The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American 19th Century

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Preface: Unmanageable Bodies: Where Childhood Studies and Biopolitics Meet

Sarah Chinn

Introduction: The Biopolitics of Childhood

Lucia Hodgson and Allison Giffen

Section I: Heredity

1. Jacob Riis, Luther Burbank, and the Training of the American Child

Christa Holm Vogelius

2. "Send the Little Patient to the Hospital at Once:" Early Eugenics at North Carolina State Hospital's Epileptic Colony

Elisabeth McClanahan Harris

3. The Biopolitics of Sexual Consent in Lydia Maria Child's Reform Fiction

Lucia Hodgson

4. "Relics of a Race Never Yet Seen": Archaeologies of Nineteenth-Century Child Bodies

Laura Soderberg

Section II: Death

5. Innocent Specimens: Depicting Enslaved Childhood through the Lusus Naturae

Rebecca M. Rosen

6. Arrested Development: Disability and the "Feebleminded" Black Boy in St. Nicholas: Scribner's Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys

Allison Giffen

7. Newsboy Necropolitics: John Ellard, Disability, and Black Absence

Manuel Herrero-Puertas

8. "The Blight-Sooner or Later-Strikes All": Childhood and the Biopolitics of Racialized Lynching

Maude Hines

Section III: Family

9. Queer Ontologies: Categories of Age before Developmentalism

Gabrielle Owen

10. Biopolitics and Youth Border-Crossing in Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton) and Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa): Children's Bodies as Sites of Contention Between White State Power and Families of Color

Sarah Ruffing Robbins

11. Twilight Talk: What Every Girl Ought to Know about Sex Education in Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins

Stephanie Peebles Tavera

12. The Sentimental Biopolitics of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

Kristin Proehl