Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity

Egan, R. Danielle; Hawkes, Gail

doi:10.1057/9780230106000

Cited by 108 publications

(92 citation statements)

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“…We have also shown how girls' sexuality is ever more surveilled and regulated in an era where age-appropriate sexual behaviour is intensely scrutinised through international 'sexualisation' moral panics (Egan and Hawkes 2010). We have suggested that while 'sexualisation' as a policy discourse has usefully pointed to the problems of the hypersexualisation of girls bodies, the solutions it proffers are typically moralistic and call for a return to a middle class fantasy of girl innocence and virginity (Renold and Ringrose 2011).…”

Section: Slutwalks As a Politics Of 'Re-signification'?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Slut-shaming, girl power and ‘sexualisation’: thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls

Ringrose

Renold

2012

Gender and Education

181

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Section: Slutwalks As a Politics Of 'Re-signification'?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Slut-shaming, girl power and ‘sexualisation’: thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls

Ringrose

Renold

2012

Gender and Education

181

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“…To be a child is to be 'naturally' innocent, unknowing of sexuality -an assumption and discourse that has been widely critiqued (Lloyd and Duveen 1992;Higonnet 1998, Epstein andJohnson 1998;Walkerdine 1997, Renold 2005, Blaise 2005, 2010b2013b, Hawkes and Egan 2010, Egan 2013Faulkner 2010;Robinson 2012, Taylor 2010, Bruhm and Hurley 2004. Research into young children's peer cultures has shown them to be deeply engaged in constructing their own sexualities and/through regulating those of others, engaged in 'doing' sexuality as they are 'doing' gender (e.g.…”

Section: Er: Do You Like It?mentioning

confidence: 99%

What (else) can a kiss do? Theorizing the power plays in young children’s sexual cultures

2013

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This article draws on school-based ethnographic research in two elementary schools (in South Wales, UK and north Finland) to explore the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart, 2007) of gendered/sexual power in young children's (aged 5–6) negotiation of their own and others’ bodies in playground and classroom spaces. We apply queer and feminist appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘becomings’ and ‘territorialisations’, not to pin down what a kiss is, but to explore the kiss as always more than itself, and thus what (else) a kiss can do. To explore the affective journey of the kiss as an always-relational social-material event, we sketch a range of kissing assemblages across four vignettes – ‘the kissing hut’, ‘the classroom kiss’, ‘the kissing line’ and ‘the dinosaur kiss’ – mapping the enabling or restriction of a range of gendered and sexual becomings. Each vignette foregrounds the complex, contradictory nature of children’s gendered and sexual cultures which we argue are vital to map in a socio-political terrain where discourses of denial, silence and (over)protection dominate accounts of how young children are doing, being and becoming ‘sexual’.

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“…In this way, as Egan and Hawkes (2010) have pointed out, the innocent girl is always haunted by the possibility of the girl 'gone skank' (Oppliger, 2008), who is represented as dirty or trashy in a way which is often clearly classed and racialised (Ringrose, forthcoming 2012): as other commentators have pointed out, it is low-cost shops like Primark and R&B music videos which are most frequently the objects of concern. In the case of the innocent girl, blame and responsibility are located in popular culture and media which can easily 'get into' the girl -rather like the demons of previous eras (Barker, 2011).…”

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confidence: 99%

Doing the möbius strip: The politics of the Bailey Review

Duschinsky

Barker

2013

Sexualities

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This paper argues that recent sexualisation discourses are problematic in several ways: they assume that all sexual materials are harmful, they smuggle in normative assumptions about good and bad sex, and they conflate sexism and sexuality in ways which function to restrict femininity. Through an analysis of the history of sexualisation discourses, and their recent deployment in the United Kingdom government's 2011 Bailey Review, we argue that it would be useful to unpack the concept of sexualisation into its earlier form: 'sexual socialisation'. This would shift the focus from individual girls, and the policing of their sexual behaviour, to wider societal forces, making space for exploration of the normativity and sexism operating within these. We draw on the image of the möbius strip to capture the subtle codependence of representations of young women as innocent, passive recipients of sexualisation, and as neoliberal choice-making subjects. On both sides of the strip oppression is something that is either simply present or absent for a particular subject. A turn to 'sexual socialisation' rather than 'sexualisation' could offer a way of escaping this möbius strip and moving towards an understanding of gendered relations of power as simultaneously enabling and limiting gendered subjectivity and agency.

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Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity

Cited by 108 publications

References 0 publications

Slut-shaming, girl power and ‘sexualisation’: thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls

Slut-shaming, girl power and ‘sexualisation’: thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls

What (else) can a kiss do? Theorizing the power plays in young children’s sexual cultures

Doing the möbius strip: The politics of the Bailey Review

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