Chair: Paul Myerscough, University of Sussex

Catherine E. Thomas, The Pennsylvania State University

In early modern scholarship, the term "unnatural" has been interrogated repeatedly for its connection to constructions of female identity in dramatic and popular literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. More specifically, it seems to define a language of motherhood, as well as anti-motherhood. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, we find it recurring around portrayals of child murder in English drama. But while there may be a common language associated with the motif, it is important to remember that representations of child murder by mothers in legal documents, popular pamphlets, and dramas are markedly different from the "real" infanticides of the era. Jodi Mikalachki, Frances Dolan, and Betty Travitsky have sought to account for the contrasts under rubrics of (respectively) national history-building, misogynistic anxieties, and dramatic conventions. The studies contribute significantly to our thinking about these portrayals, but neglect consideration of other cultural and historical issues prevalent during the early modern period.

In my paper, I open up existing readings to further examine the importance of early modern definitions of parent-child relationships, and by extension, the implications of illustrating, effectively, the death of the body politic. That dramatic depictions of child murder most often include murderous queens who slay adult children bespeaks a greater rhetorical function for the motif than conventionality. To kill the heir to the throne, the effective future of the nation, is an act with extremely serious political ramifications. To map this act across the body of a woman, to invert her creative powers into destructive force, problematizes the boundaries of "unnatural" versus civilized behavior. To figure the body natural as corrupt and monstrous, and to subsume that problem within a character who represents the body politic, makes the marginal absolutely central. I apply these cultural and political frameworks to representative dramatic examples such as Sackville and Norton’s Gorboduc, Marlowe’s 2 Tamburlaine, and Fletcher’s Tragedie of Bonduca.

When playwrights weave the child murder motif into plays, what first seems like simple theatricality may indeed register as much more politically volatile. This reconsideration of context illuminates the complexity of the motif’s usage in the plays, as well as the potential dramatic effects for the early modern audience.

Jeannie Martin, University of Alberta

In Children and the Politics of Culture (1995), Sharon Stephens states that we are witnessing a profound restructuring of social and psychological constructs of the child. Noting that issues of childhood have been neglected in analyses of late capitalism, Stephens claims that, to explore the processes of globalization, the boundaries between politics and culture need to be theorized. With the renaissance of child studies ushered in by the United Nations’ ratification of its latest document on child rights (The Convention on the Rights of the Child), early critical resistance to the generic child created by this political instrument comes from Jo Boyden, who fears that the international child excludes its radical Other: historical street children whose disappearance from urban centres from São Paolo to Seattle gets effaced in debates over child rights.

Informed by these observations, this paper analyzes treatments of the figural child in the genre of street-kid films to examine critical interventions in the imbricated discourses of globalization and human rights. Boyden’s critique raises questions: does constructing a universal figure impede work affecting the growing numbers of impoverished children, and can this binaristic model be complicated by analyzing instead the child’s relationships to other alter-figures: homo economicus, for instance, located in the forum of, say, a Forbes magazine? This paper will first situate the "freely-traded" child to ground my investigation of interventions prioritizing social accountability. Images indexing resistance to neo-imperialism—in such films as Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981), and Walter Salles’s Central Station (1998)—mark crises of poverty posing a primary threat to neo-liberal security. For alienated children, such films demonstrate, affective security is inseparable from social security. If ideological battles continue to be fought over the solitary child, an "alien" Elián González, for instance, then attention can be displaced from abandoned children in metropolitan centres everywhere.

Dr. Claire Valier, Faculty of Law, University of Leeds

In a multi-media age, we are constantly bombarded with an array of representations of crime and punishment. One of the several consequences of the mass circulation of images is that

meanings of infamy must be renegotiated. This paper explores the process through which it emerges that Myra Hindley is now being punished in respect of her notoriety rather than her crimes. Advancing this proposition requires me to argue that Myra is not simply notorious because of her crimes. To put it another way, she does not receive the level and kinds of interest that she does just because her crimes were 'so heinous' in themselves. On the contrary, there has been a repetitious recycling of traumatising narratives and images in the mass media, popular and 'high' art forms, and case law. I develop a reading of two particular tropes within this hystericised discourse, namely the cathected space of the Moors and the visual image of Hindley herself. Broadly, I argue that a reconfiguration of the relationship between notoriety, vengeance and punishment is central to the punitive turn observed across western jurisdictions over the last few decades. I reject the notion of a dispassionate rule of law and prefer that of wounding justice. This latter notion calls upon fellow scholars to engage with the politics of representation within an increasingly emotional public sphere.

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