The result of this, as the author intimates, is that their refusal to be categorized as children actually puts them outside of that, and potentially outside of the remit of society itself, or at least its structures of control.
Similar kinds of queerness are seen in Anna Kérchy’s study, ‘Perverted Postmodern Pinocchios: Cannibalistic Vegetal-Children as Ecoterrorist Agents of the Maternal Imagination’. Relying more strongly on fictional representations, though ones that stem from far older folktales, it inherently infers an ongoing cultural tradition of tropes connected to the anomalous child. What this pinpoints though is not just the ongoing form of the monstrous child, but the means of its production – the maternal imagination. As Kérchy, quoting Shildrick, comments:
The astonishingly vulnerable maternal corporeality – endowed with an inherent capacity to problematize the boundaries of self-same and other – simultaneously represents the ‘best hopes and worst fears of societies faced with an intuitive sense of their own instabilities.’42
The maternal body here can just as easily be replaced with notions of the ‘motherland’ and the reproductive capabilities of a society. These monstrous children are then, more obviously, born of the cultural environment around them, but are signified as feral rather than freakish, creating a resonance with Hövelmann’s piece earlier. The children represented here are not freaks to be gazed upon in a circus, but ones to be studied under the microscope of institutionalized categorization. Not surprisingly then, in an age when even science is led by money, both examples feature acts of consumption, but ones where parents/society consume or are consumed by their children. The result is a tension between visions of the future, which is consumed by the present or in which we are consumed; something, which Kérchy notes, reveals the dark shadow of the death drive even in acts or regeneration.
Such concerns of children being an ambivalent view of the future form the basis of Marc Démont’s ‘From the Monster to the Evil Sinthomosexual Child: Category Mixing, Temporality and Projection in Horror Movies’. Based on representations of the child in horror films (the horror-show child), Démont’s study utilizes the work of Lee Edelman and, more specifically, his idea of the child being the reproduction of heteronormativity. Here the refusal to reproduce, or what we might call the denial of children, or the ‘face of the child,’ refutes any sense of a future, or as the author states:
Reproductive politics, educational reforms, interior defence strategy, all these sociopolitical discourses invoke with a consummate ability the imperative to protect the child, lest our future be filled by Evil ones.43
This future filled with ‘evil’ children is actually no future at all. It rather represents the child as death itself, though it might just as easily mean the death of heteronormativity rather than that of the human race. Démont then discusses the sexual politics behind cultural representations of children and the mechanisms of desire which fuel them, tentatively suggesting that the overemphasis on creating the ‘good’ child necessarily creates its opposite – the monstrous adult, or the paedophile. This Gothic economy of excess and desire then posits a question: does the queer, or uncategorizable, child (see also Moore) disrupt the rigid structures of the system that tries to contain it?
The final part, ‘Cultural Categorization in the Past, Present and Possible Future’, focuses specifically on twenty-first century examples of attempts to explain, monsterize or embrace the anomalous child. Using case studies centred on non-Western cultural history, legal perspectives and/or urban legend, the anomalous child is seen to be imbued with abhuman, almost supernatural, qualities that continue to defy easy categorizations and integration into adult society. The part begins with ‘Evil Twins: Changing Perceptions of Twin Children and Witchcraft among Yoruba-Speaking People’ by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold. It forms something of a bridge between the past and the present, and indeed the previous sections and this one being focused on more recent examples and attempts to understand and rationalize shared traditions as well as those from other cultures. Frisvold takes us to Nigeria and a society where spiritual beliefs are as strong today as they were hundreds of years ago, and the anxiety caused by the unusual is given varying interpretations, both good and bad. This is no more strongly seen than in the case of twin children. As Mattos Frisvold observes:
Twins […] represent the visible and invisible world colliding into visibility. It generates a psychological unrest to see two of the same, because you should only be able to see one while the counterpart lives in the invisible realm […] twins share together this supra-human condition as neither of them are understood to be human per se.44
Twins then are inherently ‘other’, be it good, the ‘spirit child’, or bad, the monstrous child. The children themselves have no say in how their existence is explained – or resolved – as they do indeed represent a problem to be solved. This problem is one of reflection, for, not unlike the ‘hollow’ child that acts as a container for society’s dark self (mentioned earlier), twins are the hidden or invisible part of a culture made real and, as such, requiring control. The attribution of witchcraft or occult powers in the appearance of such children provides an easy and established signifier that comes with a clear course of action to restore order, not unlike that provided for all ‘problem’ children from whatever culture they come from.
The attempt to find a ‘solution’ to problematic children continues in ‘Doli Incapax: Examining the Social, Psychological, Biological and Legal Implications of Age-Related Assumptions of Criminal Responsibility’ by Jacquelyn Bent and Theresa Porter. This chapter looks at the way in which the Western legal system deals, or does not deal, with ‘bad’ or monstrous children. As the authors point out, the current structure
seems to be based, in no small part, on the assumption that children are innocent and thus incapable of instrumental or premeditated criminality despite the lack of empirically tested, scientific observation to satiate this assumption.45
This resonate with Ruickbie’s earlier observation that age was also a key consideration in the seventeenth century as seen in the trial of Jean Grenier and ultimately contributed to the leniency of the sentence passed. The difficulty of Western society to consider children as anything other than pure and innocent is also reflected in popular culture from the 1950s onwards, where even the thought of a child being born ‘bad’, or viewed as a ‘bad seed’, is almost inconceivable, and it is in fact somehow monstrous to even consider the possibility. And yet there are many cases of violence, rape and murder committed by those legally defined as children and who, consequently, cannot be judged as responsible for their actions. This again keeps the child as a separate entity within society, one that is even tried in a court of law under different rules to everyone else. Once again, as noted by Bacon, what is meant to serve as a form of ‘protection’ becomes a way of ‘othering’ that inevitably monsterizes the child.
Brigid Burke’s ‘Black-Eyed Kids and the Child Archetype’ shows how the repressed or ignored societal ambivalence over anomalous children finds outlets in other areas, and if not through texts and films from popular culture, then via urban legend and creepypasta. Burke describes this process in relation to Black Eyed Kids (BEKs)46 as one that looks at similarities between BEKs (or any manifestation of the monstrous child) and other creatures like fairies and aliens, and uses Jungian theory to explain why this does not fit the existing Child archetype, or neatly fit into other archetypal categories. It represents either a new myth, or the metamorphosis of older ones. This quite neatly identifies the way in which new representations, and cultural anxieties, constantly refer to older ones and how existing forms of interpretation do not always
