Colonialities of chrononormativity: Exploring the im/possibilities of un/becoming childhoods

Abstract

This paper diffracts the work of Maria Lugones, Elizabeth Freeman, and Karen Barad to develop the notion of colonialities of chrononormativity. This diffractive reading is motivated by a desire to examine the way childhoods are a colonial inheritance, producing multiplicitous configurations of children that embody various un/just distributions of agency. That is, like the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007), the coloniality of chrononormativity re/produces the boundaries of acceptability around how childhood ought to be performed, as part of broader colonialities of power (Quijano, 2000). This work does not suggest that these colonialities are separable, recognising the entanglement of gender, capitalism, labour, disability, race, sexuality, age, and the reproduction of inequalities. Rather than colonialities diluting one another, we demonstrate how it is this very entanglement that produces the narrow parameters of normative childhoods, fosters hegemony, and affects intelligibilities. While mapping the boundaries of colonialities of childhood is productive, insofar as it resists the naturalisation of colonial taxonomies, we are more concerned with how tracing these entanglements allows us to attend to the im/possibilities of doing ‘childhood’ differently, affording different responses to what it means to become child.