(Dis)Playable Children's Bodies in Asia (ca 1850–1950s)
Part 1: Spaces, Objects, and Representations of Play
Organisers: Elena Valdameri, Srinita Majumdar, Yiru Wang (ETH Zurich)
What does it mean for a child's body to be playable and what does it mean for it not to be? Across modern Asia, children's bodies have been subjected to expert scrutiny, spatial organisation, and discursive ordering that determined whose body was fit for play, in what form, under whose supervision, and in what kind of place. These two-part panels take '(dis)playability' as an analytical lens through which to examine the making, unmaking and remaking of children's bodies at the intersection of gender, age, class, race, and ethnicity, from the (semi)colonial to the postcolonial period.
This first part approaches (dis)playability through its material, spatial and representational dimensions: the built environments, objects, nutritional regimes, clothing, prescriptions of bodily movement and behaviour, and educational materials through which children's bodies were rendered fit or unfit for play. It considers the global circuits through which knowledges of play (pedagogical, medical, popular, nationalist, etc.) travelled – and hybridized – across different geographical and cultural contexts, especially within Asia and trans-imperially.
Together, the papers in this panel resist teleological accounts of both the liberation and the disciplining of children through play, attending instead to the ambivalences and frictions that characterised children's bodily lives across Asian contexts.
Part 2 of this panel analyses the somatic and embodied dimensions of (dis)playability.
Part 2: Somatic Experience and Embodiments
Organisers: Elena Valdameri, Srinita Majumdar, Yiru Wang (ETH Zurich)
If Part 1 of this two-part panel examined the spatial, material, and representational conditions through which children's bodies were shaped as (dis)playable, Part II turns to what those bodies felt, did, and became from the inside. The (dis)playable body is not only a body written about and classified by others: it is a body with somatic experience, internal capacity, and a range of responses to the regimes that sought to shape it.
The papers in this panel attend to the full and uneven spectrum of somatic experience and embodiments. They seek to trace how discipline could tip into fun, how prescribed movement could be reappropriated, how logics regulating children's spaces were subverted, how mischievous, evasive or creative bodily gestures could signal a 'heterogenesis of ends'.
By keeping the felt and relational bodily experience at the centre, the panel resists accounts that reduce children to objects of disciplinary or liberatory projects. Together, the two panels propose (dis)playability as a productive analytical frame for the comparative history of childhood, children's bodies and play across Asian contexts, one that seeks to keep top-down prescription and bottom-up reappropriation, simultaneously in view.
If you are interested in joining our double panel, kindly contact us via email:
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Yiru Wang
ETH Zurich
yiru.wang@gmw.gess.ethz.ch------------------------------