Advancing feminist relationality in childhood studies

Relationality has become central to Childhood Studies and even described as its ontological ground. Feminist theories offer articulate theorizing on relationalities, yet feminist ideas of relationality have not had a significant impact on Childhood Studies. Through focusing on feminist notions of corporeal specificity, sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry, and transcorporeality, this paper argues that feminist theorizations open up a space to engage with childhood and children’s lives as not only relational or entangled, but as inevitably imbricated in relations of power.

The word [relations] is an attractor; a term that engages other terms, a concept in a field of concepts, an idea that draws values and disseminates feelings, a substantive from which adjectives (relational) and abstractions (relationality) can be made exactly as though everyone knew what was meant (Strathern, 2020: 2, 2).Allen (2012: 190) has succinctly remarked that "it is, after all, hard to imagine a world without relationality as a defining characteristic of social and material interactions", and yet, as Strathern (2020) contends in the quote above, the concept of relations is both commonsensical and highly elusive.The proliferation of studies utilizing concepts like interdependency, connections, interactions, networks, nodes, bundles and entanglements in the social sciencesconcepts used almost synonymously with relationsshows how relations have become a buzzword of the present.Relations have simultaneously moved from being the means of study to an object of study (Strathern, 2020).This is very significant in Child and Childhood Studies. 1 When researching children's lives and childhoods, child scholars commonlyeven inevitablyattend to relations that "define and condition the social realities, actors, discourses and dynamics they are interested in" (Alanen, 2020: 433).Alanen (2020) has even suggested that relationality ought to be the ontological grounding for Childhood Studies.This approach has enabled not only a decentering of the child subject/object and the child position, but has also moved the analytical focus toward the relations and the situational relational effects, thus framing the 'proper object' of Childhood Studies to be relations rather than the child or childhood (Alanen, 2020).
However, definitions of relations, relationality, the relational and relation (al)ism vary among disciplinary and theoretical contexts, making it both ambiguous and vague (Alanen, 2012).Relational conceptualizations have a long history in many fields within the social sciences: for instance, in anthropology as the field's 'proper' subject-matter and in studies explicitly focused on relations (see Strathern, 2018Strathern, , 2020)); in sociology through network analysis, sciences and technology studies and the relational sociology of Bourdieu and others (Powell and Dépeltau, 2013); in the relational geography of Lefebvre, Harvey and Massey; in psychology and pedagogy through thinkers like Piaget, Dewey and Vygotsky and more recently through developmental psychology (Alanen, 2012(Alanen, , 2020)).In general, it might be argued that there has been a shift from empirical and methodological uses of relational conceptualizations to more epistemological and ontological relations.This could be seen as part of what some have referred to as a turn to ontology (Alanen, 2012;Spyrou, 2019), but as Strathern convincingly illustrates in her work on relations in anthropology and beyond, it might have a more foundational philosophical lineage in Anglophone thinking.This shift moves on a proximity axis: from indirect, taken-for-granted, peripheral conceptualizations to direct, highlighted and central conceptualizations (cf.Strathern, 2020).
To stay with and yet also challenge the ambiguity of relational conceptualizations, in this paper we will depart from a field where relationality has long been elaborated, that is, the field of feminist theory.Through concepts like intersectionality, performativity, sexual difference, feminist bioethics, care ethics and so on, relations and relationality have more or less been explicitly discussed within a feminist tradition (cf.Koggel et al., 2022).Put crudely, relationality is in many ways fundamental for feminist theorizing, as feminist knowledge production is invested in analyzing and changing unequal practices in a patriarchal society.In order to do that, feminist theorists have used conceptualizations which focus on comparing, contrasting or entangling the relations between the sexes or associated concepts therein (cf.Finlayson, 2016).However, in line with what Åsberg et al. (2015) and many others argue, research that engages with relational conceptualizations is often disconnected from the feminist archives of theorizing around difference and power, only to advance and (re)produce genealogies of relationality as 'new' or 'novel'.This could be described as a "forget (ting) feminism" in discussions about relationality (Zalewski, 2019) that have become detached from their feminist trajectories, often through (non-)citational practices.This way of describing the emergence of relational conceptualizations, where "feminist scholars [are] not at all referenced or mentioned" ( Åsberg et al., 2015: 152) is a practice that has rightfully been criticized both inside and outside of discussions on relational conceptualizations (see also Hemmings, 2005).Some of the most influential texts on relationality are thus written by "feminist philosophers and theorist [s], although this is seldom properly acknowledged" (Lenz Taguchi, 2017: 700).
