Agency, Children's Consumer Culture and the Fetal Subject: Historical Trajectories, Contemporary Connections

Abstract

The aim of this article is to offer a perspective on how the personhood implied in and by children’s consumption can extend beyond its initial context to inform other identities, like that of the individuated, autonomous fetus. Drawing upon historical material on the rise of the child-consumer in the USA, I examine how the practices and institutions built up around this child-consumer laid the cultural, philosophical and epistemological groundwork for the secular acceptance of the idea that the unborn is always and already a person. I argue and demonstrate that the construct of the child-consumer increasingly instantiates and authorizes that of an agentive, autonomous child, a figure which historically precedes and informs inscriptions fetal personhood. In short, I offer the child-consumer as an historical homologue for the fetus-person.