The Images of Childhood and Children in the Symbolic Politics

Abstract

The article analyzes principal regularities in the use of images of childhood and children in the symbolic politics. The authors note the growing politicization of the issues of childhood in the recent years, which determines academic and social relevance of the child study from the Political Science perspective. The paper shows that the symbol of childhood plays a significant role in the legitimation and delegitimation of power and political system, the discourse of military conflicts, the civilizational discourse and other forms of symbolic politics. The symbol possesses the traits which make it useful for political actors’: the connection to myth and the sacral that determines its ability to trigger strong emotional response; plasticity and subjectivity in interpretation; simplicity of perception; ability to create symbolic boundaries and to serve as a way of inclusion and exclusion. The symbol of childhood appeals to the kinship relations, which contributes to representing the social ties as natural, strong, and legitimate. This symbol helps to bring to the symbolic politics such binary oppositions as culture vs. nature, reason vs. emotions, power vs. submission, freedom vs. dependence, individuality vs. collectivity, actuality vs. potentiality. In making the meanings and evaluations of social reality with the help of this symbol the actors use various mechanisms of symbolic politics: drawing symbolic boundaries, employing conceptual metaphors, resemiotization, visualization, and stereotipization. In spite of variability of its meanings, one can note its core characteristics, and the most significant of them is otherness in regards to the norm — the image of the adult human, above all, that of the adult male, that determines both positive and negative context of employing this symbol. The authors point out that the symbol of childhood has a significant potential for the use in symbolic politics.