Children, Sexuality and Sexualization

Jessica Ringrose, Emma Renold, R. Danielle Egan, Emma Renold, R. Danielle Egan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137353382
• eBook ISBN: 9781137353399
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume presents a ground-breaking collection of interdisciplinary chapters from international scholars which complicate, and offers new ways to make sense of, children's sexual cultures across complex political, social and cultural terrains.

1

Introduction

Emma Renold, R. Danielle Egan and Jessica Ringrose

The entry below from ‘the sex goddess blues’ offers sage advice about the trials and tribulations of sociocultural and interpersonal shame and its effects on sexual expression, sexual exploration and sexual consent:

Confidence in yourself is a lifelong process. It’s sometimes a long and winding road with potholes, roadblocks, and even massive collisions. The best place to start is to know that you, as a person, are worthwhile. … You’re worth fighting for; you deserve good things in your life. You deserve to set goals for yourself. You deserve healthy relationships that make you feel good. You deserve to have your voice heard. You deserve to physically present yourself however you want. You deserve to feel at peace with your body. And, if you’re interested in sex, be it by yourself or with partners, you deserve pleasure and joy.

‘The Sex Goddess Blues: Building Sexual Confidence and Busting
Perfectionism’, 2014, www.scarletteen.org

What makes the post particularly important is that it is written for a tween and teenaged cis and trans-girl audience and manages to avoid the traps of heteronormative and white privilege. If one reads Scarleteen.org – the site where this post is featured – one finds numerous pieces on consent, physiology, condoms, pleasure, sexual violence and sexual politics.

Notwithstanding, one might be wondering, why start an edited volume on children’s sexuality and sexualization with a popular international sex education website? For us, Scarleteen illuminates what can go missing in policy and popular debates on sexualization – an assumption that children and young people are complex sexual subjects who are actively negotiating sexuality in their everyday lives. Indeed, this volume responds to this gap. It seeks to provide an academically situated collection that complicates and speaks back to a ubiquitous media landscape where children and young people’s own experiences of doing, being and becoming sexual are often sensationalized, silenced, caricatured, pathologized and routinely undermined. Drawing together contributions from a range of disciplinary fields, across a wide breadth of regional, national and transnational contexts, the chapters offer compelling accounts of how children and young people are captured by and negotiate ideological discursive formations (sexism, racism, homophobia, to name just a few) that shape their experiences, and which often operate at the intersection of curiosity, inequality, trauma, resilience, relationality, pressure, excitement, lack of interest, ambivalence and boredom.

We begin by orienting readers towards some of the key historical ideas about child sexuality and current debates on child sexualization before offering an overview of the contributions and sections that organize the book. We conclude by posing some questions about future research on children, sexuality and sexualization.

Historicizing child sexuality

The phenomenon of sexualisation phobia provides an excellent example of all that is irrational and ahistorical about the sexual child in our contemporary culture.

(Egan & Hawkes, 2010: 147)

The social construction of the child, during the modern epoch in the Anglophone West, was inextricably tied to the education, regulation and normalization of its sexuality (Egan & Hawkes, 2010). In his first volume on the history of sexuality in Western Europe, Foucault notes that the child’s sex was the object of intense scrutiny and pivotal in the deployment of a shifting disciplinary apparatus which foregrounded the project of normalization and surveillance in the late 19th century (Foucault, 1980). As with most ideas on sexuality, cultural values ebb and flow at various periods, and ideas about the sexual child are no different. For example, the assumptions at work in the discursive production of the sexual child from the 1970s stand in stark contrast to most contemporary narratives on the child and its sexuality (Angelides, 2004).

Recent scholarship reveals the particularities of how the child’s sexuality was always already imbued with a particular set of socio-epistemological assumptions in order to legitimate and propagate particular conceptions of the state, the colonial project, whiteness, the family and heteronormativity, to name only a few (Stoller, 1995; Darby, 2005; Romesberg, 2008; Egan & Hawkes, 2010; Bernstein, 2011). However, the modern history of ideas on childhood sexuality is distinct in that it is more often than not plagued by fear, projection, fascination and consternation (Fahs et al., 2013). As historians and childhood studies scholars have illustrated, the history of the sexual child differs from other populations deemed sexually deviant or in need of sexual protection because of Anglophone conceptions of childhood (Males, 1992; Angelides, 2004; Darby, 2005; Robinson & Davies, 2008; Romesberg, 2008; Egan & Hawkes, 2010; Faulkner, 2011). Most dominant discourses that have emerged within the Anglophone West have, on the surface, conceptualized childhood as antithetical to sexuality (however, this tends to primarily apply to white upper-middle-class children; Egan & Hawkes, 2010).

