Abstract
This chapter focuses on the enactment of protecting as one of the main teleoaffective qualities of child caring. I examine how this teleoaffective priority is produced and maintained in the commercial world through the theme of infant safety, and the constitution of ‘the young child’ as vulnerable in embodied ways. Infant commodity culture is crowded with products that are designed to ‘safeguard’, ‘guide’, ‘monitor’ and ‘promote the health of’ the young child, and my analysis therefore starts with a consideration of three ways in which safety connects with products. I then move on to consider renditions of the young child as vulnerable, enigmatic and unpredictable. Performances of the youngest of children as vulnerable and enigmatic open up opportunities for pecuniary value creation through product innovation and problem multiplication in which techno-medical-science ways of knowing the infant child abound, and in which ‘the child’ is not in any way held responsible (and thus rendered innocent). Performances of the young child as unpredictable, as opposed to enigmatic, point to shifting understandings of vulnerability in relation to age, development and agency. In the final part of the chapter, I draw on my interviews with prospective and new parents to discuss how protecting children gains affective salience through the co-occurrence of vulnerability with lovable and purity. I here also compare commercial and parental enactments of the young child.
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Notes
- 1.
The Which? Guide is a publication—now present as an online resource—from the UK’s charity the Consumer’s Association.
- 2.
- 3.
The websites analysed here were those of Phillips Avent , Tommee Tippee, NUK, MAM, and Dr. Brown’s. 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. I analysed the UK sites of the other companies. 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.
- 4.
A thank you to my colleague Dr. Emma Head, with whom I had an interesting conversation on finger sucking and its historical association with the malformation of children’s mouths and teeth.
- 5.
The Technology in Motion website was consulted on 11 May 2016, at https://www.technologyinmotion.com/flat-head-syndrome/what-is-flat-head-syndrome/.
- 6.
The product demonstration video on the SleepCurve website was consulted on 11 May 2016, and found at http://www.sleepcurve.com/why-buy-a-sleepcurve-mattress/.
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Martens, L. (2018). Protecting: Assembling Infant Embodied Vulnerability. In: Childhood and Markets . Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31503-8_6
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