As will be discussed throughout this paper, we see feminist theorizing of relationality as specifically important for the field of Childhood Studies.We argue that childhood and children's lives are not only relational, connected or interdependent, but that this relationality is always imbricated in relations of power.Through starting from the insight that feminist research exposes, problematizes and challenges the operation of power relations in childhood contexts (Osgood and Robinson, 2019a), feminist theorizing is "capable of examining the relational production of identity/difference and the differential distribution of symbolic and material value in dominant socio-spatial orders" (Kinkaid, 2020: 464, emphasis in orig.;cf. Redshaw, 2013).Thus, the aim of the paper is to explore what a feminist relationality in Childhood Studies could be like.This means that we will highlight both continuities and discontinuities of feminist relational conceptualizations.We argue that by thinking relationality through feminist notions of corporeal specificity, sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry and also transcorporeality, it opens up a space for engaging with indeterminacy and becoming, rendering childhood and children's lives central to the apprehension of the world.

Childhood studies and feminist theorizing
There are several important contributions in which feminist theorizing and Childhood Studies have been brought together.Over 35 years ago, Thorne (1987: 185) pointed out how the repositioning of women as agentic subjects has been adult-centered.She argues that feminist perspectives could include a focus on children to rethink notions of gender, relatedness and the "'masculinist' ideal of self-defined through separation".Burman and Stacey (2010) however, note that feminists have problematized how "womenandchildren" are grouped together as helpless and inferior, vulnerable and unreasonable, making conversations sometimes tense between feminist theorizing and Childhood Studies.Feminists have rightfully focused on challenging the position of women in relation to children, making it less appealing to attend to children or childhood per se.This has sometimes led to antagonistic relations between feminist scholars and scholars concerned with children and childhood (Rosen and Twamley, 2018).There have, however, also been fruitful attempts in which child and childhood have become important arenas for feminist debate and theorizing.Age, generation or the temporal order of society have accordingly been taken up by childhood scholars as ways of scrutinizing discursive tales of societal progress, of power relations and privilege that in turn has affected the mainstream feminist field (see e.g.Burman and Stacey, 2010;Calasanti et al., 2006;Castañeda, 2001).Queer approaches to temporality have also theorized how temporal arrangements are part of constituting subjectivities and normativity, but some of these approaches have tended to reproduce children and childhood merely as signifiers of futurity, and of heterosexual reproduction from chrononormative perspectives (Freeman, 2010;Halberstam, 2005;Lesnik-Oberstein, 2010).Even if a reciprocity is still rare (Lenz Taguchi, 2019), feminist theorizing in Childhood Studies is more frequent than discissions of what feminists can learn from Childhood Studies (Rosen and Twamley, 2018).Through feminist post-structuralist perspectives, children's gendered subjectivities have specifically been adressed in early childhood research (see e.g.Davies, 1989;Lenz Taguchi, 2004), where discourses on masculinity and femininity, as well as the performativity of subjecthood are engaged with in order to understand childhood.Osgood and Robinson (2019a: 2) state the importance of feminist thought when researching children and childhood, and they highlight feminist scholarship as particularly vital for, and politically motivated to "transform inequalities and injustices through critique and reconfiguration" in children's everyday life and ordinary experiences.As such, they argue that feminist theorizing enables different and more ethically sustainable understandings of childhood, aiming at challenging injustice, prejudice, and oppression.Working with a dual agenda in which "insights into the conditions necessary for realizing social and economic justice for children and women" (Rosen and Twamley, 2018: 8) minimize the risk of reproducing the "womenandchildren" elision, or polarizing notions of women versus children.
In conversations between the fields of Childhood Studies and feminist theorizing, relations have been at the centre of attention mainly through focusing on social relations or material relations.For example, Rosen and Twamley (2018) describe how an attention to relationality through feminst perspectives enables understandings of human life as profoundly interactive and transactional, and highlights how the subjectivities of both women and children are reproduced, challenged, resisted and transformed through social interactions.Often connected to relational sociological perspectives (see, e.g., Emirbayer, 1997), the autonomy and individualism of the independent subject is called into question, in order to dismantle both problematic and taken for granted relationships between children and women (Rosen and Twamley, 2018).Others have highlighted the prolifterion of feminist new materialist thinking in Childhood Studies, and focused on materialdiscursive entanglements where (gendered) childhoods are produced through social as well as material relations (Osgood and Robinson, 2019a, see also Hodgins, 2019).These feminist insights have illuminated relations that focus on "examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized" (Barad, 2003: 808) in relation to children and childhood.
