Bodies in chains: Consumer culture as black pedagogy and body dissatisfaction among Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian children

In love with beauty, bored by virtue still Entranced by mystery, where will it all lead Too much drama, no need to fake it The tragedies are, they’re all just, too real In our cruelty games, our cruelty dreams, Our cruelty scenes, our cruelty, cruelty In vicious circles, vicious circles, when will The patterns break, when will you break again Forever searching, but no end in site We throw it all away, as each illusion dies We’re always doomed, to repeat history Creating trials, that form our destiny Diva Destruction, ‘Cruelty Games’, from the album Passion’s Price (1999). In 1973, the German author Michael Ende wrote in his novel Momo how children are being deprived of imagination and time. Ende’s worst vision is a world bursting with commercial goods and people lacking time and each other’s company. Children are seduced by toys that demand more toys; yet they are bored and the final fantasy is to be an adult. Ende’s book anticipates the end of the childhood discussion of the 80’s that was put forward by researchers such as Neil Postman (1982) and Joshua Meyrowich (1984, 1985) who criticized cultural trends including technologization, mediatization, and commercialization. According to those authors the dividing line between the adult and the child has become blurred. As in Momo, there is no place solely for children. Children have to act like adults. In this article, I shall address the ways in which 8–13-year-old Nordic children relate to themselves as bodily subjects and how they situate themselves in terms of questions dealing with their outward appearance and body. With the help of the nomadic thinking of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, feminist theory and childhood studies I shall analyze quantitative data that was gathered b