Subject: Re: pedophilia studies
From: Raymond Michalowski (Raymond.Michalowski@NAU.EDU)
Date: Mon Jan 10 2000 - 12:26:10 CST
I agree with Marty that most feminist work on pedophilia has a high
probability of falling under the general ruberic of "critical" criminology
to the extent that it explores thow the production of sexual attraction
toward children is an expression of the way in which a given society
constructs gender, sexuality, age, and power. I could imagine some
feminist work that might focus only on the micro-production of pedopheliac
desires/practices in specific individuals, but ever there, the work would
typically attempt to use these case and/or ethnographic studies to
interpret wider social practices of gender and sexuality.
I think it would certainly be a mistake in any case to imagine pedophelia
as something that operates at an individual level. The center of every
society always determines the nature of its fringes. In a society whose
mainstream culture/pop-culture/advertising/entertainment is obsessed with
youthful sexuality, where supermodels typically look like teenagers even if
they are not, is it surprising that there are people on the sexual fringes
who push the age margin below puberty, even to infancy? Any society that
sends pre-pubescent girls to the beach in two piece bathing suits is
clearly sexualizing its little children...why else would someone imagine
they need to cover the chest of a female child?? Why can't Ameiricans just
let little children - both boys and girls - run naked at the beach?
Because we see their bodies as sexual and something shameful to be covered.
And that's just mainstream sexual culture in America. So just imagine
what happens to those who exist on the sexual fringes. Pedophelia is a
social, not an individual phenomenon, just like every other form of crime.
The problem is that outside the small house of feminist and critical
criminology, the discourse that defines crime as a matter of individual
depravity has been growing louder and louder over the last 20 years.
Ray
At 03:11 PM 1/8/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Further to what Jennifer says (and she is 100% correct), there has been a
>disjunction in the categorization into little boxes of studies of sexual
>aggression and critical criminology. I am a fair example. I have a body
>of work labeled "critical criminology," which consists of such things as
>articles on left realism. When I am evaluated as a critical criminologist
>(such as a recent article in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education,
>where the question was examined of how many times my work has been cited)
>what is ignored is another piece of my life -- four or five books and more
>than 40 journal articles and book chapters on violence against women
>(including a couple of critical pieces on incest). It is not likely that I
>run a schizophrenic existence -- critical for some articles, not for
>others. It is the same me.
>
> From my point of view, feminist work on pedophilia should automatically be
>considered critical scholarship unless your analysis shows
>otherwise. While there is less of this work than I would like, there is a
>lot of it. People who do Marxist analyses of state legitimacy don't tend
>to do this work, to be sure, but then again pedophilia scholars tend to do
>lousy work on state legitimacy.
>
>Marty Schwartz
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Mon Jan 01 2001 - 01:05:47 CST