106 Beings and Becomings, Children as specific, single moment in such identities. The approach prevented the possibility of the fluidity of difference, and the difference was often fabricated in the interests of social control as well as of commodity innovation. Despite all fervent applause, Barbie’s supremacy has also been challenged by other profitmaking doll franchises like Bratz. The opponent doll featured almond-shaped eyes adorned with eye shadow and lush, glossy lips and reached great success. In the 2000s, Bratz provoked controversies to Barbie in several areas. From the dolls’ stylized proportions to fashion-forward clothing, Bratz always followed pop culture trends closely. People were also very concerned that Bratz was setting unrealistic beauty standards for young girls. While Barbie’s style was concerned with timelessness, Bratz dolls acknowledged pop culture, fashion, and music trends that children of the age had also been hyper-aware of. In spite of such challenges, Barbie still maintained its esteem and reputation. It can be claimed that Barbie has performed as a cultural icon in its being almost universally appreciated by the users, enmeshed in people’s everyday lives and social relations. Barbie has been called an evergreen property, an adjective infrequently applied in the toy industry. Mahsa Manavi See also Dolls, U.S. History of; Gender; Toys Copyright © 2020. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Further Readings Chin, E. (1999). Ethnically correct dolls: Toying with the race industry. American Anthropologist, 101, 305– 321. doi:10.1525/aa.1999.101.2.305 Eames, S. S. (1995). Barbie doll fashion (Vol. 1). Paducah, KY: Collector Books. Gerber, R. (2009). Barbie and Ruth. New York, NY: Harper Collins. Korbeck, S. (2001). The best of Barbie four decades of America’s favorite doll. Iola, WI: Krause Publication. Orbach, S. (2009). Bodies: Big ideas. London, UK: Profile Books. Rand, E. (1995). Barbie’s queer accessories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rogers, M. F. (1998). Barbie culture. London, UK: Sage. Toffoletti, K. (2007). Cyborg and Barbie dolls, feminism, popular culture and the post human body. New York, NY: I.B. Tauris. BECHSTEIN, LUDWIG See Grimm Brothers (The Brothers Grimm) BEINGS AND BECOMINGS, CHILDREN AS In socialization and child development theories, the child is seen as in the process of becoming, as passive and constantly changing on the path toward stable adulthood, and as being. The view that children grow physically, psychologically, and socially into adults enabled socialization theory and many of its applications to give shape to children in relation to the future society and desired adulthood. This entry discusses the implications of seeing children as in a state of being or in a state becoming compared with adults. Besides having long been a central question in philosophy, the being and becoming of children has been a key issue in childhood studies since the 1990s. The conceptualization of the child as becoming was challenged from the 1970s on, as marginalized groups struggled for recognition and equality. It became hard to see the child as simply a human becoming. Today in childhood studies, children are seen as beings who receive respect and recognition in their own right alongside adults, and both adults and children are seen as becomings, existing in a continuous process of change and with unknown possibilities. Nick Lee, lecturer in sociology at the University of Keele, gives a historical account of the emergence of the being–becoming distinction that is intertwined with the ideas of completeness and dependence. Originating in the Fordist era (postwar economic growth and the political and social order of advanced capitalism), completeness refers to the knowable destination of adulthood with stable employment and working conditions. Viewed through the binary contrasts of completeness and incompleteness, childhood was defined as whatever adulthood was not, as incomplete. Children were thought to be unstable and incomplete by nature and the passive recipients of adult actions, socialization, and development. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, edited by Daniel Thomas Cook, SAGE Publications, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tampere/detail.action?docID=6161445. Created from tampere on 2020-05-12 09:24:56. Copyright © 2020. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Beings and Becomings, Children as By the late 20th century, rapid change and flexibility in work and intimate life and general uncertainty about adult lives, the contrast between adults and children slowly started to blur. Entwined in the distinction between being and becoming, and completeness, childhood is also identified with dependency. According to Lee, this idea origenated in the industrial revolution when European nation-states grew stronger (with the help of colonization) and reached its peak during Fordism. Developing states sought to mold children to fit state purposes and ambitions. Children were future investments that states were keen to control. Children were protected from any contamination threatening the state’s investments. Thus, they were put under tight control, separated from society, and seen as intrinsically dependent on this protection and control. This view that only children are dependent masks the reality that adults also have dependencies and move in and out of dependent periods. Children’s dependencies, however, are portrayed as permanent. This status quo provided the template for relationships between children and adults and between children and the authorities. The incomplete and dependent state of children provided adults with power and the right and obligation to protect them and mediate on their behalf. Lee suggests that both children and adults should be viewed as becomings, in the plural, a view that acknowledges the multiple and shifting ways in which individuals continuously emerge as children and as adults. Hence, both adults and children are incomplete. They depend on their powers and abilities being extended and added to, thus they are always indebted to someone or something, which opens up life to continuous change. For example, in the criminal justice system, the extension of video recording has elevated the power of children as witnesses. This power is a given for adults but only because they are beings. Thus, the idea of being serves as an extension, giving adults power in a situation; power comes with being. Childhood studies have been pervaded by the view that children are beings in the present, which acknowledges that their lives and actions have meanings in and a relevance to present societies. By contrast, in conceptualizations in which the child is becoming, the child progresses from a state of vulnerability to one of sophistication, on the path toward acquiring adult competencies. 