How might thinking with fluid river bodies destabilize neoliberal desires that segment child bodies into convenient and colonial temporalities?
Shared by ADRIENNE ARGENT AND AJA PAPP
How might thinking with fluid river bodies destabilize neoliberal desires that segment child bodies into convenient and colonial temporalities? By paying attention to river movements, we begin to notice the regulating forces of separation that seek to divide and regulate time, bodies, and movement within infant [and] toddler spaces. How are these words in and of themselves symbols of developmental psychologies? How does language exist in symbiosis with practice and pedagogies and space—never isolated or innocent from these discourses of convenient and consumable developmentalisms. How can and must language be unsettled alongside practice, and how can river wisdoms draw us into turbulent considerations of fluid intimacies—intimacies that exist between bodies, times, developmental ‘stages’, and temporalities?
We turn to Neimanis (2012) and her watery contemplations on water-bodies as conduits and modes of connection that blur the divides between times and bodies, as well as bodies themselves.
References
Neimanis Astrida. (2012). Hydrofeminisim, or on becoming a body of water. In H. Gunkle, C. Nigianni & F. Soderback (Eds.), Undutiful Daughters: Mobilizing Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities in Feminist Thought and Practice (96-115). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.