Child As Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide

Abstract

This article mobilises transdisciplinary inquiry to explore and deconstruct the often-used comparison of racialized/colonized people, intellectually disabled people and mad people as being like children. To be childlike is a metaphor that is used to denigrate, to classify as irrational and incompetent, to dismiss as not being knowledge-holders, to justify governance and action on others' behalf, to deem as being animistic, as undeveloped , underdeveloped or wrongly-developed, and, hence, to subjugate. We explore the political work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, and particularly the centrality of the metaphor of childhood to legitimising colonialism and white supremacy. The article attends to the ways in which this metaphor contributes to the shaping of the material and discursive realities of racialized and colonized others as well as those who have been psychiatrized and deemed 'intellectually disabled'. Further, we explore specific metaphors of child-colony, and child-mad-'crip'. We then detail the developmental logic underlying the historical and continued use of the metaphorics of childhood and explore how this makes possible an infantilisation of colonized peoples and the global South more widely. The material and discursive impact of this metaphor on children's lives, and particularly children who are racialized, colonized, and/or deemed mad or 'crip', is then considered. We argue that complex adult-child relations, sane-mad relations and Western-majority world relations within global psychiatry, are situated firmly within pejorative notions of what it means to be childlike , and reproduce multi-systemic forms of oppression that, ostensibly in their 'best interests', govern children and all those deemed childlike .

‘Such a white thing to do’: A discourse analysis of CAMH’s Coping with COVID-19 Campaign

“…Accordingly, "madness was framed through an understanding of degenerative illness as hereditary deviance, which lurked in the body and was passed down through tainted genes" (Voronka, 2008, p.48) and the spatial confinement, according to Voronka (2008), operated as a tool of the colonial project "to create and solidify a history of whiteness in Canada" (p.48). Joseph (2013) refers to Roman et al who argue "colonial western psychiatry had been described as a necessary vehicle used to advance colonial nation building and the very definition of 'civil' society" (p.285), in line with Mills & LeFrançois (2018) who indicate "that conceptions of normal and pathological behaviour and psychology were made possible through the colonial binary of the "normal" West and the pathological Rest" (p.513) in which the psy-disciplines "have been constituted through colonialism and so are always already a colonial practice" (p.520). Joseph (2015) similarly addresses the reliance on colonial technologies to support the colonial project, embedded within criminal justice and mental health systems to operate as mechanisms of social control.…”

“…It is by no coincidence that autonomy is presented to the white subjects, in which white supremacist racial hierarchies are evident in their implied autonomy versus prescribed reliance on external services to manage their "illness". The infantilization of subjects (Mills & LeFrançois, 2018) and parentification of agencies in Case 5 is constructed as necessary intervention to keep racialized mad bodies out of carceral systems. In Case 5 (Pendenque, Case 5, 2020) it says "He feels fortunate these days.…”

Pathological demand avoidance: What and who are being pathologised and in whose interests?

“…These are the same words that are used to describe children and their competencies or, more precisely, their assumed lack of competencies. These ideas are so engrained and so powerful that the word 'child' can be and has been used to pathologise and 'other' certain groups by characterising them as childlike (Mills and Lefrançois, 2018). Child has been used as a metaphor to justify welfarist practices that infantalise disabled people and older people, for example (Mills and Lefrançois, 2018;Thompson, 2006).…”

“…These ideas are so engrained and so powerful that the word 'child' can be and has been used to pathologise and 'other' certain groups by characterising them as childlike (Mills and Lefrançois, 2018). Child has been used as a metaphor to justify welfarist practices that infantalise disabled people and older people, for example (Mills and Lefrançois, 2018;Thompson, 2006). Furthermore, it could also be argued that the term 'demand' in the label pathological demand avoidance reflects the unequal power dynamics between adults and children.…”

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“…The governance of childhood is a key constituent of the governance of hegemonic sociopolitical order, from the local to the global. Much is invested in the child's place in society as well as in the very idea of childhood itself as a technology for the limitation and control of abided subjecthood of those marked 'childish' (Basham, 2015), 'childlike', (Mills and LeFrançois, 2018) or 'child' (Beier, 2018). Typically, where the dominant modes of the governance of childhood are put under challenge is in circumstances where the broader hegemonic order is also under challenge (as, e.g.…”