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theses

My dissertation examines representations of childhood in Progressive Era kid strips, or comic strips headlined by child characters. It studies the ways the strips expressed and explored contemporary conceptualizations of childhood and citizenship. Working at the intersection of studies of childhood, comics, humor and visual culture, this multidisciplinary project demonstrates that the strips linked discourses of childhood with discourses of race, class, gender and nationhood. As my dissertation focuses on strips produced between 1896 and 1911, it recognizes that these texts emerged during a time when notions of nationhood and membership in this nation were being anxiously defined and debated. By placing the strips in conversation with contemporary reformers’ writings, children’s literature, scientific studies, photographs, advertisements and other visual ephemera, I demonstrate that kid strips participated in constructing childhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More specifically, I show how the strips not only theorized childhood but also theorized child citizenship. The strips particularly positioned white, middle-class boys as the proper inheritors of a racial and national legacy, (re)presenting them as most fit to become effective and productive Americans. Child characters that were non-white, lower-class and female, on the other hand, appeared to be marginal figures that were constructed in opposition to – and thus inferior to – white, middle-class male characters. Yet a significant number of strips also suggested that these minor/minority characters also possessed the “positive” qualities often associated with Anglo-Saxon boyhood. Thus Progressive Era kid strips drew and redrew the lines, illustrating how social boundaries – as they are defined by race, class, gender and age – are simultaneously rigid and porous. The child characters in these texts upheld and undermined the lines drawn between white and non-white, lower-class and middle-class, male and female, child and adult. By employing careful textual analysis and approaching the comic strip as a medium that delivered ambivalent messages, I ultimately argue that kid strips were sites of cultural negotiation in which white, middle-class beliefs about childhood and the child’s role and place in a modernizing and expanding nation were at once reinforced and interrogated.

ETD_4822

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

Includes vita

by Ma. Larisa Montserrat Q. Saguisag

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10005600001.ETD.000068632

doi:10.7282/T34X56DD

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.