“I want to be soon an adult-child”: A dialogue between Childhood Studies and the film <i>The cosmic boy</i>

Abstract

The research that this article is linked to examines the conditions of possibility of what one might call a shortening of childhood. The goal is to understand how this period of life is socially constructed fewer as social metaphor of dependence (Schindler, 1996) and increasingly as a place of agency. Based on the important contributions of the humanities and social sciences, which support the so-called Childhood Studies, this paper conducts a dialogue between these contributions and portraits of children present in the film O garoto cósmico (The cosmic boy). Such articulation showed that the Brazilian feature film reinforces representations aligned with new conceptions of childhood at the expense of more traditional images, and accordingly, favors the perspective of a child subjectivity.

Keywords: Childhood Studies, O garoto cósmico (The cosmic boy), children, children film.