Children’s Bodies: An Absent Presence

Abstract

Chris Shilling (1993) famously described the body as ‘an absent presence’ in sociology — a characterisation that has also been applied to the body in geography (see Longhurst 1995) and more recently to the sub-discipline of children’s geographies. The body has been absent in the sense that it has rarely been acknowledged as a dominant theme within this area of geographical research; and yet the body is present precisely because children’s identities and place in the world have fundamentally been constructed in modern times and, in western societies at least, through their bodies. This chapter, therefore, draws out the significance of children’s bodies, using the sub-disciplinary context of children’s geographies in order to demonstrate how children’s bodies are ‘present’ in particular ways by considering how they have become a symbol of the meaning of childhood itself; how the process of making the transition from childhood to adulthood necessarily involves the disciplining of children’s bodies, producing struggles and contestation between children and adults about how they move and where they can or cannot go; how the body has been central to the production and contestation of children’s own identities within their peer group worlds; and the extent to which children and young people can occupy and take up public space.

The argument in this chapter has been developed through my work over several years and elements of this chapter have previously been published as part of G. Valentine (2001) Social Geographies (Harlow: Pearson) and G. Valentine (2008) ‘The ties that bind: towards geographies of intimacy’, Geography Cornpass 2(6): 2097–110.