Innocence

Childhood Innocence: Essence, Education and Performativity

by Robbie Duschinsky

Draft Only; forthcoming in Textual Practice

Building from an analysis of Wedekind and Foucault, it will be argued that modern childhood has been constructed as... more Building from an analysis of Wedekind and Foucault, it will be argued that modern childhood has been constructed as both natural and in need of cultivation and regulation. Through practices which seem to protect and nurture innocence, a particular account of the ‘natural purity’ of children can be materially and discursively produced without this seeming to be an artificial imposition. Moreover, I shall propose that imputing innocence to children allows a covert ontology to be constructed for particular groups of adults or society more generally; claims about the nature of the particular groups of adults, or society generally, can be smuggled into such accounts via claims about the child they may once have been. I shall depict innocence discourses as complex: capable of beneficial effects but also complicit in the production, stabilisation and occlusion of potentially troubling effects on relations of power, emotion and meaning in modern societies.

Contemporary French Feminine Cinema and Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence

by Tim Palmer