Becoming Monstrous: On the Limits of the Body of a Child

Abstract

This chapter draws on data from research on ‘Textures of food: diffracting eating relationships in an early years setting’ which is about young children’s embodied engagements with food. The research was based in a nursery in the northwest of England that is known to have high levels of poverty and offers free places to ‘disadvantaged’ 2 year olds. The assemblage moves beyond the linear accounts of UK policy narratives around ‘healthy eating’ and ‘balanced diet’ in the early years that force children’s relationships with food into binary positions such as having a ‘healthy appetite’ or being ‘fussy eater’. Instead, it harnesses the concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘difference’ to open up the potentialities of a machinic food assemblage, where alternative forms of monstrous life, created between heterogeneous entities at mealtimes, are recognised as in circulation in the early years setting. The assemblage will examine one particular ‘monstrous’ story about how a child experiences the limits of her own body while finding her ‘self’ affectively entangled with food and other entities. It foregrounds the affective relationships she has with food in order to understand why some children enjoy eating, whilst for others, it is a situation that is fraught with tension, anxiety and frustration. Methodologically, the assemblage turns to the post-humanities, which offer opportunities, as well as produce particular challenges, in relation to ways of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ as a researcher. Our entanglements in this assemblage draw in visual, auditory and tactile bodily intra-relationalities, as the event becomes co-produced in the interrogation of what is beyond or more-than-human.