Governing Childhoods Through Stories: A Havelian Analysis of Childhood Subjectivities

Abstract

The story of childhood is a continuously contested notion. The production of childhoods through children’s literature and the formation of subjectivities through texts, stories and fairy tales are positioned in the centre of this thesis. The preschool magazine Little Bee, and the post-totalitarian, communist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s and 1980s in which it was published, serve as a site of exploration through which the production of childhoods and childhood subjectivities is analysed. The tensions between public, ideal, expected childhoods and private, resistant childhoods filled with desires for alternative experiences are explored through the philosophies of Havel and Foucault. Havel’s work gives this research an analytical framework: I argue that children are the victim, supporter and rebel subjects produced through children’s literature. This subjectification occurs both in the official discourse of education as well as in the secret private places of childhood undergrounds. My analysis complicates the nature of everyday life in post-totalitarian Czechoslovakian kindergartens in the 1970s and 1980s, contests the security and truth of archival data, and leads to the problematisation of how children’s literature and stories produce childhoods and childhood subjectivities. This thesis culminates with connections drawn between the complex power relations of post-totalitarian ideology and the current New Zealand neoliberal discourse of government-funded children’s literature. I argue that the striking resemblance and familiarity of the post-totalitarian and neoliberal contexts analysed exemplify the ways that childhoods are governed through stories in any ideological context.