Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I What Is Sexual Development?
- Children
- 1 Are Children Sexual?
- 2 Toward a Central Theory of Childhood Sexuality
- 3 A Sociological Exploration of Childhood Sexuality
- 4 Not Innocent, but Vulnerable
- 5 The Dynamic Expression of Sexual-Minority and Gender-Minority Experience during Childhood and Adolescence
- 6 Sexual Embodiment in Girlhood and beyond
- Adolescence
- Part II How Do We Study Sexual Development?
- Part III Media, Family, Education
- Index
- References
4 - Not Innocent, but Vulnerable
An Approach to Childhood Innocence
from Children
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
Book contents
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual Development
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I What Is Sexual Development?
- Children
- 1 Are Children Sexual?
- 2 Toward a Central Theory of Childhood Sexuality
- 3 A Sociological Exploration of Childhood Sexuality
- 4 Not Innocent, but Vulnerable
- 5 The Dynamic Expression of Sexual-Minority and Gender-Minority Experience during Childhood and Adolescence
- 6 Sexual Embodiment in Girlhood and beyond
- Adolescence
- Part II How Do We Study Sexual Development?
- Part III Media, Family, Education
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter provides a critique of the concept of childhood innocence. The authors critically examine the many political uses of this concept, which have been in service of agendas to make children's lives better as well as initiatives that make their lives worse. This chapter provides case studies and stories to show how the trope of the innocent child has been used to perpetuate anti-LGBT sentiment and generate moral panic, to demonstrate the ways in which childhood innocence is gendered and affected by race and class, and to discuss children's sexuality as an assemblage. They propose that scholars replace the concept of childhood innocence with that of vulnerability, as approaching the topic of children's sexuality with an understanding that children are vulnerable, rather than innocent, maintains children's agency and subjectivity while acknowledging their need for protection.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Handbook of Sexual DevelopmentChildhood and Adolescence, pp. 76 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018
References
American Psychological Association (2007). Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.Google Scholar
Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York and London: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs, 28(3), 801–831.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boone, T. (2005). Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brown, L., Lamb, S., & Tappan, M. B. (2009). Packaging Boyhood: Superheroes, Slackers, and Other Media Stereotypes, New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Cahill, S. & Jones, K. T. (2002). Child Sexual Abuse and Homosexuality: The Long History of the “Gays as Pedophiles” Fallacy. Retrieved October 3, 2002, from www.NGLTF.org.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (48–51). Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2005). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Dines, G. & Levy, D. (2013, August 1). A rare defeat for corporate lobbyists. Counterpunch. www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/01/a-rare-defeat-for-corporate-lobbyists/.Google Scholar
Duschinsky, R. (2013a). Sexualization: A State of Injury. Theory & Psychology, 23(3), 351–370. doi:10.1177/0959354312469732.Google Scholar
Duschinsky, R. (2013b). The Emergence of Sexualization as a Social Problem: 1981–2010. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 20 (1), 137–156. doi:10.1093/sp/jxs016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Egan, R. & Hawkes, G. (2008). Endangered Girls and Incendiary Objects: Unpacking the Discourse on Sexualization, Sexuality & Culture, 12(4), 291–311. doi:10.1007/s12119-008-9036-8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Egan, R. & Hawkes, G. (2010). Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity. Gordonsville: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Faulkner, J. (2013). Vulnerability of “Virtual” Subjects: Childhood, Memory, and Crisis in the Cultural Value of Innocence. Substance 42(3), 127–147. doi:10.1353/sub.2013.0029.Google Scholar
Fields, J. (2008). Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Fischel, J. J. (2016). Pornographic Protections? Itineraries of Childhood Innocence. Law, Culture and the Humanities 12(2), 206–220. doi:10.1177/1743872113492396.Google Scholar
Gill, R. (2012). Media, Empowerment and the “Sexualization of Culture” Debates. Sex Roles 66(11–12), 736–745. doi:10.1007/s11199-011–0107-1.Google Scholar
