ABSTRACT
The introduction is divided into two main sections. In the first, this chapter explores the various ways scholars have approached children and childhood, and how children and childhood are operationalized at the convergence of social identity markers like race, gender, and class. But this chapter also shows how children are marked by a unique age-related otherness requiring its own method of study. The epideictic rhetorical genre reveals more about rhetorical children’s conceptual distinctiveness by linking their potency to historical, cultural, social, and economic factors. In turn, this chapter shows how rhetorical children use their constraints to develop unique sites of rhetorical invention by unconcealing incongruities between the community’s shared values and collective actions. Finally, this chapter justifies the study of rhetorical children by highlighting the fresh theoretical and political insights offered by better understanding voice and agency for scholars and activists alike. In the second major section, this chapter explores the historical shift in structural conditions that gave birth to rhetorical children. The chapter traces how changing approaches to the sacralization of the young turn childhood into a new normative category. The chapter concludes by previewing how our forthcoming case study chapters will illuminate how rhetorical children burst into the political arena by reconciling the innocence double-bind.
