Challenging Essentialist Discourses on Children's Self-Identities: ‘The Child’ in Cultural Radicalism and Revolutionary Practices in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s

This article tries to understand, by using some poststructural tools, practices with children that were performed by a Left action group in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s. Modernist resistance discourses of enlightenment and liberation from obedience, silence and innocence can be seen as being produced, together with postmodern acts of unfolding and deconstructing a unified and essentialist child subject. It finds those non-essential child subjects created in the unpredictable dramaturgy of happenings and actions, and in the decentred spread of talks, tasks and modes of addressing. It makes the point that by analysing how new discourses of childhood were lived out, acted on and performed rather than found in ideological debates, it is possible to add new understandings of changes in child discourses in the 1970s. The article stresses the open-endedness of those practices, and their relation to the creation of new rooms and spaces. It suggests something of a paradox: that the moving and changing of child subjectivities was produced within practices where collectivity was the priority.