The conversations between Childhood Studies and feminist theorizing thus have a varied past.What seems to unite the engement with feminist theorizing in Childhood Studies is the acknowledgment of "the affordances that feminist theory has created to conceptualize the child and childhood in ways that challenge dominant conservative and regressive ideas, policies and practices" (Osgood and Robinson, 2019b: 17).In this paper, we build on this insight and argue for the necessity of continuing to bring Childhood Studies and feminist theorizing in conversation with each other, specifically through focusing on feminist theories of the body, in order to broaden and deepen the discussion on relationality as an ontological ground for Childhood Studies.

Tracing feminist relationality
Inspired by Lykke's (2010) genealogical reading of some influential strands of feminist theory, we engage particularly with feminist theories of the body, corporeality and materiality more broadly, where the boundaries between nature and culture often become blurred.Accordingly, we will engage with feminisms which have taken up the task of not only analyzing social, cultural or discursive relations but also placing the (female) body and materiality at the center of theory.These feminist theories can provide ways of both questioning the rationality of the knowing subject as well as maturity (cf.Lee, 1998) and the often-associated adult normativity.In our analysis, our aim has been to understand the ways relationality is configured as a heuristic device (cf.Grosz, 1994): what are the elements of interest, what is positioned more centrally or peripherally, what is absent from this configuration etc. Committed to a feminist ethico-political project of transforming inequalities, we concur with Strathern's (a reference made by Haraway in Lykke et al., 2008: 35-36) aphorism that "[i]t matters which categories you use to think other categories with".Our way of conceptualizing relationality thus matters, as well as their analytical contexts, since it points to the epistemic ramifications of what can be known (articulated, represented and experienced) (Strathern, 2020;cf. Fricker, 2007).Being explicit about relations is therefore part of a "critical edge" (Strathern, 2020), and also part of our motivation for the present paper.We have subsequently analyzed how children or childhood, age, generation or temporality 'fit' into particular theoretical configurations of relationality, or where it does not fit and why it does not.In this endeavor, our effort has been to remain wary of how the genealogies may be perceived as "a series of ongoing contests and relationships" rather than following any logic of progressiveness of thought, thus challenging any "linear 'displacement' of one approach by another" (Hemmings, 2005: 131).In order to tease out what relationality can entail in Childhood Studies, we propose the use of some guiding concepts which will highlight the necessity of taking corporeal specificity, sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry, as well as wider material entanglements, into account.Thus, taken together, we suggest that these concepts are fruitful for understanding and analysing childhood as they engage with children's corporeal specificity from a morphological perspective, which makes it possible to discuss sexual-temporal difference and the need of attending to asymmetrical relationality.Finally, we arrive at transcorporeality, and propose that this concept will allow for addressing the ways human/child corpomateriality is at the same time specific and entangled in more-than-human relations.

