Abstract
This chapter presents an analysis of the aesthetic organisation of commercial environments and objects of early childhood. The aim is to demonstrate the role aesthetic organisation plays in the shaping of the particular understanding of ‘the young child’ as loveable. I purposefully start the analysis of the teleoaffective structuration of child caring with the quality of the young child as loveable, because knowing ‘the child’ in this way operates as such a resounding cultural obviousness, that it renders examination almost redundant, and because the loving quality of the young child serves as an ‘anchor’ for other elements in the teleoaffective structure, including those of protecting and purifying, around which pecuniary value is created. Elements of the aesthetic of early childhood outlined in this chapter, and found in the commercial world of young children and child caring, include the use of colours and colour schemes, the definition of ‘cute’ objects, designed as play mates for children and used as affective devices targeting adults, and conventions in the visual representation of young children. I close with a discussion on the use of certain kinds of objects in practices of personal life lovemaking. In and through these various practices, ‘the young child’ is known as lovable, not only in the privacy of family life, but as a signifier in a broader generational and symbolic culture of childhood.
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Notes
- 1.
These simultaneously ensured that if toddlers clambered onto the stage, they would not hurt themselves when falling off.
- 2.
Neutral colours (including pastel yellows and creams) are colours which do not gender categorise the baby, but which are nevertheless suitable for ‘the young child’.
- 3.
Baby Sense is a South African company, which exhibited at The Show during some of the years included in my research. It sells a variety of baby soothing products . The company’s website, first accessed in 2009, and again in 2017, is http://www.babysense.co.za/.
- 4.
Sophie the Giraffe , along with some other soft toys for young children , is produced by the French company Vulli. In 2017, Sophie had her own website. See http://www.sophielagirafe.fr/en/.
- 5.
I first came across Sophie when speaking with her then UK distributors at the Baby Product Association trade exhibition. Since then, Sophie has become popular in the UK; something that has been stimulated by discussions of parenting internet sites. To the careful observer, she may be seen sharing the living room couch with Labour leader Ed Miliband, when he fronted The Guardian newspaper’s weekend magazine in March 2011.
- 6.
It was, however, not uncommon for smaller commercial players (family businesses) to bring their young children and babies with them to The Baby Show, and on one of my excursions, a toddler could be seen to help demonstrate the uses of the baby sling, by sitting, facing outwards, wrapped up against the body of his father.
- 7.
The question whether infants can be ‘for sale’, can take on monetary value in their own right, is reflected in the culturally contentious examples of adoption, surrogate mothering, and IVF conception. These practices were not present in the commercial environments researched here, confirming the heightening of cultural contradictions around such practices when associated with pecuniary value . See Traver (2013) for a discussion on adoption; Thompson (2005) on IVF, and Taylor et al. (2004) for other examples.
- 8.
Reborn baby dolls are dolls that are made to look and feel like real babies, by crafts persons who call themselves artists.
- 9.
These are tools that go into the mouths of infants, and can include as diverse a range of products as feeding bottles, soothers or pacifiers, teething tools, early toothbrushes, early cutlery and drinking cups.
- 10.
The websites analysed here were those of Johnson’s Baby and the major brand-companies that supply feeding and orality tools: Phillips Avent , Tommee Tippee, NUK, MAM, and Dr. Browns. For Johnson’s Baby , the UK sites for 2009 and 2011 were analysed. The sites of the orality tool companies analysed all date from April and May 2013. Tommee Tippee is an American owned company, which has a major production site in the UK. Philips Avent is the merged outcome of the British infant feeding tools brand company Avent, and the Dutch domestic technologies giant Philips. The merger took place in 2006, which signals the shift to a ‘mixed feeding’ narrative (see Chapter 7). MAM is of Austrian origin. NUK originates in Germany. These brand companies all trade globally. The website content of these international commercial organisations change regularly, and many maintain different sites for specific countries. In 2013, for instance, NUK had a ‘generic’ international English language site, and also sites for a range of different countries. For some countries, the organization of the site differed considerably from that of the international site, for others, some or all of the materials used on the international site were used. For NUK and MAM, I analysed the international English language sites. For the other companies, I analysed their UK sites. As website content changes over time, the procedure I used was to copy the website content of each brand-company by making screen prints of each page of information, and by storing any additional materials, including any information brochures that were available from the sites. This allowed for the archival of textual and visual materials to return to later.
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Martens, L. (2018). Loving: Emotional Movements. In: Childhood and Markets . Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31503-8_5
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