Playing War
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€38.99
A01=Sabine Fruhstuck
Author_Sabine Fruhstuck
Category=JWK
Category=JWL
Category=JWM
Category=NHF
child labor
child military
childhood
children
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
exploiting children
globalization
history of children
history of children and war
innocence
japan
late 19th century
modern conceptions of war
modern militarism
naturalizing war
peace
rhetorical tools
symbolic constructions
vulnerability
what it means to be human
Product details
- ISBN 9780520295452
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jul 2017
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Playing War, Sabine Fruhstuck makes a bold proposition: that for over a century throughout Japan and beyond, children and concepts of childhood have been appropriated as tools for decidedly unchildlike purposes: to validate, moralize, humanize, and naturalize war, and to sentimentalize peace. She argues that modern conceptions of war insist on and exploit a specific and static notion of the child: that the child, though the embodiment of vulnerability and innocence, nonetheless possesses an inherent will to war, and that this seemingly contradictory creature demonstrates what it means to be human. In examining the intersection of children/childhood with war/military, Fruhstuck identifies the insidious factors perpetuating this alliance, thus rethinking the very foundations of modern militarism.
She interrogates how essentialist notions of both childhood and war have been productively intertwined; how assumptions about childhood and war have converged; and how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical tools, particularly in the decades between the nation- and empire-building efforts of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries up to the uneven manifestations of globalization at the beginning of the twenty-first.
Sabine Fruhstuck is Professor of Modern Japanese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her publications include Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan and Uneasy Warriors: Gender, Memory, and Popular Culture in the Japanese Army.