Corporeal specificity
In feminist theory, despite the significance of attending to the social construction of gender, the unintended effects of the sex/gender-divisiona distinction between biology (sex) and the social (gender)has raised concerns in various ways.Biology has been equated with nature, with sex, and with the corporeal, where the social is associated with both gender and culture.Dualistic thinking leaves the body to be merely "a blank page for social inscription" (Haraway 1988: 591), thus dissociating nature from culture, biology from the social, the corporeal from the mind/thinking, and sex from gender.Furthermore, such bivalent ontologies are used to ground polarities such as the feminine and the masculine, in which the masculine becomes dis-embodied, universalized and valued as over and above the feminine (Braidotti, 1994;Irigaray, 1994).In a similar manner, childhood scholars have argued that adulthood is organized and valued as ontologically above childhood, thus positioning children (alongside women) as closer to nature, often through cultural conceptions around physical embodiment.Western philosophy, keep in mind, has also elevated the mind over the body, and where those instances in which the body have been attended to, privileges certain senses (sight, hearing) before others (smell, taste) (Mol, 2021).Focusing upon social difference then, is not merely a theoretical or methodological aspiration, but also a philosophical, ontological and epistemological question.The issue at stake involves the transformative potentiality of placing affirmative difference at the center of our understanding of existence and hence also in theorizing (Braidotti, 1994;Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).For feminist theorizing, corporeal and morphological specificity is a fundamental aspect of how sexual difference emerges and becomes reiterated.Grosz (1994) is likewise concerned with how the body as open materiality can inform a theory of the subject, and she argues that subjectivity is corporeal in a very specific/sexed sense.Sexual difference is primary in this subjectification process, and therefore cannot be regarded as insignificant.For example, in her discussion of puberty as marking the break between childhood and adulthood, Grosz (1994) holds that the onset of menstruation (culturally associated with impurity, 'dirt') for the maturing woman marks the entry into the reproductive realm rather than into sexual maturity.She further argues that 'womanhood' is culturally paradoxical: on the one hand it remains "outside itself, outside its time (the time of a self-contained adulthood) and place (the place definitively within its own skin, as a self-identical being)", and on the other hand, "on the very border between infancy and adulthood, nature and culture, subject and object, rational being and irrational animal" (Grosz, 1994: 205).In Grosz's (1994: 165) interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), she finds the body to be neither a locus of consciousness, nor an organically determined entity; it is understood more in terms of what it can do, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations and becomings it undergoes, and the machinic connections it forms with other bodies, what it can link with, how it can proliferate its capacitiesa rare, affirmative understanding of the body.This affirmative understanding of the body is helpful in analyzing children's bodies as well.For example, children's morphologies are not only different in form but also in size.As children's bodies grow in size, their morphologies also transform.Their becoming is hence fundamentally corporeal and entangled with temporality.Consider the bodies of children when they move around in car-dense urban spaces (planned for the normative adult able-bodied body of a particular height), where their bodies afford them a very particular line of sight.As the bodies of cars, taking up the majority of space in urban cities, have increased in size both vertically and horizontally, less space has been accorded to other space users (including children).The driver (by default, people of a certain chronological age) is also positioned higher up within the car, physically further distancing the insider, by height, from the outsiders.Bodies of a particular height moving around outside the vehicle are more or less visible to the driver, thus accentuating the already asymmetrical morphological relations between differently situated bodies in space.

Sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry
We can now ask how sexual difference can be understood in relation to age, generation, and temporality.Temporality could be argued as allowing for difference to emerge as sexual difference, as Grosz (1994) illustrates in relation to the transition from childhood and adulthood above, associating corporeality and sexual specificity even more tightly together.As already alluded to, corporeal feminism has attended to questions of corporeality, the body and embodiment, from the vantage point of the sexed body.Grosz (1994) and Braidotti (1994) have in somewhat distinct ways followed Irigaray's (1993) reading of the absence of the representation of femininity in western culture.Irigaray (1993) argues that sexual difference is not indifferent, that it is fundamental in the way in which it is historically installed, and culturally validated and reinforced and cannot therefore be disregarded.Women have hitherto lacked a cultural and linguistic mirror in which their differentiated and specific morphologies can be affirmed.This absence of a linguistic and philosophical representation of female morphology has instead reinforced the phallogocentrism of our culture where male morphology signifies the 'human' body.Irigaray (1993) argues that sexual difference matters, and that sexual specificity is that which has not yet been represented.Women do not have a cultural linguistic mirror in which their sexual morphological specificity can be mirrored, thus complicating their identity formation.
Theorizing sexual difference implicates certain forms of relationality, for example, how the social relations of men/boys and women/girls transpire at any given time and place, or how the conceptual relation between gender and sex can be conceived.Some girls (but not exclusively subjects identifying as girls, of course) entering puberty revolt against "losing their childhood", that is, being forced to emerge as sexed subjects who are intelligible only through heteronormativity, through, in some cases, practicing selfstarvation (Bordo, 1993).The anorectic body subject can therefore be seen to symbolically epitomize both the refusal to become 'adult', and the refusal to become 'woman'.However, Zehavi (2018: 249) argues that the girl is subject to two simultaneous interpellationsat the same time as she is turned into a future woman, she is also turned into a present child.[…] The girl is the site on which both femininity and childhood are built.She should therefore play a pivotal role in any true revolutionary movement concerning women and children.
