[...] The child-figure of nineteenth-century science appeared as an instrumental, and indeed vital, bodily container for human variation across the globe and through historical time. Progressive development, figured through this child, constituted and ordered a plethora of human differences in hierarchical series, including child-ness itself. The ‘‘normal’’ child, then, was a figure through which the ordering of children across the colonial globe was realized as well. From the ‘‘savage’’ urban poor child, to the child at the ‘‘uttermost ends of the earth,’’ to the bourgeois child in the nursery—all were brought under the scientific gaze, where their bodies materialized a continuum of normal and pathological development that simultaneously told a story of human history—and of human mind, desire, and moral justice.
As I have also suggested, the ‘‘normal’’ child was not assured of being normal until the developing body had traversed childhood and become the normative adult. To be a true adult was to have passed out of development—out of the realm of the pathological (savage, female, racialized, hyper- and hypo-sexual, etc.)—and into the realm of the ‘‘normal’’: to be a ‘‘civilized’’ man in present time. The female, the racialized, the insane, the disabled, and the poor were left behind, in childhood, while adulthood was strictly enforced as a ‘‘natural’’ developmental achievement reserved for the deserving few.
claudia castañeda, figurations: child, bodies, worlds
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