Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture

New Perspectives in Childhood Studies and Animal Studies

Anna Feuerstein, Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo, Anna Feuerstein, Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315386201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together new perspectives in childhood studies and animal studies, this book is the first collection to critically address the manifold alignments and frequent co-constitutions of children and pets in our families, our cultures, and our societies. The cultural politics of power shaping relationships between children, pets, and adults inform the wide range of essays included in this collection, as they explore issues such as protection, discipline, mastery, wildness, play, and domestication. The volume use the frequent social and cultural intersections between children and pets as an opportunity to analyze institutions that create pet and child subjectivity, from education and training to putting children and pets on display for entertainment purposes. Essays analyze legal discourses, visual culture, literature for children and adults, migration narratives, magazines for children, music, and language socialization to discuss how notions of nationalism, race, gender, heteronormativity, and speciesism shape cultural constructions of children and pets. Examining childhood and pethood in America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, this collection shows how discourses linking children and pets are pervasive and work across cultures. By presenting innovative approaches to the child and the pet, the book brings to light alternative paths toward understanding these figures, leading to new openings and questions about kinship, agency, and the power of care that so often shapes our relationships with children and animals. This will be an important volume for scholars of animal studies, childhood studies, children's literature, cultural studies, political theory, education, art history, and sociology.

Preface 1 Children and Animal “Pets”

Monica Flegel

Upon turning 30 and acquiring a cat, I found myself immediately bombarded, from all directions, with the warning that I was in danger of becoming that often-ridiculed figure of pity: the dreaded crazy cat lady. Naively, I felt that my (at the time) relatively young age and sole cat would not expose me to such accusations, but I was wrong: the line between proper womanhood and abject spinsterdom is apparently marked by the companionship of just one feline. This is true, at least, when those other markers of successful femininity—a partner, a child—are absent, which I discovered only by recognizing that a friend who had three cats and two dogs never faced any criticism for her menagerie. Her husband and children protected her from the ignominy of improper pet relations, demonstrating to me that a significant part of what designates the “crazy cat lady” is not her hoarding, nor her supposed anti-social isolation: it is, instead, her lack of reproductivity. She has made the fateful mistake of displacing progeny with pets, confusing her beloved animal with the culturally expected child.

Clearly, and despite the ubiquity of the linkage between children and animals as shared dependents within the family home as “pets” who play a shared, central role as “family-constituting beings” that ensure “the performance of the middle-class family’s purported raison d’être: nurturance” (Pearson 37), there is still a great deal of shame associated with this linkage. To supposedly mistake a pet for a child, or to wrongfully make a child a pet, is either to fail at achieving parenthood (still a large marker for success in our culture) or to fail at being a parent. This is true, even while our culture increasingly considers pets as part of the family: “More and more pet owners include pets in traditional family activities, including holiday gift exchanges, vacation (witness the rise in pet-friendly hotels!), play dates, dog camps, doggy daycare, indoor living, and high-end pet food” (Miller 91). Pets also play a growing role in divorce settlements, with some courts “willing to treat pets more like children” (McLain) as the hard-won objects of custody disputes. That an increasing construction of animals as children exists alongside a vigorous cultural policing of those who are judged to take this connection too far tells us that we are in the presence of an ideological contradiction, in which our definitions of the animal other occupy contrary and conflicting social positions. We may regularly and insistently link children and animals together, but we also register discomfort as we do so, protesting that the animal is just an animal and certainly not a child, all while being called “mommy” when we visit the vet (Miller 90).

James Kincaid has identified a similar contradiction in our social construction of childhood, one that he links to the historical development of childhood as a concept. Kincaid argues that even while we label the eroticization of childhood as monstrous, we also continually produce it in everyday popular culture. For him, this seemingly paradoxical position is explained by the fact that sexuality and childhood developed at the same time, and that, somewhere along the way, “they got mixed together. One somehow got implanted with the other, and it shouldn’t have happened” (52). I argue that childhood and pethood speak to a similar historical conflation with the child, the pet, and the nuclear family home all co-developing in the nineteenth century. Susan J. Pearson argues that, “Over the course of the nineteenth century, the legal and cultural status of both children and animals changed as each was transformed from an economic to a sentimental investment, from being adjuncts in the family economy to the center of familial affections” (28–29). And Kathleen Kete points out that in many ways pets were in fact the ideal child, because “Dogs were eternal children, captive outside of narrative, without a past, future, or a culture. Dogs were uniquely malleable and controllable, nineteenth-century authors insisted, ‘they live an eternal childhood, a minority without end’” (82). Both children and pets in the nineteenth century ensured that the middle-class home was operating as it should, with the dependent at the center of the family confirming the parents’ role as care-takers, providing a model for pet- and childhood that, for better or for worse, we have been employing ever since.

