Dear Colleagues: Please see the CFP below for MLA 2019. Also, please share widely. Thanks, - Michelle
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Call for Papers
Modern Language Association Convention
Chicago, IL
January 3rd – 6th, 2019
Selling Childhood
Arguably, Western culture has been selling the concept of childhood from its inception. In the eighteenth century, figures like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
persuaded their peers to buy the new idea that childhood constituted a distinct phase of human development.
Selling childhood quickly expanded from the realm of ideological persuasion to the one of consumer capitalism. After all, if childhood constituted its own unique
period in the human life cycle, then it had unique material needs. During the nineteenth century, a large and lucrative industry of books, clothes, toys, and household items emerged to cater to the new specialty market of children.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, childhood was being sold in a myriad of ways: as nostalgia, as political rhetoric, and—amidst the rise of postwar youth culture—as
coolness.
In the new millennium, the selling of childhood has reached a scale that is unprecedented in human history. Throughout Western culture, young people occupy the
vanguards of material, popular, and consumer culture. Furthermore, after centuries of childhood commonly being sold as innocence, it has increasingly been marketed as sexiness.
Of course, during all of eras, childhood has been sold not simply figuratively, but literally: via child labor, child trafficking, and child exploitation.
This guaranteed panel session examines the long, rich, and complicated history of selling childhood in the West. In so doing, it brings together past and present
notions of this concept as an ideological, cultural, and, of course, capitalist commodity. How have Western concepts of childhood been regarded as transactional, from an intellectual, economic, historic, and/or socio-political standpoint? How has childhood
been packaged, marketed, and sold over the centuries? Just as importantly, who has been buying it? Finally, how have technological developments—from photography and television to computers and smart phones—both helped to facilitate and provided sites of
resistance to this phenomenon?
In considering responses to these and other questions, this panel invites examinations from a wide array of disciplines, including literature, popular culture,
education, philosophy, childhood studies, economics, comics studies, media studies, age studies, sociology, cultural studies, political science, and history.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
Send 500-word paper proposals and a 2-page CV by March 1st, 2018 to Michelle Ann Abate,
[log in to unmask]. Accepted panelists must become members of MLA by April 1st, 2018.
Michelle Ann Abate
Associate Professor of Literature for Children and Young Adults
Department of Teaching and Learning
Department of English
Affiliated Faculty with Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
The Ohio State University
229A Ramseyer Hall | 29 W. Woodruff Ave. | Columbus, OH 43210
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