ABSTRACT
The title of my paper implies a brave Foucauldian promise, ‘technologies of “the child”’ seeming to suggest an exploration both of the disciplinary apparatuses by which children are simultaneously produced and
Textual Practice 9(2) 1995, 223-242 © 1995 Routledge 0950-236X
subjected, and those practices by which children come to recognize themselves as desiring subjects. Its subtitle, however, expires into a fainthearted deferral. Not only will the paper not attempt a coherent theory of the child-subject, though it will point towards the need for one, it will not discuss children as historical agents. These two gaping holesno theory, no children-reflect, on the one hand, the relative absence of theoretical sophistication in the field of, for example, children’s literature criticism and, on the other, the continuing absence of children in theories of subjectivity, particularly in emerging theories of citizenship.2 Although this paper cannot fill either of these holes, it will attempt to trace the contours of the second.