Historically, Anglophone culture has been engrossed by the innocent or sexually endangered child and its socially pathologized counterpart, the erotic or sexually knowing child. Both operate as a barometer of social decay or progress, as a nostalgic longing for a pure past, a signal of impending societal doom or as a utopian possibility for reshaping the future as well as a site for social intervention. Nevertheless, both figures are, to use historian Robin Bernstein’s term, ‘imagined’ children in that they are symbolic figures as opposed to material actors (Bernstein, 2011). Fears regarding sexual corruption from a variety of sexually salacious sources (comic books, television, rap music, the Internet, clothing, etc.) or deviant populations (immigrants, the poor, gays and lesbians or the paedophile) tend to gain momentum during times of social upheaval or crisis (Egan & Hawkes, 2010). To this end, the discourse on sexualization, which we outline in its contemporary shape and form below, is situated within a larger socio-historical context that has been strikingly persistent over the last two centuries (Foucault, 1980; Hunt, 1999; Mort, 2000; Egan & Hawkes, 2010; Bernstein, 2011; Faulkner, 2011).

Contemporary debates on sexualization

Sexuality and cultural scholars have used empirical and comparative studies, as well as history and critical sociology to argue that ‘sexualization’ is itself a constructed and unsubstantiated concept.

(Hawkes & Dune, 2013: 623)

Since the early 2000s, there has been increased public policy concern across the Anglophone West of how children and young people (particularly girls) are being ‘sexualized’ by the media and culture industries (Rush & LaNauze, 2006; APA, 2007; Papadopoulos, 2010; Bailey, 2011). We have seen a steady stream of sensationalist popular cultural texts purporting to illuminate the real problems of ‘sexualization’ as well as a range of policy and governmental responses (Egan, 2013). There has been a flurry of academic research and writing based on ‘sexualization’, in which there is general agreement and a strong evidence base suggesting that sexual imagery has become more ubiquitous in society, including in media and material marketed at and consumed by children (Buckingham et al., 2010). However, while attention to how changes in the significance and representation of sexuality might be shaping children and young people’s sexual cultures is long overdue, the concept of ‘sexualization’ has been contested (see in particular Lerum & Dworkin, 2009; Albury & Lumby, 2010; Atwood & Smith 2011; Bragg et al., 2011; Duschinsky, 2013).

Indeed, a consistent theme running through both historical and contemporary discourses about the child and its sexuality is that they are rarely, if ever, about children’s own social and cultural worlds. More often than not they represent adult preoccupations and anxieties about the nature, corruption and correction of the child’s sex as well as the nature of society. The voices of children and how they make sense of their own lives and bodies are conspicuously absent. Indeed, relying on dubious claims and little empirical research foregrounding children’s experiences of doing, being and becoming sexual, the outcomes predicted for children within the ‘sexualization’ literature are restrictive and frequently serve to moralize about and pathologize particular behaviours and particular children (Egan & Hawkes, 2008; Buckingham, 2009: 26). Evaluating the research evidence on the impact of ‘sexualized’ media and products on children, Buckingham et al. (2009: 26) summarize that ‘almost all of the research on the impact of these developments relates to adults rather than children; and, insofar as it addresses children at all, to girls rather than boys’ (see also Barker and Duschinsky 2012). The history of discourses on the child and its sexuality then is more accurately a narrative about adulthood (Egan & Hawkes, 2010). As such we must be careful to ground any analysis around specificities: what childhood is being addressed, who is absent and to what ends?

Renold and Ringrose have previously (2011, 2013) identified how these abstractions and generalities of child sexualization discourses have operated to define the objects and relations of scrutiny in particularly gendered ways. We draw out further below what we identify as some of the problematic effects, which include:

• Measuring harms and risks of sexual media exposure to advance protectionist agendas (Egan, 2013) that lack analyses of how children, particularly girls, make meaning of, and negotiate media in their everyday lives

• Overemphasizing the victimization and objectification of girls, thereby reducing any sexual expression as evidence of ‘sexualization’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2011)

• Denying girls’ sexual agency, rights, pleasure and desires (Lerum & Dworkin, 2009; Tolman, 2012; Clark, 2013)

• Interpreting a range of commercial products for children as simply dangerous conduits for ‘child’ sexualization (Bragg et al., 2011; Kehily 2012)

