ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses how food designated as children's food locates appropriate social norms relating to both children and nonhuman animals through the ways in which nonhuman animals are both present and represented in foods marketed for children's consumption. It examines how toys and clothing, where nonhuman character representations are widespread are instrumentalized as both gendering and anthroparchizing symbols using exemplary cases. The clothing industry plays an important part in the creation of divisions of and within childhood, and the normalizing of relationships between humans and nonhuman animals is solidly embedded within this, with clothes reproducing proper human relationships with other animals. The chapter also discusses animal companions who in many ways are constructed as human children's quasi peers within the family. The family home is a key site for the articulation of proper' human-nonhuman spatial boundaries, and especially for discourses of domestic invasion by feared others who threaten the protective environment the family is expected to provide for children.