ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the sociohistorical and legal consequences of particular mixings and metamorphoses between animals and children, framed around an example of child–human transformation from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The focus is on how cultural-historical conceptions of animals and children intersect with colonial discourses via their complex relations with familial and gendered dynamics. A key preoccupation – throughout this chapter and this book – concerns contested connections between the positions of women and children as articulated by and articulating colonialism and racism. Women’s and children’s positions have been set against each other, since, as subjugated groups, both have – like colonial subjects – been associated with ‘nature’ – in both its primitivising and romanticising senses. Taking such equations and elisions seriously invites further questions around political affinities and possible solidarities, rather than contests.
I discuss in some detail the mutual relations and contestations between animal and child protection organisations, exemplified by the UK bodies, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the National Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). This Child as method exploration attends to complex interplays between the subordinated or, alternatively, privileged status of child and other abjected and oppressed parties, crossing disciplines as well as continents. Animals figure in this account – not only as the origin points in the (not so) great chain of being composing European modernity, with child as close companion – but also in more complicated ways that inflect and interact with conceptions of social order and disorder – including gendered divisions of labour.
