The Embodied Child The Embodied Child: Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture is an innovative and timely collection of essays that offers rich analyses of children’s bodies as they are constructed in literature and popular cul- ture. In this ground-breaking work, editors Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola have brought together some of the most renown scholars in childhood studies who each delve into the complex ways children and their physical form are represented literature. Each chapter introduces readers to the subject through a distinctive lens, whether it be queer, racial, gendered, or those that are less often discussed, this book makes a long-needed contribution to discussions of the body and the child. Roxanne Harde is Professor of English and Associate Dean (Research) at the Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta, Canada. Lydia Kokkola is Head of English and Education at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Children’s Literature and Culture Jack Zipes, Founding Series Editor Philip Nel, Current Series Editor For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com. New Directions in Children’s Gothic Debatable Lands Edited by Anna Jackson More Words About Pictures Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People Edited by Perry Nodelman, Naomi Hamer, and Mavis Reimer Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture New Perspectives on Childhood Studies and Animal Studies Edited by Anna Feuerstein and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo Origin Narratives The Stories We Tell Children about Immigration and Interracial Adoption Macarena Garcia Gonzales Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity Maria Truglio The Beloved Does Not Bite Moral Vampires and the Humans Who Love Them Debra Dudek Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults Edited by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen The Embodied Child Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture Edited by Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola The Embodied Child Readings in Children’s Literature and Culture Edited by Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Roxanne Harde and Lydia Kokkola to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-08156-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10126-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra To Bristol, the busiest little body a grandma could hope for. —Roxanne In memory of my parents, Jean and David, whose bodies created my own. —Lydia This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures xi Acknowledgments xiii The Embodied Child: An Introduction 1 Ly d i a Ko K Ko L a 1 Anne’s Body Has a Mind (and Soul) of Its Own: Embodiment and the Cartesian Legacy in Anne of Green Gables 21 J a n e t W e s s e L i u s SECTIOn I Politicizations 37 2 Learning not to Hate What We Are: Black Power, Literature, and the Black Child 43 K a r e n s a n d s - o ’ C o n n o r 3 “[I]t’s my skin that’s paid most dearly”: Katniss Everdeen and/as the Appalachian Body 57 rox a n n e H a r d e 4 Invisibility and (Dis)Embodiment in Louise O’neill’s Only Ever Yours 70 H e at H e r B r au n 5 Kitchens and Edges: The Politics of Hair in African American Children’s Picturebooks 83 M i C H e L L e H . M a rt i n a n d r aC H e L L e d. Wa s H i n g t o n viii Contents Section ii corporealities 95 6 Disciplining normalcy: What Katy Did and nineteenth-century Female Bodies 99 J u l i e P f e i f f e r a n d da r l a S c h u m m 7 embodying the Healthy, charitable child in the Junior Red cross 113 K r i S t i n e m o ru z i 8 Liberty in the Age of eugenics: non-normative Bodies in Fabian Socialist children’s Fiction 127 a m a n da h o l l a n d e r Section iii Reading Bodies 141 9 “My story starts right here”: the embodied identities of Blackfoot Readers 147 e r i n S P r i n g 10 A Feeling connection: embodied Flourishing as Represented in contemporary Picturebooks 161 a d r i e l l e B r i t t e n 11 the child’s Reading Body 175 m a rg a r e t m ac K e y 12 Hands on Reading: the Body, the Brain, and the Book 191 ly d i a Ko K Ko l a Section iV commodifications 207 13 “Little cooks”: Food and the Disciplined Body in nineteenth-century Stories for Girls 213 S a m a n t h a c h r i S t e n S e n a n d rox a n n e h a r d e 14 Break Dancing: Reading the Ballerina in To Dance 227 J e n n i f e r m . m i S K e c Contents ix 15 Embodied Performances by Lesbian Cheerleaders and Dancers in Glee and Leading Ladies 241 K AT E N O R B U RY 16 “A dolla makes her holla”: Honey Boo Boo and the Collaborative Gaze of the Twenty-First-Century Knowing Child 254 L A N C E W E L DY Notes on Contributors 271 Index 275 This page intentionally left blank 7.1 “Reproduction of the First Prize Poster” Red Cross Junior Jan. 1923. 