rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_6fef8d47-b5e0-5654-a435-11ad0102dc76">15 comes closer to capturing the forces at play in this process explaining social constructions of youth. Within this, whether configured as supernatural or just plain wicked, the child becomes a liminal being, caught outside of normalized categorization; not mature, not socialized, not wholly accepted, not recognized as autonomous, not under the rule of law and not conforming to adult nostalgia and idealism over what they should be.16 The Victorian period, in particular, defined a view of the prepubescent child that was simultaneously nostalgic and savage; a time of unparalleled freedom, but also one in which the child had to be quickly socialized to be able to enter the adult world. Consequently, childhood becomes a site of the ongoing tensions between cultural ideals and collective guilt and repression, producing a fetishized body intimating social anxiety and what the future might hold if such hidden desires become manifest.
In this way it is possible to see that the more the category of the child is defined and controlled, the more strongly it represents cultural anxieties, however contradictory they might be. This is brought into a very specific focus at the start of the twenty-first century where childhood is believed to be an almost sacrosanct stage of life embodying all that is good and hopeful in a society that largely sees itself as corrupt and/or trapped in ultimately meaningless lives. Simultaneously, however, and more so within capitalism, children are a resource and a commodity to be exploited and often manipulated, sexualized and abused. Commenting on this, David Buckingham observes that not all aspects of this are necessarily negative: ‘Commercialization is seen to cause harm to many aspects of children’s physical and mental health, as well as generating concerns about issues such as “sexualisation” and “materialism”’,17 but, he continues, ‘the media seem to have erased the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, and hence to have undermined the authority of adults,’ where ‘children’s expertise with technology gives them access to new forms of culture and communication that largely escape parental control’.18 Indeed, new technology and communications is a particular point of anxiety allowing children far greater autonomy, ‘opportunities for creativity and self-determinism’,19 but often in areas that are viewed as unregulated or uncontrolled. As pointed out by Bex Lewix, the idea of ‘risk’ has largely been part of childhood and growing up, but this same risk, in the twenty-first century, is seen as unacceptable and to be avoided at all costs.20 In this sense, the conditions that created the forms of otherness that once kept the young in check now become the ones which allow it to exceed and evade regulation. This goes in the face of global organizations such as UNICEF and Save the Children who promote the sanctity of childhood as a fundamental human right and enforcing innocence on those in cultures that do not necessarily want it. Indeed, oftentimes, popular culture, empirical and sociological data, and even ecological survival intimate something else. Here children are not necessarily configured as the wealth of the family and the community but can be seen as a luxury or even an economic and environmental burden; no longer the bearers of the future, but a never-ending death knell for the world as we know it. This begins to delineate the dichotomies and oppositional tensions within the idea of childhood and adolescence in the twenty-first century where adults not only fear the transitional nature of youth, but also of humanity itself. It is a development that is inherently anxiety inducing as it can never offer a reproduction of what has gone before but is a new creation made to continue without the adults of today.
2. The Anomalous Body of the Child
The idea of the child, and more specifically the body of the child, as a transitional subject is of key importance here as is the way it further resonates with instability, liminality and becoming. All of these can be seen to inform the idea of the body’s Gothicization, that is, its ability to become something other than what it seems to be, to become the body of the other. In terms of the child, this is interesting as youth is often utilized to bring the family together (paternal and maternal (domestic Gothic));21 yet it also contains the notion of change and/or transcendence. It is a body in turmoil, starting as one thing but in a state of flux as it moves on to become something else. Kelly Hurley, speaking of the performative qualities of bodies within the Gothic genre, specifically the revival of the late eighteenth century going into the nineteenth, describes them as ‘abhuman’ and specifically where ‘abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterized by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other’.22 Here it is possible to replace ‘human’ with ‘adult’, and indeed ‘adult male’, as that would be considered the essential example of what constitutes normative mankind. As such then abnormal can speak of the body that is not quite adult and is constantly on the verge of change. Hurley further explains the term where ‘the prefix “ab-” signals a movement away from a site or condition, and thus a loss. But […] is also a move towards […] a site a site or condition as yet unspecified – and thus entails both a threat and a promise’.23 Again this can be read as the child’s body (virtually of any age that is not considered adult) that moves away from the adult body and towards something other, an other that is inherently anxiety inducing.
While Hurley very much sees such a definition in terms of Gothic fiction and its legacy, examples such as John Starkey from the late sixteenth century, as seen in this collection, show how historical accounts use similar language and establish stereotypes that have then inherently adhered to problematic or ‘naughty’ children. In relation to this, it is worth noting that Hurley sees the transformative qualities of the abhuman body in often almost supernatural terms where the subject, in Gothic texts, is often one that sometimes becomes something monstrous, such as a vampire or werewolf. This is a supernatural transformation that resonates with the kinds of human becomings laid out by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, where vampires, wolves, magic and the supernatural describe more the human and subjectivities other than those offered by ‘mankind’.24 In the light of this, it is maybe not surprising that the supernatural, or at least the cloak of it, hangs around examples of the abhuman body of the child. Consequently, many of its problematic, anomalous qualities/gifts – bad or transgressive behaviour, violence, deceitfulness – are designated as being supernatural, evil or alien (not of this world) in nature.
The Gothic and the abhuman become very useful terms to describe the anomalous body of the various stages of not-adult in this collection, from the very young to those on the cusp of adulthood and/or sexual maturity. In fact, one could argue that the category covers all those that are ‘not yet’ adult no matter what their age – this is distinguished from those who are ‘no longer’ adult which could conceivably be applied to those no longer in command of their bodies or entering a ‘second’ childhood – and this collection leans towards that homogeneous reading, partly due to the limited size of the current volume. It is also worth mentioning that the anomalous, abhuman child’s body does also suggest elements of queerness in its configuration many of which will become apparent in the examples discussed in the book.
That said, sexual maturity and gender are featured within this application of the abhuman as an instigator or catalyst for anxiety in the social milieu around the child – something that is often imposed upon the anomalous body rather than a quality inherent to it. This can take the form of physical or psychic monstrosity caused by a form of becoming-womanhood but can equally signal a marked move away from masculinity and femininity into a queerness beyond gender categorization. This last is often configured as the child moving into a form of otherness that will never mature into an adult, a defined sexual orientation or gender categorization and remaining essentially ‘other’, or queer, forever,
