That’s enough!’ (But it wasn’t)

The generative possibilities of attuning to what else a tantrum can do

Datos Bibliográficos

ID13005362
AutoresJayne Osgood (0000-0001-9424-8602, Middlesex University, autor de correspondencia), Victoria De Rijke (0000-0003-0804-5687, Middlesex University)
Año2022
Volumen12
Número3
Páginas235-248
Fecha de publicación2022-08-09
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGlobal Studies of Childhood (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2043-6106 • E-ISSN: 2043-6106
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/20436106221117167
OpenAlexW4293771499
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas17

Often used in the plural, tantrum denotes an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a young child. In this paper we attempt to enact a feminist project of reclamation and reconfiguration of ‘the toddler tantrum’. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions, this paper investigates the complex yet generative possibilities inherent within the tantrum to argue that it can be encountered as more-than-human, as a worldly-becoming, and as a form of resistance to Anthropocentrism and childism. We propose that the tantrum might be reappraised as a generative form of (child) activism. By mobilising the potential of arts-based approaches to the study of childhood we seek to reach other, opened out and speculative accounts of what tantrum-ing is, what it makes possible, and what it might offer to stretch ideas about, and practices with very young children. We undertake a tentacular engagement with children’s literature to arrive at possibilities to resist smoothing out, extinguishing or demonising the uncomfortable affective ecologies that are agitated by child rage. This paper brings together a concern with affect, materialities and bodies as they coalesce in more-than-human relationalities captured within ‘the tantrum’. In doing so, the unthinkable, the unbearable, the uncomfortable and the unknowable are set in motion, in the hope of arriving at a (more) critically affirmative account of childhood in all its messy complexity

Aesthetics · Art · Generative grammar · Set (abstract data type · Sociology · Children's Rights and Participation · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Social Psychology