Infância, biopolítica e neoliberalismo: uma navegação do pueril ao kids

Abstract

I insist here on the word “childhood”, to think again an old word in the face of a relatively new one: “kids” – a childhood that works based of a neoliberal biopolitics. At the thought of them, I seek to break with the alleged universality that fixe them in a fertile (profitable and productive) territory, to analyze them in their conditions of possibility. Instead of tracing a line from non-childhood to our childhood, I intend to realize the minimal discontinuities that form childhood and child within a neoliberal biopolitics, in the light of Michel Foucault, with an archaeological approach and under a genealogical view. With these navigation instruments and aids for docking at ports along the way, I set off on a journey from puerile to kids. Therefore, the thesis is divided into: (1) “nautical chart”, which works as a prologue; (2) “notices to mariners”, in which I detail the theoretical-methodological ways of doing this research; (3) “anterior quay”, a strategic starting point, located in the analysis of Renaissance and Classicist childhood; (4) “sea current”, in which I discuss the traces and movements of the notion of biopolitics in the work of Michel Foucault; (5) “Next Port: Liberalism and Childhood (18th-20th centuries)”, in which I seek to understand the intersections between childhood, liberalism and biopolitics; (6) “End Port: Neoliberalism and Kids (20th-21st centuries)”, in which the intersections analyzed are between childhood, neoliberalism and biopolitics; (7) finally, “Land ho! — Market kiddo!”, which I dedicate to the final remarks, in which I return to the biopolitical contours of neoliberal childhood, as part of an ontology of the present and opening a critical attitude, in view of decolonizing childhood