ABSTRACT
In the next chapter on the Social History of Child Stars I demonstrate the malleability and tenacity of this unique band of children to be reinvented for every new phase of cultural production and to provide entertainment in whatever form is required of them by the adults who defi ne and desire them. For such a colourful and curious troupe however, a surprising lack of academic research into their status and cultural signifi cance has been undertaken, due in large part, I would imagine, to the inherent diffi culty of conceptualising such a disparate and temporally disjointed set of individuals as a distinct social group. Although, as will be seen later in this chapter, there has been much reporting of the individual lives and experiences of such performers and also much textual analysis of fi lm and television roles played by child actors, the consideration of the child star as a social category existing beyond the experiences of individual children has not been directly addressed. However, in order to provide a theoretical background for the rest of this study, it is important to establish the child star as a sociological and cultural construct as well as a way of describing individual juvenile performers. To this end, the following discussion brings together several strands of research, all of which have a bearing on how the category ‘child star’ is defi ned and conceptualised in our culture.
