Governed childhood

a foucauldian study of the capture of childhood in Modernity

Abstract

This article aims to provide a historical-philosophical reflection on the ways in which the subject is constituted in Modernity. To this end, it draws on the theorization of Michel Foucault, particularly regarding biopolitics and governmentality, in order to understand that it is a discourse that must occur critically and that the philosopher devoted his research to establishing the ways in which an individual becomes a subject in the modern Western world. Thus, discourse on the mode by which disciplinary power was transmuted into biopower in Modernity and came to operate through biopolitics, crossing the body and the life of the child in order to exercise techniques of subjugation and control. Such techniques of power could be implemented through the knowledge of Pedagogy, which found in schooling children the primary means of inscribing the marks of modernity upon them. A bibliographic review was conducted on Foucauldian concepts that establish the ways in which control over bodies came to be exercised by society and legitimized through the binomial power–knowledge, thereby producing a specific subjectivity. It is noteworthy that childhood, as it is known today, did not always exist, but came to acquire its own status, making it a target not only of modern discourses but also a historically and socially situated object, historically producing the modern child.