118 List of Figures This page intentionally left blank Assembling a collection is always a communal endeavor, but working on this one has felt particularly, even joyously, so. Conceived as we prepared for International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) 2015 “Creating Childhoods,” constructed through collegial networks, and brought to fruition as we look toward IRSCL 2017 “Possible & Impossible Children,” The Embodied Child embodies the best of this organization and the field of children’s literature. Each of the scholars whose work appears in this volume is supported by communities, in our institutions, but also by our partners, families, friends, and colleagues. The result is a collection that is uniformly of the highest standards. We are grateful for the opportunity this collection provided to bring us into contact with such a dynamic group of researchers, and we thank our contributors for all their hard work and good humor. We also wish to extend our gratitude to Jean Webb who encouraged us to form a collection from the IRSCL Congress in Worcester. Philip Nel who has been positive about this book from the start. Roberta Seelinger Trites and the anonymous reviewers who helped raise the standard of the collection. Jennifer Abbott, Veronica Haggar, and Sofia Buono, who carried the project through to production. Tia Lalani for polishing the abstracts in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Our institutions: the University of Alberta and its Augustana Faculty which have supported Roxanne’s research with funding, a stellar and superbly staffed Library, and an administrative team that fosters this work. Luleå University of Technology who offered Lydia opportunities worth emigrating for. But most of all, we extend this work to you, our readers, as your body engages with the fruits of our labor. Acknowledgments This page intentionally left blank The English word body stems from the Saxon word bodig meaning ves- sel : a carrier or container. Embedded within the etymology of the word are the ideas that the body is neutral and that what it contains—the soul, the spirit, mind, call it what you will—is both separate and of more value. This divide, so clearly articulated by Rene Descartes that it is often attributed to him, despite its older origins, informs many as- pects of thought and behavior and is, consequently, deeply embedded in Indo-European languages. Academic studies of the body and embodi- ment typically begin by pointing out that the division is a fallacy: the body is not neutral, and it cannot be separated from the ways in which we think, perceive, and inhabit our environment. In their excellent The Body: A Reader , Mariam Fraser and Monica greco, for instance, note that this particular dualism is very Western and suggest that the reason Chinese medicine is more holistic is quite simply because the Chinese do not regard the body and the mind as a dualism. Instead they contrast the heart (the site, not of love, but of cognition and virtue) with the body (associated with emotion and turmoil), a dichotomy which, Fraser and greco claim, “does not involve a general subordination of the body to the mind” (22). We also question the divide, even as we acknowledge its ubiquity, and with this collection we bring together a range of ap- proaches to examine representations of a particular kind of body: the child’s body. Maria Nikolajeva identified the “return to the body” and more gener- ally “the material turn” as a recent trend in the scholarship on children’s literature, and posits that this trend has arisen partly in response to an extended focus on construction and representation (“Recent Trends”). The approach she espouses, cognitive criticism, was initiated by work in linguistics that revealed how the metaphors we use expose patterns of thought (Lakoff and Johnson). The language used to describe chil- dren also reveals an implicit set of ideas about this category of human: the word child is gender neutral—suggesting it would be the correct pronoun to use in reference—although the child is not an object. Or is “it”? Is the child merely an object (a vessel) until “it” is gendered, and thus filled with meaning? Finnish is one of the few languages that does The Embodied Child An Introduction Lydia Kokkola 2 Lydia Kokkola not have gendered pronouns, which would suggest that thinking outside gendered binaries would be easier, but in practice Finnish newborns are rapidly referred to using terms of endearment that reveal their biological sex, thereby ensuring that their bodies are easily understood and cate- gorized by society. In short, gender is imposed even when the language does not directly support such classification. Tensions surrounding the term child are also evident in the very name of our field. Where Anglophone scholars are generally comfort- able with the use of children’s literature to cover the entire range of books intended for readers from birth to adulthood, scholars from other language backgrounds need to add a specific marker for adolescents, for example, Kinder und Jugend Litteratur in german [Literature for Children and Youth ]. Theorizations of different categories of non-adults have increased the use of such terminology in works published in En- glish as well. A problem all scholars in our field share, however, is how to describe the other literature: the majority of literary works that are not intended to be read by a young person. Among ourselves, we often use the term adult literature , but the sexual connotations of that term tend to cause mirth when used in more general contexts. Literature for adults and, Nikolajeva’s preferred term, mainstream literature provide less amusing alternatives, but even these are used only in contexts where one is endeavoring to contrast the two types of literature as though they were a dichotomy. Part of the thinking behind this collection