatory or disciplinary force, constraining the ways in which knowledge is produced and articulated for children, and the possibilities for children's subjec...