The “Age Complex” in Childhood Studies and the Limits of a Politics of Age

The present work discusses the significance of age as the cornerstone notion which has historically embedded studies of children and childhood.   Naturalized as a handy indicator of change along the life cycle and inherently simple as a quantifiable marker, age has, nevertheless, allowed for scarce questioning concerning its own epistemological conditions of possibility.  For instance, can age de- or re-construct the evolutionary temporality in which it was initially conceived?  How can age divisions and differences be re-constructed in view of emancipatory ideals of children?  Hasn’t age contributed to an under-socialized notion of children? Modern childhood owes its origins to the emergent historical importance given to human differentiation along the life course, a principle which came to preside over the formation of organisms, individuals and societies. Chronological age became the index which testified to socially and biologically relevant changes against the backdrop of an individual’s identity.  How human differentials along the life course should be signified, predicted and legitimated became an accomplishment of age taxonomies or life stages. Studies of childhood emerging the in the second half of the twentieth century, like sociology and anthropology, problematized the contextually unbound nature of age changes and its reifying effects on children’s subjectivities.  Dichotomies and disjunctions in subjective dispositions that were tapped by age were brought to converge, although age, as an explanatory concept, was not entirely overcome lurking beneath the constructionist efforts to understand childhood and children.  Age constitutes, then,  a “complex” given its overall adherence to modern as well as contemporary perspectives of childhood studies. Problematizing age points in the direction of inquiring about the nature of the disputes and conflicts of age-related social groups and the limits of such a politics of age.