Posthuman Childhood and the Pedagogy of Becoming in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Catwings Series

Abstract

This article rethinks childhood in children’s literature through a posthuman lens by examining Ursula K. Le Guin’s Catwings series as a pedagogy of becoming rather than a narrative of developmental completion. Challenging liberal humanist models that frame childhood as a preparatory, “not-yet” stage oriented toward rational adulthood, the article argues that the Catwings tetralogy resists didacticism, anthropocentrism, and linear maturation. Drawing on posthuman theory, particularly relational ontology, processual-emergent subjectivity, and becoming-with, the analysis shows how Le Guin’s winged cats enact subjectivity through embodied movement, interspecies care, vulnerability, and environmental entanglement. Rather than functioning as allegories for human moral instruction, the nonhuman protagonists participate in multispecies worlds where ethics emerge situationally and knowledge arises through encounters. By foregrounding relational ethics over mastery and openness over moral closure, the Catwings series reconfigures childhood as a site of posthuman becoming, offering a model of posthuman education without top-down instruction. The series thus demonstrates how children’s literature can cultivate posthuman sensibilities prior to the consolidation of anthropocentric habits of thought.