• Ignoring how the eroticization of sexual objectification, including sexual innocence, features in girls’ own sexual subjectification practices (Walkerdine, 1998; Renold & Ringrose, 2011; Lamb & Peterson, 2012; Bragg, 2012)

• Creating enduring binaries of passive feminine sexuality versus active, predatory masculine sexuality (Renold, 2013)

• Encouraging ‘either/or’ and ‘polarized’ position-taking among stakeholders between sexual empowerment and pleasure versus sexual danger and risk (Duschinsky, 2013; Lamb et al., 2013; Tolman, 2013)

• Promoting a linear developmental yet delayed future trajectory of ‘healthy’ age-appropriate non-sexual, heteronormative gender identities (Epstein et al., 2012; Holford et al., 2013)

• Mobilizing a white middle-class panic over the loss of a raced and classed sexual innocence via the Othering of working-class/racialized cultures as evidence of hypersexuality (Egan, 2013; Ringrose, 2013)

• Neglecting the wealth of cross disciplinary, theoretical, empirical, clinical and practitioner-grounded research on children, sexuality and sexualization (Atwood et al., 2013)

The aims of the collection

All these discursive effects are, in different ways and to varying extents, taken up by the chapters in this collection, with the final point on the dearth of empirical research operating as an orienting catalyst for bringing the collection together.

Our aim for this collection was to go beyond these well-worn cleavages and polarizations in the sexualization debates and profile key interdisciplinary commentators, academics, researcher and activists working in the area of children’s sexuality and sexual cultures. It was imperative for us to draw together a collection that illuminates the diversity and complexity of children and young people’s everyday sexual cultures, relations and subjectivities.

We begin with an important range of disciplinary chapters that situate debates in the context of particular frames of reference and meaning, showing the rich diversity of scholarship on children’s sexuality. The next sections showcase a range of cutting-edge research from these various disciplinary domains that move far beyond simplistic ‘telling it like it is’ accounts of doing, being and becoming sexual to theoretically engaged and critical accounts of experiences and realities. The type of research we have purposefully chosen is that which is unsettling, challenging, moving beyond binaries and side-taking around a complex set of issues.

Navigating your way through the collection

Part I: Mapping the history of research and theory within the landscape of ideas

As we have noted, the child’s sexuality has often served as a particularly dense site of cultural anxiety, confusion and projection. In response, a variety of disciplines have offered alternative discourses through the empirical study of the sexuality of children and its various cultural and individual manifestations. These disciplinary chapters offer unique and important contributions through an historical trajectory and assessment of ideas on children and sexuality in six different disciplinary contexts: anthropology, sociology, subcultural studies, social psychology, media studies and clinical psychoanalysis. The chapters raise questions about the impact of cultural diversity on the sexual cultures of children both within the West and outside and ask us to think about the phenomenological experience of sexuality in the lives of young people and the impact of ideological and cultural formations.

In Chapter 2, Diederik F. Janssen highlights how anthropological views on young sexualities illuminate what is specifically human, or rather culturally particular, about the induction of the young into existing mating patterns. Janssen’s exhaustive review of the literature reveals a stark pattern – that children’s own conceptions of intimacy remain significantly delimited by competition between and among the (adult) sexes. His contribution illustrates how young sexualities are governed in ways that illuminate significant power relations between the sexes and between generations.

In Chapter 3, Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott give readers a reflexive and critical overview of the sociological research on the sexuality of children and young people. Jackson and Scott trace the theoretical and empirical trends in sociological literature from the 1970s to today to explore the continuities and discontinuities in both sociological and public debates. They argue that adult anxieties around children and sex derive from constructions of sexuality as a special area of life and children as a special category of people, arguing against sex being seen as inevitably inimical to the well-being of children.

Mary Jane Kehily and Joseph De Lappe explore the links between youth subcultures and young people’s sexual cultures in Chapter 4. Through a discussion of the concept and practice of youth subcultures, the chapter points to the continuing significance of this influential body of work on subsequent studies of young people’s sexual culture. Drawing on examples from pro-ana websites and Japanese Lolita fashion, the chapter demonstrates how the study of youth subcultures and girlhood studies is marked by a distinctive set of ideas and methods that have ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Mapping the History of Research and Theory within the Landscape of Ideas
• Part II: Pre-teen Sexualities: Problematizing Sexual Agency and Sexual Innocence
• Part III: Queering Young Sexualities: Gender, Place and History
• Part IV: Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imaginary
• Part V: New Media, Digital Technology and Young Sexual Cultures
• Index