Giroux, H. A. (1998). Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence. Social Text, no. 57, 31–53.Google Scholar
Grillo, T. (2013). Anti-essentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House. Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, 10(1), 16–30. doi:10.15779/Z38MC6W.Google Scholar
Hamilton, M. (2009). What’s Happening to Our Girls? Melbourne: Penguin Group Australia.Google Scholar
Higgonet, A. (1998). Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar
Irvine, J. M. (2004). Talk about Sex. The Battles over Sex Education in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorising Childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Jenkins, H. (1998). Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths. In Jenkins, H. (Ed.), The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Kincaid, J. (1998). Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kinney, A. B. (1995). Chinese Views of Childhood. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Kristeva, J. & Roudiez, L. S. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lamb, S. (2010). Feminist Ideals of Healthy Female Adolescent Sexuality: A Critique. Sex Roles, 62(5/6), 294–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lamb, S. & Brown, L. M. (2006). Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes. New York: St. Martin’s Press.Google Scholar
Lamb, S., Graling, K., & Lustig, K. (2013). The Use and Misuse of Pleasure in Sex Education Curricula. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 13(3), 305–318. doi:10.1080/14681811.2012.738604.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maďarová, Z. (2015). Love and Fear. Argumentative Strategies against Gender Equality in Slovakia In Anti-gender Movements on the Rise?: Strategising for Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe (33–42). Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung.Google Scholar
Najafi, S. & Higonnet, A. (2003). Picturing innocence: An interview with Anne Higonnet. Cabinet, Issue 9. www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/picturing_innocence.php.Google Scholar
Paternotte, D. (2015). Blessing the Crowds. Catholic Mobilisations against Gender in Europe. In Hark, S. & Villa, P.-I. (Eds.), Anti-Genderismus. Sexualität und Geschlecht als Schauplätze aktueller politischer Auseinandersetzungen (129–147). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.Google Scholar
Renold, E. & Ringrose, J. (2008). Regulation and Rupture: Mapping Tween and Teenage Girls’ “Resistance” to the Heterosexual Matrix. Feminist Theory 9(3), 335–360.Google Scholar
Ringrose, J. & Reynold, E. (2012). Slut-Shaming, Girl Power and “Sexualisation”: Thinking through the Politics of the International SlutWalks with Teen Girls. Gender and Education, 24(3), 333–343. doi:10.1080/09540253.2011.645023.Google Scholar
Robinson, K. H. (2008). In the Name of ‘Childhood Innocence’; A Discursive Exploration of the Moral Panic Associated with Childhood and Sexuality. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 113–129.Google Scholar
Robinson, K. H. (2012). “Difficult Citizenship”: The Precarious Relationships between Childhood, Sexuality and Access to Knowledge. Sexualities 15(3/4), 257–276. doi:10.1177/1363460712436469.Google Scholar
Russell, G. & Kelly, N. (2003). Subtle Stereotyping: The Media, Homosexuality, and the Priest Sexual Abuse Scandal. Amherst: The Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies.Google Scholar
Schmincke, I. (2015). Das Kind als Chiffre politischer Auseinandersetzung am Beispiel neuer konservativer Protestbewegungen in Frankreich und Deutschland. In Hark, S. & Villa, P.-I. (Eds.), Anti-Genderismus. Sexualität und Geschlecht als Schauplätze aktueller politischer Auseinandersetzungen (93–107). Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.Google Scholar
Spivak, G. C. (1990). The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Stevenson, M. R. (2000). Public Policy, Homosexuality and the Sexual Coercion of Children. Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 12(4), 8.Google Scholar
Walkerdine, V. (1997). Daddy’s Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture. London, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walkerdine, V. (2001). Safety and Danger: Childhood, Sexuality, and Space at the End of the Millennium. In Hultqvist, K. & Dahlberg, G. (Eds.), Governing the Child in the New Millennium, (15–34). New York and London: Routledge Falmer.Google Scholar
Whittier, N. (2009). The Politics of Child Sexual Abuse: Emotion, Social Movements, and the State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Young-Bruehl, E. (2012). Childism: Confronting Prejudice against Children. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
- 10
- Cited by