Tuning to Shapeshifting Bodies and Bodying Chronologies in Childhood Studies

In a mediation on maturation, diarist Anaïs Nin (1971) avows that “we do not grow absolutely, chronologically...We grow partially. We are relative” (p. 127). Holding that bodied human subjects confront growth in its patchiness - its unsteady and conditional cadences - we stand against the assertion that childhood must subscribe to or articulate a chronology consistent with Euro-Western colonial logics of linearity. We follow critical childhood studies scholars who make clear how arranging and containing childhood’s trajectories within the grammar of the white Anthropocene purposefully produces child subjects and bodies built to thrive in the rhythms and pace of neoliberal capitalism. These sanctioned chronologies position the human (child) body as a living archive of linearity; the fleshed reference point that anchors chronology becomes the child’s skeleton. In this paper, we work with the problematic of how we might attune to the rhythms and trajectories of the ever-shapeshifting human body without reiterating the human-centered chronological categories that organize the Anthropocene. Working with documentation from pedagogical inquiry research with young children and early childhood educators, we take up Anaïs Nin’s contention that “we are made up of layers, cells, constellations” (p. 127) as we work to figure out how to tune into bodied growth beyond human-centric chronological logics, referents, and prescriptions. We wrestle with a necessarily irresolvable contradiction: we want to think beyond human bodies while it is with our bodied hands that we grasp this proposal. How, we ask, can we understand bodied growth as particular responses, experiments, and processes of worldly immersion - as relentless, risky, and recuperative world-making - while resisting taken-for-granted formulations of growing larger and older within an already known world? Our intention is to follow what becomes possible for experiencing bodies and their permeability, excess, and contagion when growth is evacuated from anthropocentric ontologies of chronology.