WHAT CHILDHOOD ARE WE CONSTRUCTING?: Pathologizing Practices, Discourses, and Modes of Subjectivation of Childhood in the Neoliberal Context

práticas patologizantes, discursos e modos de subjetivação de uma infância no contexto Neoliberal

Abstract

Contemporary childhood has been marked by a growing diagnostic practice that standardizes typical aspects of neurodevelopment while classifying behaviors considered atypical, thus making childhood an object of Child Psychiatry. We currently experience an epidemic of childhood psychiatric diagnoses, in which different social dispositifs begin to operate through diagnostic nomenclatures and representations, within a process of medicalization of everyday life and pathologization of childhood. In this context, medicine is established as a strategy of governmentality and produces forms of subjectivation compatible with the demands of the neoliberal system. Understanding the modes of subjectivation of childhood within the neoliberal context requires comprehending childhood as a historical construction, as well as analyzing the effects of neoliberal rationality on child subjects, the role of social medicine, and psychiatry as strategies of governance. The presentation of the research The Meanings Attributed to Childhood: The Discourse of Caregivers and Education Professionals contributes to the discussion of how discourses help naturalize diagnostic categories and produce a childhood regulated by biomedical parameters of normality. Contemporary ways of signifying childhood are traversed by discursive and institutional practices that operate processes of control, normalization, and governance of children, reducing subjective experiences to individualizing and pathologizing frameworks.