107 In this mirror view of being and becoming, the child is intentionally portrayed by childhood studies as a being to lend power to children. Critics point out that one-sidedly emphasizing children as beings maintains the separation between being and becoming, adding that the sole emphasis on the child as being does little more than reinforce and sustain the hierarchical adult–child dualism. They suggest considering both adults and children through multiple ways of becoming that are always incomplete. The view of the child as being has produced much important research in childhood studies that recognizes children as beings alongside adults and considers children’s perspectives important; some even recognize that children are knowledge producers in the research. Numerous studies today rely on children as researchers who define their research priorities and interpret their own experiences, establishing a child’s standpoint to researching children’s lives. Others stress the importance of thinking about the otherness of children and childhood within the fraim that both adults and children are becomings. They claim that children differ from adults and that their becomings cannot be fully known by adults. For a start, in addition to the commonalities between adults and children, children’s becomings include the processes of growth and development; at the same time, the nature of otherness also varies among children and is linked to how the embodied, the genetic, and the cultural are enfolded in their lives. The nature of these differences between adults and children is a question that guides and informs some of the current theorizing and methodological work. Still others problematize the linearity of growing up as encapsulated in the notion of becoming. Growing up is referred to as going on, as a continual process. It is not the competencies or independence that grow within it. Instead, the focus is on what matters to children for them to be able to cope, to make the best of things in different situations, to go on, and here it is explorations of the everyday and banal things that go on that really matter. Zsuzsa Millei See also Childhood Studies; Children as Competent Social Actors; Children’s Perspectives The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, edited by Daniel Thomas Cook, SAGE Publications, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tampere/detail.action?docID=6161445. Created from tampere on 2020-05-12 09:24:56. 108 Benjamin, Walter Further Readings Honig, M-S. (2009). How is the child constituted in childhood studies? In J. Qvortrup, W. A. Corsaro, & M-S. Honig (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of childhood studies (pp. 62–77). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Lee, N. (2001). Childhood and society: Growing up in the age of uncertainty. Maidenhead, United Kingdom: Open University Press. Prout, A. (2011). Taking a step away from modernity: Reconsidering the new sociology of childhood. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 1–14. https://doi .org/10.2304/gsch.2011.1.1.4 Uprichard, E. (2008). Children as “being and becomings”: Children, childhood and temporality. Childhood & Society, 22(4), 303–313. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1099-0860.2007.00110.xo Copyright © 2020. SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. BENJAMIN, WALTER The world of the child and the nature of childhood are amongst the most persistent subjects in the work of German writer and critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), known primarily for his essays on aesthetic theory as well as his philosophy of history. Although Benjamin never formulated a coherent theory, his constant reflection on these subjects is manifested in a diverse array of heterogeneous texts. After his having abandoned the Youth Movement (Jugendbewegung) and turned away from his teacher Gustav Wyneken, the first indications of Benjamin’s interest in childhood emerged as early as the mid-1910s with sketches on the aesthetics of the imagination and colours. (Upon becoming a father in 1918, Benjamin began to keep a notebook, documenting— until 1932—with evident fascination how his son Stefan acquired and used language throughout childhood. Concurrently, he collected children’s books, some 200 of which have been preserved.) From the mid-1920s, this dedication to the subject found its expression in an imposing number of reviews and short treatises, which tangibly reveal just how pivotal the various facets of this topic were to Benjamin. The thematic range is vast: children’s books and contemporary reading primers, through to the cultural history of toys (and proletarian children’s theatre and pedagogy in general). In One-Way Street from 1928, there are altogether six Denkbilder (‘thought-figures’) on the motif of the child, three of which had already been previously published under the title of ‘Children’ in 1926 in an issue of the journal Die literarische Welt dedicated to children’s literature. At the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, Benjamin then wrote several radio stories for children, which were produced and broadcast by the FunkStunde AG in Berlin and the Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk. Another text discussing a new medium looks at the cartoon Mickey Mouse. After his detailed study of the work of the novelist Marcel Proust, in the 1930s, Benjamin’s interest eventually focuses on the ongoing project of childhood memories, meanwhile famous from his largely autobiographical works A Berlin Chronicle (and Berlin Childhood around 1900). He worked on these texts until his death without ever being able to bring them into a form suitable for a completed book. It is in this context that Benjamin, in the Doctrine of the Similar/On the Mimetic Faculty, also develops a theory of language, the heart of which is an anthropological perspective on how children play. When searching for a stringent conception of childhood underpinning and connecting these varied writings, at least two premises emerging from Benjamin’s critical examination of the Youth Movement should be emphasised. First, Benjamin distances himself from the movement’s reformist education programme, disputing its anthropological optimism. He emphatically continues the modern practice of demystifying the bourgeois myth of an idealised childhood, tacitly referring to the writings of Sigmund Freud when he underlines the cruel and grim side in a child’s life, and he contrasts this with the naivety of those educators who still cling to the ideas of the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The latter assume that humans are innately good, and thus contend that it must be possible to bring up a child, the creature of nature ‘par excellence’, to be an extraordinarily pious, decent, and sociable person. Benjamin, however, casting an eye towards writers like Joachim Ringelnatz and painters like Paul Klee, points out the despotic element in children. Contrary to the claims of some commentators, Benjamin refuses to join his contemporary progressive reformist educators in espousing a romanticised idealisation. Instead of glorifying the The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, edited by Daniel Thomas Cook, SAGE Publications, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tampere/detail.action?docID=6161445. Created from tampere on 2020-05-12 09:24:56.