Figurations

Child, Bodies, Worlds

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by Claudia Castaneda

Duke University Press

Due/Published January 2003, 232 pages, paper

ISBN 0822329697

Always in the process of becoming, inherently incomplete, the child is a remarkably malleable figure. In Figurations, Castañeda shows how this malleability is itself generated--how the child is "made" by different constituencies and how the resulting historically, geographically, and culturally specific figures are put to widely divergent uses, often to very powerful effect. Situated at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and science and technology studies, this book provides a map of the child's meaning and movement across transnational circuits of exchange.

 Castañeda investigates the construction of the child as both a natural and cultural body, the character of its embodiment, and its imaginative appeal in various settings. The sites through which she tracks the bodily production and deployment of the child include nineteenth-century developmental science; cognitive neuroscience in the late twentieth century; international adoption; rumors and media coverage of child organ stealing; and poststructuralist theory. Her work reveals the extent to which the child's cultural significance and value lie in its status as a body whose incompleteness makes it "available" for such widely divergent uses. Figurations establishes the child as a key figure for understanding and rethinking the politics of nature, culture, bodies, and subjects in changing "global" worlds.

"So much literature in the cultural study of science and medicine has been devoted to the body, but what is a child body? Claudia Castaneda broaches this important question, presenting new and compelling ways of understanding constructions of the child in colonial and neocolonial culture, theory, and history. Figurations is an astute reading of the child figure as it is informed by medical and scientific discourses in particular cultural settings such as genetic therapies, adoption, and organ procurement. Especially significant is Castañeda's focus on the transnational dynamics that have shaped postwar medical and humanitarian discourses on the child. "--Lisa Cartwright

"Castaneda understands to power of figures not just to contain, but to shape, worlds. Her analysis of the potent figures of development, childhood, and the always transforming bodies of children themseves will not soon fade from my soul. Her book is about how 'the child' is made relentlessly available for cultural and political projects. The material and semiotic force of the figure ties times and places together into trans-local knots that are at the heart of debates about globalization and development."--Donna J. Haraway