There is good reason to think that such a connection between children and companion animals is definitely for the worse: Donna Haraway speaks disparagingly of those who “love their dogs as children” (33), stating plainly that “[t]o regard a dog as a furry child, even metaphorically, demeans dogs and children …” (37). Her choice of “demeaning,” rather than “incorrect” or “inaccurate,” is telling, because it indicates that what makes the association between the two problematic is that both occupy disempowered and oppressed positions in adult, human society, and that each is diminished and lessened by association with the other. For example, to call an animal a “child” is to “contribute to the infantilization of animals in our care” (Miller 93). In so doing, we deny the life cycle of our animal companions, sometimes deliberately through spaying, neutering, and selective breeding that preserves the child-like appearance of pets, because it “suits human purpose … to breed animals such that they retain juvenile anatomical and behavioral traits through their entire life span” (Tuan 101, see also Melson 37–38). Theorist Yi-Fu Tuan points out that

the majority of Americans keep their dogs for only two years or less. In other words, for these Americans dogs are kept so long as they are playful, endearing, and asexual pups. When they grow to a size that makes their presence in the house problematical and, above all, when they begin to respond to the imperatives of their sexual nature, the temptation to destroy them increases. (88)

Furthermore, by calling companion animals our children, we fail to recognize (or we simply ignore) all the ways that they are not, particularly under the law. Pets might feel like family, but for all intents and purposes, they are often still chattel: as Alyce Miller notes,

The vet may well call my pets family, but the law refers to them as my property, pure and simple, just like a sofa or car. I can pretty much do whatever I want with my companion animals, as long as I do not blatantly violate the often rather minimal and toothless anti-cruelty statutes of Indiana …. I can leave them outside, tie them up, sell them, dump them at the shelter, put them in cages. The law would not allow me to do any of these things with my own offspring. (90)

Granting pets the status of “children,” then, may speak to a real and deep affection, but it also obscures the disposability and thinghood of animal companions within sentimental narratives of familial life.

If companion animals are “demeaned” by their connection to children, it is no less true that child proximity to the household pet likewise speaks to the contingent status of children, with the child only partly included in the status of human, the definitive representative of which is still the adult. Compared to adults, children are often constructed as savage, animalistic, and undeveloped: “Children are the animal human, the instinctual, untamed substrate that humanity shares with other species …. The core challenge of socialization is to channel these ‘animal’ urges toward human, civilizing ends. As Georges Bataille asked: ‘What are children if not animals becoming human?’” (Melson 35). And while children undoubtedly enjoy far greater legal protections than do non-human animals, the “chattel” status of the animal is not so separate from childhood as we might think. When researching the emergence of child protection laws, I was often confronted by those who wanted me to share their outrage that animals had received legal protections prior to children, a historical fact that, many believed, spoke to the lesser status of children in comparison to beloved pets. There is some basis for this, as theorists argue that the love we have from our animals is more uncomplicated than our love for our fellow humans: “… the overwhelming dimension of human need sometimes makes the task of reparation seem hopeless. Dog love is local love, passionate, often unmediated, virtually always reciprocated, fulfilling, manageable. Love for humans is harder … a child grows up and grows away; a lover becomes familiar, known, imperfect, taken for granted” (Garber 14). However, I argue that the earlier historical development of protection for animals does not speak to a cultural preference for animals over children; rather, the later development of child protection, modelled along the same lines of animal welfare, speaks instead to the animalization of children themselves; that is, they had to become more like animals, and less like humans, for such protectionist measures to develop. Welfare and protection, not to be confused with rights, are about preventing some forms of cruelty, while still supporting and protecting legitimate forms of violence, such as corporal punishment, discipline, and, in the case of animals, slaughter. Finally, like pets, children can find their status as petted dependents entirely revocable, as witnessed whenever a child commits a heinous enough act that they are denied the protective status of “child.”

But while the connection between children and animals speaks to a shared, if unequal, oppressed status in adult, human society, one that makes the connection between the two problematic for both, it speaks also to the complicated role they share within the family home as cherished dependents. Even those of us who are advocates of both animal and child rights recognize that both often (and in the case of pet animals, always) must be spoken for, represented by those who, we hope, have their best interests in mind. We love and care for both of them, recognizing that they have their own wills and personalities, while also struggling to figure out what agency they can have while still occupying the status of dependent. As well, our own ethical relations to both are complicated, for (arguably) underneath the desire to keep pets and to rear children lies, at least in part, selfishness and larger moral, and particularly, ecological issues. The very act of keeping pets requires that we “participate in a multi-billion-dollar industry that exploits other animals for veterinary medical research and pet food, and ultimately views animals as commodities in a large-scale business” (Miller 98). And while rearing children may be the most “natural” thing in the world (certainly from an evolutionary and biological-drive standpoint), it is not without its own political impetus: as Lee Edelman observes, “reproductive futurism” is a powerful force behind normative politics, with the “Child” as “the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” (3), and the embodiment of “the telos of the social order and … the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11). We are always “thinking of the children,” after all, whenever we deny or reject radical political upheaval and change.

