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.
Edited by:
Anna Feuerstein,
Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Weight: 553g
ISBN: 9780367346324
ISBN 10: 036734632X
Series: Children's Literature and Culture
Pages: 300
Publication Date: 21 May 2019
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
,
A / AS level
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
CONTENTS List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Contributors Preface 1: Children and Animal ‘Pets’ Monica Flegel Preface 2: On Childhood Studies and Human Exceptionalism Kenneth Kidd Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Childhood and Pethood Anna Feuerstein and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo Section I: Family, Language, and Nationhood 1. Custody, Adoption, Protection: Contested Institutional Representations of Pets as Children James Gillett 2. Transgressing the ‘Luggage’ Metaphor: Children and Pets as Migrants in the Context of Contemporary International Mobility from Poland to Norway Justyna Struzik and Paula Pustulka 3. Who Needs Protection and Discipline? Children, Pets, and Nationalism in the Early Twentieth-Century Ottoman and Turkish Lands Melis Sulos 4. Pets as Vehicles of Language Socialization: Encouraging Children’s Emotional, Moral, and Relational Development in Japanese Matthew Burdelski 5. Moamahi ā Puaʻa Moe Poli: Nā Keiki a nā Hānaiāhuhu i ka Moʻomeheu Hawaiʻi (Cherished Chickens to Chest-cuddled Pigs: Children and Pets in Hawaiian Culture) ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui Section II: Literature for Children and Adults 6. Pullman, Pets, and Posthuman Animals: The Dæmon-child of His Dark Materials Zoe Jaques 7. Domesticating Dorothy: Toto’s Role in Constructing Childhood in The Wizard of Oz and Its Retellings Caryn Kunz Lesuma 8. Mr. Dog Is a Conservative: Representations of Children and/as Animals in Little Golden Books Kelly Hübben 9. ‘Oh God, Give Me Horses!’: Pony-Mad Girls, Sexuality, and Pethood Amalya Layla Ashman 10. ‘The cats are outside hanging’: Settler Colonialism, Racialized Animality, and Queer Kinship in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging Anna Feuerstein and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo 11. Doomed Creatures: Children and Nonhuman Animals in Contemporary Southern African Fiction in English Wendy Woodward Section III: Music and Visual Culture 12. Bird Songs for Children, the Rhetoric of Conservation, and Voicing the Bird in the United States, 1900-1930 Katheryn Lawson 13. Black Children as Pets in Eighteenth-Century European Courts Michèle Bocquillon 14. ‘The Values of Savagery’: Pathologies of Child and Pet Play in Avant-Garde Visual Culture Victoria de Rijke 15. The Best Friend: Exploring Power Relations of the Child-Pet Co-Construction in Children’s TV Programs Åsa Pettersson Index
Anna Feuerstein is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai’i – Manoa, USA. Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i – West O’ahu, USA.
Reviews for Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies and Animal Studies
"""[This book]’s accessible and thorough analysis of the discourse around the statuses of being a child and being a pet provides an essential understanding of how these discourses developed and their real-world impact. This volume is a crucial contribution to current work on children, childhood studies, and animals."" --Amy Ratelle, University of Toronto, Canada"
