Literature and Politics

This paper explores the politics and ethics of childhood in Christos Tsiolkas’ novel,The Slap.  Cultural theorist Henry Jenkins, noting that discourses of childhood are simultaneously contradictory and enmeshed, uses the notion of palimpsest to draw attention to the gradual processes of accretion of discourses (rather than continuous reconstitution or renewal) that characterise the construction of the conceptual territory of childhood. the ways in which discourses of childhood both coalesce and work against one another to problematise the space of childhood – and its relation to adulthood – in The Slap. The paper focuses particularly on the ways in which competing discourses position the children variously as innately innocent and in need of protection, potentially monstrous and in need of control, as insignificant not-yet-adults and as people deserving of respect, to examine what these various positionings might mean for adult perceptions of the agency of the child. The paper draws on feminist and postcolonial thinking to look at what possibilities a re-conceputalisation of children’s subjectivity might hold for repositioning the child as agentic.