was to ex- amine the way in which the child’s body belongs to what linguists would call a marked category—that is, a category that differs from the norm. In the same way that whiteness is deemed the norm in the context of ra- cial terminology and heterosexuality is deemed the norm in the context of sexual desire, the adult body is the norm by which children’s bodies are judged ... and found wanting. If the child’s body is a container, then it is a vessel that adults fill with their cultural values, with skills, thoughts, and emotions that will create a better future, as though the vessel was neutral or empty until filled in this way. In Volatile Bodies , Elizabeth grosz criticizes the tradition of regarding “the human subject as a being made up of two dichotomously opposed characteristics: mind and body, thought and extension, reason and passion, psychology and biology” (3). She then provides a helpful overview of such practices from Plato to the end of the twentieth century which has informed our own summary below. For grosz, this dualis- tic thinking is problematic because it links masculinity with the mind and femininity with the body. An analogous situation exists for children whose developing, unstable bodies are contrasted with the seemingly stable bodies of adults. From the lack of control over bodily fluids in infancy to the lack of control over responses to hormones in adolescence, the youthful body invites adult concern, and the desire to control and socialize young people into socially acceptable ways of taming bodily The Embodied Child 3 desires. In this situation, adults are associated with the mind, reason, and control while the child’s body is conjured as a site of uncontrolled desire, illogicality, and passion. As a result, “children’s literature and culture has long been invested in constructions of and instructions about the body of the child,” sometimes at the expense of the physical child who reads the literature (Hager 18). Nevertheless, no book-length study examining the representation of the child’s body in literature, film, and other cultural expressions or the embodiedness of the reading process has yet appeared. This collection endeavors to fill these lacunae. In thinking through the varied ways of conceiving the body, Fraser and greco suggest three major positions: the body as object (something we have ), the body as subject (something we are ), and as performance (something we become ) (4). Broadly speaking, these positions have arisen in that historical order. Descartes (1596–1650) radicalized the distinc- tion between body and mind, but as Jack Zipes reminds us, the term “radical” indicates a return to the root (ix–x). Mind-Body dualism can be traced back to antiquity. In her discussion of Plato’s Cratylus , grosz points out that even he attributes the notion of the body as a vessel back to his own ancients, the Orphic priests (47). For Plato, man was a slave in the service of the body for “if we do obtain any leisure from the body’s claims and turn to some line of inquiry, the body intrudes once more on our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth” (Plato, Phaedo , in Lupton 2). Moreover, “Plato sees matter itself as a denigrated and imperfect version of the Idea. The body is a betrayal of and a prison for the soul, reason or mind. For Plato, it was evident that reason should rule over the body and over the irrational or appetitive functions of the soul,” and this belief continues to dominate Western thinking even today (grosz 5). This separation of body and soul is frequently celebrated in Western religious practice, one of the most obvious examples being the celebra- tion of Holy Communion within Christianity. The painful rupture as the church was split between Catholicism and Protestantism in the sixteenth century focused greatly on the quality of embodiment, as the church fathers debated the concept of transubstantiation. Leaders of the church questioned whether or not the bread and wine blessed during the service actually became the body and blood of Christ or whether it merely stood as a metaphor for His sacrificed body. In both services, however, the members of the congregation, to this day, refer to themselves as the col- lective body of the church as they share their spiritual practices. And in all sects within the Christian churches, the human body is designated as having less value than the spiritual. Bodily appetites, whether sexual or nutritional, are deemed base, while desires for abstract or spiritual goals are deemed to be of greater value. Many religious practices reflect this dichotomy by positing that subjecting the body to certain deprivations (such as abstinence, specific forms of clothing, or restricted foods) can 4 Lydia Kokkola promote spiritual development. The underlying assumption is that the ability to control the body will lead to greater spiritual and/or intellec- tual development. The body is an object: something the mind has , and thus the mind can control the body. To return to grosz, these practices pave the way for the body to become a commodity. The body “must be regarded as a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscrip- tions, production or constitution ... it is itself a cultural, the cultural, product” (grosz 23). Children’s bodies are no exception. As Jack Zipes explains, It is one of the worst kept secrets in