‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
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Karen Lury
Abstract
This article addresses the representation and mediation of the child-as-subject in British reality-television ‘parenting’ programmes, focusing on the BBC's ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways.’ It suggests that the programme produces a set of discourses — surveillance, exploitation, regulation, and transformation — and that these discourses mirror the current Labour government's initiatives in relation to children and childhood. The article asks whether these discourses have a repressive effect on the more ‘extraordinary’ aspects of childhood and on children's agency.
Since the children represented on the programme cry so frequently and so loudly, the article then goes on to interrogate the performance and visibility of tears as way in which we might think about the status and qualities of the child as subject. One important aspect of the programme is a distinctive ‘narrative’ of crying, so that while the child's tears are apparently stopped, the parents or caregivers are then seen crying ‘appropriately’ in line with the programme's enforced transformative and therapeutic discourse. In this narrative trajectory, the child is presented simply as a ‘symptom’ of the parents' or caregivers' pathology and it is suggested that the child's subjectivity and agency is thereby distorted or even ‘faked’ by the programme.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
