My Feelings: Power, politics and childhood subjectivities

Abstract

This article focuses on the production of children’s literature in New Zealand. It problematizes the current practices of releasing and distributing children’s literature, and explores these practices as technologies of control through processes of censorship and classification set by government agencies such as the Office for Film and Literature. Decisions about what is and what is not acceptable for children’s development, it is argued, are not neutral and are instead driven by a neoliberal image of the ‘happy’ uncomplicated child. The article takes the example of the state-funded and distributed My Feelings series as a widely accessible text that is embedded in neoliberal ideology. As this series is distributed to all New Zealand early childhood centres and kindergartens, this article explores understandings of how politics of government influence children’s literature. The work of Václav Havel and Michel Foucault are drawn upon to demonstrate the mechanisms of ideologically driven forms of governmental power that directly impact on the constitution of certain types of childhoods. An example from a contrasting historical and political discourse in the form of communist Czechoslovakia suggests unexpected synergies between neoliberal and socialist ideological frameworks. This analysis further problematizes notions of power in the distribution of children’s literature, and illustrates the influence that political agendas have on the production of idealized political childhood subjectivities.

Keywords:

• childhood subjectivities
• children’s literature
• neoliberalism
• governmentality
• censorship
• Havel

Notes

1. Havel’s notion of the ‘truth’ is not of a Cartesian nature; he does not seek the ultimate truth. His writing is mostly concerned with the overall understanding of openness and honesty (Havel, 1985); and truth is an existential statement underlying his experience within the ideology of the ruling political rationalities. Havel emphasizes the importance of truth as a subversive story, and not as an ultimate positivistic truth. Truth in Havel’s writing can be seen as something unidentifiable without understanding a ‘lie’, as for example in Havel’s opinion, in the public discourse of the ideological statements of governing agencies (Havel, 1985). Therefore, Havel is more concerned with the tension between the truth and the lie, than with what necessarily constitutes the truth itself.

2. All citizens in Czechoslovakia, including children, were engaged into the ‘fight’ against this enemy: Colorado potato beetle, labelled as the American beetle. This was prevalent in what in Havel’s term is the totalitarian period, despite American beetles prevailing in much milder form into the post-totalitarian era of the 1970s and 1980s.

3. In the American Beetle story government agencies refers to the Ministry of Education, and other national and local government bodies influenced by the Czechoslovak Communist Party and its ideology.

4. Mateřídouška in original.

5. I do not claim that children have become objects; they were subjects, and in the Havelian sense subjectified as both victims and supporters. I am not concerned in this article with how many children actually believed, supported or were victims of this propaganda or stories. I am concerned with the production of the literature, and how it produced certain truths and subjectified children into subject positions where they were supposed to become someone and believe in something.

6. Sometimes it was not the theme that was banned, but the author.