The girl as a subject is intelligible through ideologies of gender and age, Zehavi (2018) proposes.As we have argued, however, the 'ideology of adulthood' and 'patriarchal ideology', instead of being understood as separate ideologies, can be seen as processes of differentiation that mutually constitute each other.Seen in this vein, sexual difference and temporal difference make sexually specific and temporally transforming corporeality an important marker for intelligible subjecthood.One becomes child and woman (man), one becomes girl (boy).The becoming is always situated, corporeal, and asymmetrically sexually-temporally differentiated.Braidotti (1994) has theorized how women's subjectivity is shaped through their bodies and sexuality, asymmetrically vis-à-vis men/the masculine, and that sexual difference must therefore be the starting point for more productive and affirmative theories of women's subjectivity.She argues that the concept of difference needs to be re-valorized, since it has been "colonized [by European fascism] and taken over by hierarchical and exclusionary ways of thinking": 'to be "different-from" came to mean to be "less than", to be worth less than' (Braidotti 1994: 147, italics in original; cf.Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).She thus calls for an understanding of difference, in which differences are ongoing practices: "difference in itself as an ongoing flow of affirmative relations" (Lenz Taguchi, 2013).The potential of this generative difference is, however, dependent on how 'we' allow ourselves to be generated by it (Rautio, 2013).In her subsequent effort to elaborate on an affirmative conceptualization of difference, Braidotti (1994) suggests that sexual difference can be thought of on three levels that 1. Attend to differences between women and men, and criticize the hierarchical statues of masculinity; 2. Pertains to the differences between and among women, being sensitive about the politics of location and the power relations between women; and 3. Highlights how identity is fractured and multiple, and the difference within each woman.
In a similar vein, we would propose that we need to be attentive not only to the politics of location, but to the politics of temporality too.Bodily specificity needs to be understood not only with reference to sexual difference, but also to temporal difference throughout the life course.Temporal difference refers to the way bodies transform over the life course, as our bodies' shape, size, constitution and composition shift and change through processes of ageing (Sandberg, 2011).What childhood scholars have vividly emphasized, however, is that the category of children (and childhood) is conditioned by heterogeneity and multiplicity, as well as asymmetry.In sum, difference is conceptualized as affirmative, and so sexual difference needs to be understood as co-constituted with temporal difference.We find it crucial to pause here, and stress that the notion of sexual-temporal difference involves asymmetry, making it useful for understanding the ways in which sexed and aged relations and subjects emerge.The co-constitution of these processes highlights sexualtemporal differentiation as conditioned by asymmetrical relationality.The lesson to be learned here, we contend, is that asymmetry is crucial for analysing the sociomateriality of for example, children's lives, which we will return to below.Although theorizing women's or children's subjectivities from the vantage point of sexual-temporal difference focuses on the affirmative and the generative, the need to argue for the importance of attending to corporeal specificity and asymmetry remains.

Transcorporeality
Although many childhood scholars are influenced by feminist theorizing on sexual difference and the body, work focusing on the corporeal specificity and materiality of children's bodies is surprisingly scant.Rather than focussing on corpomateriality, scholars have engaged more with the bodies of children as merely one materiality among others, where gendered bodies are described as emerging (rather than preceding) in direct relation with the forces, flows, energies and movements of other (human and non-human) bodies (Blaise and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019).Spyrou (2018: 10) describes how this kind of theorizing enables ways for Childhood Studies to "decenter its very object of inquiry, namely, the C/child, and to rethink its knowledge practices in ways which extend its scope".Accordingly, the materiality of children's bodies becomes decentered amongst other materialities in the production of children's lives.This "has a tremendous impact on the notion of the child-construct, as the vibrancy of things shifts the centre of attention from purely discursive and/or material body of a child to the place of agency of things" (Malone et al., 2020: 63).There are, however, certain risks in this way of addressing relationality in terms of a decentering.Kraftl (2020) problematizes tendencies to decenter only specific kinds of more-than-humans in childhood relations, like animals and easily definable objects like toys, rather than messier or less touchable stuff like (micro)plastics, energy or digital media.Through this, he argues that the decentering offered is not sophisticated enough to face the challenges of childhoods of the current times, and calls for ways to engage "meaningfully and consistently with feminist, queer and critical race theorizations of difference and matter that sit alongside and in tension with certain forms of 'post-'child thinking" (Kraftl, 2020: 5).Furthermore, Nxumalo (2019) describes how the idealization and centering of the human is not universal, but a Euro-western construct of the human that has been challenged by indigenous ontologies long before the emergence of notions such as, for example, new materialist thinking (cf.Nxumalo and Murris, 2021).
