Innocence, Protection and Failure: Bringing the Child Subject to the Centre of the Politics of the Family. A Response to Cristyn Davies and Kerry Robinson

Abstract

In response to Davies and Robinson's article looking at how queer families are positioned and position themselves in relation to neoliberalism, this article brings the child to the centre of the debate to examine how reading the child subject in terms of discourses of innocence and protection might work to maintain the hegemony of the normative — that is, heterosexual, nuclear — family, and close down discussions of alternative family structures. In exploring how the child subject is positioned in relation to these ideas, the article draws on Judith Butler's reworking of Adorno's notion of ‘ethical violence’ to suggest that the constraining of possibilities for the constitution of children's subjectivities by limiting their access to ‘difficult knowledges' around sexuality can be read as a kind of violence to the child subject. Turning to the children's voices that emerge from Davies and Robinson's research, it argues that children's failure to enact the position of the innocent child can be seen as a productive or generative space from which to begin to question the terms of this specious positioning. Thus, the article suggests that both the acknowledgement of borderwork as ethically violent towards the child, and the failure of the child to conform to the discourse of innocence together work to destabilise the normative positioning of the heterosexual, nuclear family.