Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 36

Analysing the effects on childhood of race, gender and class as both cultural categories and material structures in ways that allow meaningful statements to be made about childhood in its global context is fraught with difficulty. To say that class affects children’s life chances on a global scale seems uncontentious enough; and yet even UNICEF’s 2006 report on Excluded and Invisible Children does not use the language of class to describe economic inequality and its manifestation in inequalities in health and education. Similarly, in the same report, although ethnicity and gender are both mentioned as lines of social difference that affect life chances, we find no talk of racism or sexism but are told that ‘the root causes of exclusion are poverty, weak governance, armed conflict and HIV/AIDS’ (UNICEF 2006: 11). If these are the root causes of exclusion, then how can we explain their tendency to be unequally distributed by race, gender and class?

I have argued in this chapter that race and gender remain salient in the formation of cultural identity and access to resources, both material and symbolic. The tendency of governments and international bodies to discursively deny the continuing salience of these social categories is congruent with the emptying out by neo-liberal states and the international system (manifested through international bodies and regulations) of the political sphere and its replacement by economic criteria. In short, we are left with individual answers to social questions: poverty becomes a matter of individual failure or success, while race is reduced to cultural expression (hence its substitution by ethnicity), and both ethnic and gender discrimination are blamed on outmoded ideas left over from semi-feudal pasts. If such a view of inequality as being essentially outside of modernity were accepted, then, of course, there would be no need to speak of childhood in the plural. However, what I have tried to show in this chapter is that class structures children’s lives (its effects are not simply haphazard or unpredictable) but class is experienced by raced and gendered subjects. These social categories are not outside of modernity; they are constitutive of modernity (Goldberg 2001), understood here as (global) capitalism. Indeed race, gender and class overdetermine childhood. That is to say, the model of childhood that is usually described as being a ‘Western’ model or a Western/contemporary model is not only specific to a particular space and time, it is also specific to a particular class, race and gender. In other words, the model child is in some respects more accurately the model bourgeois white boy. However, even this recognition of the specificity of the ideal of contemporary global childhood does not quite capture the ways that race, gender and class overdetermine childhood because, in fact, the childhood envisaged in this model, above all its innocence of political calculation and economic interest, can no more be true of a white middle-class boy than it can be true of a Black working-class girl (to make the point in its most Manichean form). Indeed, once childhood is seen as a racialized, gendered and classed position, the notion of childhood as having the possibility of being innocent, in the sense of existing outside of the symbolic and material nexus of political economy, has to be abandoned entirely (Wells 2018).