Chapter 9: Concluding Thoughts

The work the authors in this volume set out to do does not end here. Preceding chapters have raised important questions, challenged prevailing assumptions and offered new ways of thinking about childhood masculinities in today's world. In many senses, this concluding chapter marks the commencement of future critical thinking and research on childhood masculinity that takes children seriously as social actors and fully appreciates childhood as a key site for ongoing debates concerning gender and power.

We are at a crucial point in our contemporary history where gender has assumed newer political meanings in public discourse. Although less commented upon in existing literature, the image of the innocent child has been harnessed time and again to push forward arguments in current ‘gender debates’. As childhood researchers have long demonstrated, the modern social construction of childhood as a realm of innocence wherein children cease to function as economic actors in the public sphere and become ‘emotionally priceless’ has bolstered the ‘cultural process of “sacralization” of children's lives’ (Zelizer, 1985, p. 11). Although not all children have been at the receiving end of this sacralisation process which deems them inherently innocent and deserving of special care and protection, the changing modern discourse around childhood has engendered a set of vocabularies that continue to be deployed to mount emotionally charged public campaigns for a host of purposes. Contemporary debates around gender that have encompassed everything from sports to toilet provisions, school curriculum to medical care, have witnessed strategic deployment of this emotive vocabulary and the associated image of the innocent child to further the causes being championed by commentators, scholars, activists and politicians alike. Some see these as constructions of ‘moral panic around threats to children’ (Amery, 2023, p. 99) that are being mobilised for ulterior political motives, while others portray their campaigns as heartfelt attempts to save children's lives and advocate for their ‘best interests’. In this embattled political arena of ‘gender debates’, however, the child is hardly visible. It is high time that Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities (CSMM) scholars engaged with children and with childhood scholarship to shift their focus and learn from those voices that have for long remained at the margins of CSMM writings. This volume makes a start in this direction.