L’enfance contemporaine : Des significations imaginaires en temps bio-identitaires
Contemporary Childhood: Imaginary Meanings in Bio-Identity Times

Summary/Abstract: Since modernity, childhood has been a privileged anchor theme for humanities. Already rationalized by theological pedagogy, essentialized by psychology, currently included by neuroscience, it embraces the power and flow of representations that remain at the heart of these disciplines, triggering them in a vibrating and renewed social construction. Thus, the history of seizing and modeling childhood reveals a historical and social fabric which, obsessed by its control and functionalist use, leaves identity production pages in the archives of existing and emerging Humanities. This movement around childhood is not confined to the limits of what produces it or what ends it, because it transcends the formerly established frameworks and paradigms. Following the track of imaginary identities assigned to childhood, I aim to understand how this identity, anchored in the body and its fluids, organizes and disrupts in our contemporary world, a field concerning childhood. In an era when the child is left only with an identity objectified through media coverage of childish mental disorders, where the “mental” is equivalent to the status of “body fluid”, I focused on the mapping of imaginary significations maintained/ historically altered in discourse and practices concerning children. To do this, I will work on the analysis of the parental, media and specialised discourse.

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