Abstract
This chapter draws on data from research on ‘Textures of food: diffracting eating relationships in an early years setting’ which is about young children’s embodied engagements with food. The research was based in a nursery in the northwest of England that is known to have high levels of poverty and offers free places to ‘disadvantaged’ 2 year olds. The assemblage moves beyond the linear accounts of UK policy narratives around ‘healthy eating’ and ‘balanced diet’ in the early years that force children’s relationships with food into binary positions such as having a ‘healthy appetite’ or being ‘fussy eater’. Instead, it harnesses the concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘difference’ to open up the potentialities of a machinic food assemblage, where alternative forms of monstrous life, created between heterogeneous entities at mealtimes, are recognised as in circulation in the early years setting. The assemblage will examine one particular ‘monstrous’ story about how a child experiences the limits of her own body while finding her ‘self’ affectively entangled with food and other entities. It foregrounds the affective relationships she has with food in order to understand why some children enjoy eating, whilst for others, it is a situation that is fraught with tension, anxiety and frustration. Methodologically, the assemblage turns to the post-humanities, which offer opportunities, as well as produce particular challenges, in relation to ways of ‘being’ and ‘knowing’ as a researcher. Our entanglements in this assemblage draw in visual, auditory and tactile bodily intra-relationalities, as the event becomes co-produced in the interrogation of what is beyond or more-than-human.
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this chapter assemblage , the use of ‘I’ is entangled with the production of data and refers to Thekla Anastasiou. ‘We’ is used to denote the co-generation of the overall written piece and refers to Thekla Anastasiou, Rachel Holmes and Katherine Runswick-Cole.
- 2.
Following Barad (2014: 168), with the term ‘re-turn’, we aim to do what describes as making a turn over and over again in order to make something new, to find new patterns by intra-acting and re-diffracting.
- 3.
We borrowed the conjunctive term ‘and … and … and …’ from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) which was used in their book ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. We adopted this term in an attempt to help us to open up life to variation and difference : ‘the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, and … and … and …’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 25). In that way, the body and any assemblage that we refer to within this research is open, it can be multiple, and is a continuous becoming rather than a static being (Malins, 2004). In addition, we find the use of ‘and … and … and …’ ethical, as in that way the reader is not restricted and committed only to what we have written, but they are free to add other things to the assemblages developed within this research project (Düttmann, 2002).
- 4.
Consent gained for photographs from the setting as well as the parents. Pseudonyms were also used in this assemblage of writing to protect children’s identities.
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to my supervisors Rachel Holmes and Katherine Runswick-Cole, whose generous feedback and critical conversations during the writing process, significantly improved my research work and the ideas included in this article.
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Anastasiou, T., Holmes, R., Runswick-Cole, K. (2018). Becoming Monstrous: On the Limits of the Body of a Child. In: Riddle, S., Bright, D., Honan, E. (eds) Writing with Deleuze in the Academy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2065-1_4
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