Presentations of boy's sexuality within man-boy sexual relationships have shifted considerably over the past three decades. We document this through analyzing three very different constituencies: 'boylover' (adult men sexually attracted to boys) activist movements, three research case studies, and male survivors of abuse. We examine the specific ways boy's sexuality has been constructed within each of these positions, how these have changed over this period, and what insights all this can shed on wider social and cultural (re)conceptions on age, gender, and sexuality. Studying these diverse perspectives provides a series of contrasting assumptions and frameworks which will yield invaluable insights on wider transformations in the production of narratives on child and intergenerational sexualities. We hope to illuminate this through drawing out the complex interplays involving power dynamics and fluctuations in the epistemological hierarchy delineating boy's sexuality (in terms of more normative and transgressive forms this may take). We conclude this critical engagement with a discussion of the likely impact any 'queering' of, or fractures in, age/generational boundaries might have for the future narrating of boy's sexual stories within man-boy sexual relationships.
Pedophilia's significance in late modernity rests on its unconventionality, an extreme symbol of sexual decadence threatening “moral” communities and nation‐states. Over the past 25 years, pedophilia has mostly been formulated through political campaigns, professional etiologies, and media‐led local “moral panics,” notably in the campaign for “Megan's Law.”
In this paper I emphasize the multiple ways dominant moral and essentialist understandings feed into the wider regulatory norms and conventional thinking governing adult‐child sexual relations. Clearly, researchers are not immune from the ascendant material and symbolic hegemony enjoyed by child sexual abuse (CSA) paradigms. Indeed the experience of the seven critical writers and researchers cited in the paper, coupled with the author’s own experiences carrying out PhD research in this area, clearly reinforce this point. I contend that sociological and Foucauldian insights on age and sexual categorization can offer a helpful tool‐kit for unpacking the contested claims from CSA survivors, child liberationists, and the specific case of one respondent who resists victimological labelling of his sexual experiences with adults.
There is a mistake, repeated three times, made by the publisher and typesetter at a late stage of production. The expression''DSM's 5-code''should be''DSM's V-code.''This mistake occurred near the end of the Abstract (p. 797, bottom of left-hand column), in the section entitled ''HD Approach'' (p. 802, left-hand column near end of second paragraph), and in the section entitled ''Concluding Remarks'' (p. 824, righthand column near the middle of the paragraph). The V-code (but not the''5-code'') is a section in the DSM, which contains non-disordered conditions that create significant problems in present-day society.The online version of the original article can be found under
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