the world that, within the past fifty years or so, we have reconfigured our children to act and be- have as commodities and agents of consumerism, and we continue to invent ways to incorporate them flawlessly into socio-economic systems that compromise their integrity and make them complicit in criminal behavior such as mutual economic exploitation. (27) If we accept grosz’s claim that the body is the most significant cultural product, then the valorization of youth has resulted in children’s bodies becoming one of the most highly contested cultural products. This separation of body and soul—for all its dominance and commodification—has constantly been subjected to critique. The notion of the body as a subject—something we are —is perhaps most clearly articulated in the classification systems that emerged in the eighteenth century. The Linnean system, developed by Carl Linnaeus, was an en- deavor to produce a universal system that could transcend cultures and languages so as to enable people around the world to refer to their lived environment in the same way. The categories in the Linnaean system are generated primarily on the basis of visual identification. It is a hierarchi- cal system that begins with three kingdoms (animal, mineral, vegetable) that are divided into genera ( genus in the singular) and thence to spe- cies. Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) divided human beings into four species: Europæus albus (white European), Americanus rubescens (red American), Asiaticus fuscus (brown Asian), and Africanus Niger (black African), a classification that has been blown apart on ethnographic, ethical, and DNA grounds, although Linnaeus’s ground-breaking asser- tion that humans are animals and are members of the genus mammal species primate still holds today. In its day, the Linnaean system was valued not just for its seemingly clear classification of physical appear- ance, but also because it reflected the belief that behaviors are inher- ent. Linnaeus highlighted race primarily, making it unsurprising that critiques of the assumption that body and destiny are interwoven have come from scholars challenging institutionalized racism. The Linnaean system also made sex central to our understanding of the body: Linnaeus The Embodied Child 5 institutionalized the use of male and female as metaphors to describe the reproduction of plants, based on the essentialist assumption that sex is a neutral fact, a defining feature of what a person or plant is This conviction that the body reflects an inner self—who we are— reveals itself in contexts as diverse as the valuing of white-collar work such as academia over the blue-collar work of farmers and builders who provide essentials such as food and shelter. It is also evident in the pres- tige given to evidence of a lack of physical labor such as high heels, manicured nails, and smooth hand skin. Sara Ahmed uses an anecdote about a time when she was stopped by the Australian police at the age of fourteen for no obvious reason (she was simply walking) to concretize her discussion of how skin tone— chromotism —is used to divide people into categories (58–60). At first the White policemen thought she was Aboriginal (Black like them) and when she refuted this, they concluded that she was suntanned (White like me). Ahmed’s skin tone did not change during the discussion, but the way in which her body was read affected the way in which her supposed offence was perceived. Once her body was read as suntanned (that she had copious amounts of leisure time to spend in the sun rather than being engaged in outdoor labor), her behavior was deemed less significant than when her skin tone was (correctly) read as a physical marker of her racial heritage (albeit not the correct racial heritage). This belief that “breeding will out,” implicit in the racist responses to Ahmed’s body, is clearly visible in adoption stories (Singley; Nelson, Little Strangers ). A consistent feature of these stories, from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess (1905) to picturebooks addressing contemporary issues such as cross-cultural adoption like Allen Say’s Al- lison (1997), is the idea that heritage is carried through the body. This idea of heritage even spills over into areas such as the assumption that the children of heterosexual parents are simultaneously assumed to be asexual and becoming-heterosexuals. This bizarre combination, Stephen Bruhm and Natasha Hurley argue, “has some very queer effects. Child- hood itself is afforded a modicum of queerness when the people worry more about how the child turns out than about how the child exists as a child” (xiv). The notion of sex as a determinant of behavior, like notions about race, remains endemic in both children’s literature and the wider cultural context in which it appears. Overt racism, sexism, and homophobia are certainly not the only ways in which our bodies can invite hostile reactions, although these aspects of the embodied self are often entwined with each other and with other prejudices such as fat prejudice. Beth Younger examines how young adult (YA) fiction reinforces cultural assumptions and so- cial constraints, resulting in a policing of the young female body into conforming to patriarchal values. Large and obese bodies frequently invoke hostility, and so tend to be filtered out of advertising, unless