Cirrus@Austlit

Both traditional and new media texts incorporate representations of child bodies that are medicated, under surveillance, gendered, sexualised, commercialized and commodified. These bodies are treated as pathological and technological, as human and cyborg. In this unit students critically engage with a wide range of texts representing the diversity of children’s bodies as subjects in society, researching and responding to the politics these representations generate. Building on their understanding of narrative theory, ideology, power and identity as they operate in literature and other textual forms, students investigate how child bodies are understood, constructed, marked and enacted by stories and representations.