Introduction: Visualising Adolescence in Contemporary Latin American Cinema—Gender, Class and Politics

The Child to Come reads American culture from the 1960s to the present as a period in which the anxious apprehension of nonhuman vitality has sought alleviation in the figure of the child. Yet the salvific life of the child only assuages to the degree that it also gives expression to the forces of nonhuman vitality it was fitted to capture. Drawing on arguments in the field of childhood studies about the interweaving of the child with the life sciences, the book argues that neither life nor the child are what they used to be. Under pressure from ecological change, artificial reproductive technology, genetic engineering, and the neoliberalization of the economy, the child no longer serves a biopolitical technology trained on sexual subjectivity. Instead, the contemporary, queerly-human child signals the ascendancy of a new episteme: the biopolitics of reproduction. Thus, subjectivity is far less crucial than the direct intervention into life itself within the paradigmatic locus of the pregnant woman and the sacred child.