Abstract
The issue of ‘child sexualization’ is widely addressed in the mass media of the Anglophone West. It is a topic on which many voices, both lay and professional, pronounce upon with conviction. Almost universally the judgment is that this is a damaging and unwanted consequence of the ‘modern world’ that cannot be avoided, so that protection of ‘the child’ is the only recourse. This introduction argues that this hegemonic discourse entails unchallenged and naturalized assumptions. We identify three: the normative distinction between ‘proper’ and improper sexualization––where the former involves the staged transmission of approved knowledge from adult to child; while the latter is the consequence of a ‘free market’ in exploitative imagery and inappropriate expectations of the unprotected child in the adult world. Second, the sexually agentic child is not only missing but logically excluded. Paradoxically the very capacity essential for growing to full citizenship is denied the citizens of the future. Finally, that though ‘the child’ is deemed at risk, it is girls who are the naturalized victims within traditionally gendered framings. We develop these themes in relation to the work of the other contributors, whose work strengthens and deepens the necessary critical challenge.
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Notes
The study draws on material from only one of the seven states in Australia, where education is governed at a state, not federal level.
The idea of such alternative and self-contained erotic worlds of pre-adolescent children was recently addressed in a January 1998 episode of Law and Order: SVU. (Season 9, Episode 3 Unorthodox). The possibility of an independent sexual world of children was shut down in a discourse that rendered the 14 year old rapist a victim of adult corruption through pornography (quoted in Egan and Hawkes, this issue).
Olympia, now 11, said: "I was really, really offended by what Kevin Rudd said about this picture. It is one of my favorites—if not my favorite—photo my mum has ever taken of me." http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/australasia/art-or-abuse-fury-over-image-of-naked-girl-862068.html. Accessed August 6th 2008.
Egan and Hawkes (2008).
The infectious nature of this distorted gendered sexuality is evident in the anxiety that young girls will seek to emulate similarly objectified (real or imaginary) adult women in the media, see Egan and Hawkes (2008).
For a discussion of this cultural phenomenon in a different context, see Romesburg (2009) forthcoming.
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Hawkes, G., Egan, R.D. Landscapes of Erotophobia: The Sexual(ized) Child in the Postmodern Anglophone West. Sexuality & Culture 12, 193–203 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-008-9038-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-008-9038-6