The connection between companion animals and children, then, is far more than simply an occasion for shame or for an immersion into the sentimental: instead, it asks us to question who counts as a being with rights and status, and what it means to be a dependent in a world in which dependency is envisioned as always entailing a lesser status. The essays in this collection remind us to think about animal and child pethood as a complicated, varied, and politically fraught status, one that gets at the heart of family, interspecies relations, and social organization as a whole. We would do well to treat it, then, not as a subject of ridicule, but instead as a question that allows us to open up larger questions about personhood, dignity, and mutual relations of love and respect.

Works Cited

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2004. Print.

Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print.

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003. Print.

Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print.

McClain, Tabby. “Brief Summary of Pets in Divorce/Custody Issues.” Animal Legal and Historical Center. Michigan State University College of Law. Web. 26 Aug. 2015.

Melson, Gail F. Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.

Miller, Alyce. “Just Don’t Call Me ‘Mom’: Pros and Cons of a Family Law Model for Companion Animals in the U.S.” Humanimalia 2.2. (Spring 2011): 90–114. Print.

Pearson, Susan J. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011. Print.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984. Print.

Preface 2 On Childhood Studies and Human Exceptionalism

Kenneth Kidd

In “The Animal That Therefore I Am: More to Follow,” the first of several lectures he gave in 1997 addressing the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida speaks of his embarrassment one day when, emerging from a shower, he finds his cat staring at him: “I often ask myself, just to see, who I am – and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad time overcoming my embarrassment. Whence this malaise?” (3–4). This cat, he assures us, is a real cat. “It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables” (6). He continues:

“My” pussycat (but a pussycat never belongs) is not even the one who speaks in Alice in Wonderland. Of course, if you insist at all costs on suspecting me of perversity – always a possibility – you are free to understand or receive my emphasis on ‘really a little cat’ as a quote from chapter 11 of Through the Looking Glass. Entitled “Waking,” this penultimate chapter consists in a single sentence: “—it really was a kitten, after all”; or as one French translation has it: “and, after all, it really was a little black pussycat.”

Although I don’t have time to do so, I would of course have liked to inscribe my whole talk within a reading of Lewis Carroll. In fact, you can’t be certain that I am not doing that, for better or for worse, silently, unconsciously, or without your knowing. (7)

The Animal That Therefore I Am belongs to Derrida’s late work on ethics, sovereignty, and human exceptionalism. It’s a key theoretical text for critical animal studies of the posthumanist tradition especially. Derrida sees in Carroll’s Alice books an exploration of the nonhuman animal’s point of view and a potential challenge to human haughtiness. Such a perspective, he notes, is rare indeed, so determined are most human animals that “we” are the only sort who can speak and reason. Like a few philosophers such as Montaigne, Carroll calls into question the human-nonhuman animal hierarchy, even if in fantasy for children. After indulging Carroll’s cats, hedgehogs, and flamingos, however, Derrida concludes that Carroll stops short of a radical critique of human exceptionalism. Such a critique would have been difficult for anyone in Carroll’s day. It is difficult still. Going back to his own real cat, Derrida insists on its unknowable alterity, remarking that “what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized… . And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it” (9). It is a singular creature, not here “to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race” (9).

The posthumanist strain of animal studies with which Derrida is linked offers a useful reminder that childhood is no less a mysterious and singular affair. I find that childhood studies, like animal studies, is sometimes too invested in a humanist and thus human exceptionalist approach, one inattentive if not resistant to the politics of representation. Childhood studies is of course a complex and diverse undertaking, perhaps more an assemblage of methods and topics than a field per se, although its recent institutionalization at the level of graduate programs and various programs/centers may be moving it in that direction. Recent years have seen some terrific work emerge, notably Anna Mae Duane’s wide-ranging collection The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities. But historically, for better and for worse, childhood studies has been linked with advocacy for children’s rights and human rights more broadly. Sociologist Gertrud Lenzer, for instance, who co-founded and directed the Children’s Studies program and the Children’s Studies Center at Brooklyn College in the early 1990s, saw childhood studies as making “the ontological claim that children must be viewed in their fullness as human beings” (183). She and others sought a “holistic understanding of children” (often explicitly against the insights of poststructuralism) which would lead to their empowerment. Mary Galbraith has argued explicitly—and persuasively—for an “emancipatory” childhood studies approach to children’s literature, while ethicist John Wall promotes what he calls “childism.” These interventions are arguably strategic and necessary in a global culture that does not sufficiently value children, or value all children equally. My concern is that such language can lead us back to an uncritical humanism under and through which nonhuman animals will continue to suffer. Even the contemporary and very welcome focus on children’s agency in both childhood studies and children’s literature studies runs that risk. For all the parallels between children and “pets,” including the demeaning (and worse) of both, we cannot forget that some nonhuman animals—the not-pets—are raised and slaughtered on a massive scale under the banner of “animal agriculture.” Or that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Preface 1: Children and Animal “Pets”
• Preface 2: On Childhood Studies and Human Exceptionalism
• Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Childhood and Pethood
• SECTION I Family, Language, and Nationhood
• SECTION II Literature for Children and Adults
• SECTION III Music and Visual Culture
• List of Contributors
• Index