Constructing the Modern Sexual Child

Abstract

As historians from Philippe Aries (1962) onward have illustrated, around 300 years ago the child began to be conceptualized as distinct from the adult. Drawing on diaries, works of art, and family histories, historians have elucidated the change in affective responses to, and connection between, adult and child, especially in the family setting within these epochs (Hendrick 2003; Davin 1996; Pollack 1983; Stone 1977; McFarlane 1977; Shorter 1975; DeMause 1974; Aries 1962). Intellectually, socially, and morally the child was characterized as an “adult-in-development.” The emergence of this new category of personhood—the child—hierarchically ordered the relationship between adults and children, rendering the distinction absolute at the level of the physiological, the emotional, and the intellectual. One aspect that remains largely unexplored by historians of childhood is the construction of the sexual subjectivity of the “to-be-adult.” This omission by historians from an otherwise detailed program of pedagogy and development that began with the work of John Locke (1689) is particularly noteworthy if one considers how rapidly the figure of the masturbating child became a central focus in the management of populations during the nineteenth century (Foucault 1984).

He that attentively considers the state of a child, at his first corning into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas, that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. It is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them.

John Locke (1692)