Page 142 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

136 CULTURAL STUDIES

Nancy Spero as a little girl. ‘…I see a flash of her.’
Source Photograph from Out There. Courtesy of Nancy Spero.

Childhood clothes, like childhood photographs, link up (indexically) with our
past childhood selves. Like old family photographs, our saved and cherished and
often ravaged clothes from babyhood and childhood remind us that we have
changed: that our bodies were once very small; that we dressed differently then
from now; that we wore different kinds of clothing from children today. But
most dramatically for me, childhood clothes contain traces of lost selves. Worn
soles, stained collars, scents abandoned by the body attest to a body that once
was, but no longer is. Such traces allow me a glimpse, a touch, a sniff at the child
body that I have lost. And, in the case of my children’s baby clothes, a glimpse, a
touch, a sniff at the bodies that they have already lost.
Like Slavick, many of us feel the loss of the body/bodies of our own
childhood. Indeed, many of us feel that our childhood selves are dead. We mourn
the loss. We try to bring the child back. We save toys and clothes and other
mementos from our childhood days: souvenirs that try to replace the loss.
Childhood and death (as Lynn Gumpert has remarked) are closely linked:

Although these themes at first appear at odds with one another, they share
some fundamental similarities. We never know death directly; as
Wittgenstein has succinctly observed, ‘Death is not lived through.’ Thus
we must broach the subject from a distance, from observation. And while