As the child body becomes one among many materialities, the corporeal specificities or sexual-temporal differences are at risk of being erasedor simply less engaged with as their onto-epistemological position is back-grounded.This back-grounding sometimes may dissolve the asymmetries integrated in the processes of material differentiation from analytical sight.To engage with the relational role of biology, gendered bodies and materialism, one promising avenue is Alaimo's (2008) conceptualization of transcorporeality.According to Blaise and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019: 116), this concept could shift the attention from an "individual child's body, body parts and body movements towards overlapping and entangled bodies' relations".The concept thus provides a conceptual space for analysing children's lives from a material perspective, where the bodies of children are not simply one materiality among others, but engaged in asymmetrical and corporeal specific temporal relations.This adds to the conceptualization of both corporeal specificity and sexual-temporal difference, emphasizing how biological life processes, social processes and the material environment are mutually affecting each other (Lee and Motzkau, 2012).This brings us back to taking the materiality of the child body seriously, while simultaneously attending to it relationally.
Transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2008(Alaimo, , 2010) ) is an influential contribution to feminist theorizing, as it pinpoints the very enmeshment of human corpomateriality with the surrounding environment.Transcorporeality "opens up an epistemological 'space' that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors" (Alaimo 2008: 238).It also aligns with other related concepts, such as Lee and Motzkau's (2012) notion of the biosocial event, by highlighting the various and changing relationships between life processes and social processes, or natureculture (cf.Haraway, 2003).These conceptualizations stress both the synthetical relations emerging in the discursive-material entanglements, and the discursive-material effects or transformations that these processes give rise to.Temporalityor spacetimematterings, to use the concept of Barad (2007) is in various ways central in these processes, in the insistence on transformability without a given direction or intention (Barad, 2003;Birke, 1999;cf. Butler, 1993).This would entail, then, that the child subject in its corporeal specificity, must exist as the performative effect, not as a mere 'thing'.Barad (1998) questions Butler's theory of performativity for being concerned merely with human bodies, and more specifically, their surfaces, and suggests a radical relational ontology where different materialities emerge through temporal and space-specific intra-actions.This feminist new materialist or posthumanist performativity instead "incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors" (Barad 2003: 808) in understanding how bodily relationalities is crucial in constituting childhood and children's lives.The focus is thus moved to highlight the connections and relations that always already reside between human and more-than-human bodies (Blaise and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019).It also offers a feminist critique which redefines the human as material, calling for a subversion of current representations and the gendered scenarios of visibility (Alaimo, 2010).For the field of Childhood Studies, then, this enables a relational understanding that does not exclusively focus on social categorizations, but also "allows us to imagine corporeality not as a ground of static substance but as a place of possible connections, interconnections, actions, and ethical becomings" (Alaimo, 2010, in Blaise andPacini-Ketchabaw, 2019: 118).
Engaging with the concept of transcorporeality in Childhood Studies could be a way not only to address what a feminist relationality in Childhood Studies is, but also what it could become.Blaise and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019) highlight how the refusal of dualism which this concept entails is at the heart of the feminist project, and contributes to what Haraway describes as 'feminist objectivity'.We thus want to bring this part of the paper to a close before heading to the concluding discussion, with a reminder that Haraway's (2003: 24) feminist stances call us to be attentive to how power operates within local and situated networks or knots, which is particularly important to theorize children's lives and childhoods.

Engaging seriously with materiality: A modest proposal for childhood studies
In this paper, we have shown how new ways of engaging with feminist relationality in Childhood Studies could both add to the already ongoing conversations between feminist theorizing and Childhood Studies, as well as advance the discussion by emphasizing relationality as always embodied, and as always embedded in hierarchies and power relations.The relations between feminist theories and theorizations of children and childhood within Childhood Studies have not been symmetrical, despite diverse interventions (e.g., Baird, 2008;Burman and Stacey, 2010;Rosen and Twamley, 2018;Thorne, 1987).It appears as if the inspiration from feminist theories has been substantial, whereas it is not so clear the other way around.Additionally, in these efforts, the focus has been on the social relations rather than relationality in general.Through a relational approach that is more situated in feminist theorizing, we have shown that it is possible to take an approach to relationality in Childhood Studies that does not only provide tools to address how "everything is related" but that simultaneously attends to the productions and problematizations of corporeal and material specificities, differences and asymmetries within these relations.Through drawing together relational conceptualizations in Childhood Studies with feminist theorizing difference, we argue that there is no inherent necessity to have a relational approach in Childhood Studies unless it is also coupled with an interest in the production of power, of social difference and asymmetries, and in how these processes can be challenged.Feminist approaches to relationality persistently investigating the ways of difference and power, that is, processes of differentiation, are fundamental for understanding both society and subjectivity.We thus argue that feminist relationality holds a promising venue for Childhood Studies, with which to study childhood, generations and ageone of the many (but often forgotten) matrices of differentiation in society where Childhood Studies can make a substantial contribution.More specifically, we propose that relationality through the conceptual frameworks of corporeal specificity, sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry and transcorporeality enables understandings of how processes of becoming are not only relational, but situated, corporeal, specific, temporal, and asymmetrically differentiated.This is crucial for feminist ways of engaging with relationality in Childhood Studies, as sexually specific and temporally transforming corporeality is a performatively repeated marker for intelligible subjecthood.Becoming intelligible as a child, as a sexed child, needs to be understood with reference to the culturally and materially inscribed asymmetry of childadult as well as the sexed relationships.Together with issues of social difference, of power and of the enduring character of social inequalities, these asymmetries are necessary to engage with children's lives in the current landscape of contemporary society.
In line with how Kinkaid (2020) has argued in relation to assemblage geography that feminist theory has much to offer, we find a feminist persistence with the relevance of social and material difference, of how our engagements with the operation of power and how forms of inequality endure and resist transformation, is pivotal for Childhood Studies.As stressed by Rosen and Twamley (2018), the parallels between the social position of children and women are many and the "understandings of the position of children as a social group and efforts to address their subordination, which are central to childhood studies, owe a great deal to feminist political and intellectual efforts" (Rosen and Twamley, 2018: 3).However, and as Thorne (1987) has already pointed out, it would be a fallacy to perceive the frontline of feminist theorizing as full-fledged.Despite the persistent focus on the intersections of the production of social difference, age or generation are still very seldom included in the list of etceteras or included at the very end (Krekula et al., 2005).Feminist theorization has not attributed children conceptual autonomy, and the contribution of Childhood Studies to feminist relational approaches is therefore as valuable as the opposite (cf.Weiss, 2021).We propose that relational approaches dealing with corporeal specificity, sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry and transcorporeality is one fruitful contribution, where temporality and corporeality are taken seriously as starting points for understanding children's position (ing)s.
As much as relationality is conceived of as an important analytical approach and perhaps also a disciplinary essence in some of the relational approaches we have discussed, the question at stake is also about defining, managing and controlling the disciplinary borders of Childhood Studies.This is of course not only a question of disciplinary identity, but also of academic legitimacy and status.Interestingly, Alanen (2011: 4) associates "a consistently relational orientation" to a greater possibility for "interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration with a range of other disciplines and research fields".In her way of reasoning, a disciplinary essence is also key to inter-/ cross-disciplinary collaboration.We instead want to problematize the understanding of relations as the 'proper object' or ontological ground for Childhood Studies (Alanen, 2020).Rather than focusing on relationality as the one (and only) ontological ground to address children and childhood, weinspired by Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila (forthcoming 2024)want to acknowledge an ontological relationality, that responds to how any phenomenon will always include a multiplicity of simultaneous ontologies.Including age, generation or childhood in a list of analytical categories in a flattened and nonhierarchical relation is not enough.A shift toward a feminist relational approach would more thoroughly consider difference and otherness, more broadly, at the heart of theorizing childhoods.It is also ethically and politically vital to think through the implications of this.Analyses focusing on diverse social categories make valuable contributions to knowledge, but the insistence on 'proper objects' or 'disciplinary essences' hinders more transversal dialogues in a post-disciplinary (academic) environment (Lykke, 2010).By attending to questions of difference from a relational approach, we can facilitate dialogues where multiple intensities, speeds or scales are equally attended to (Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila, forthcoming 2024;cf. Tsing, 2015).The future of knowledge production is transdisciplinarity and will emerge through multiple ontologies, in which the situational decentering and re-centering of the (child) subject is only the beginning.Letting children and childhood slip into but also out of sight, by following what Kraftl (2020) has suggested in re-interpreting Tsing's arts of (not) noticing, traces of childhood can nevertheless be found.Working with relations, as Strathern (2020: 3) contends, can thus be "as trivial (…) as it is powerful".