The reframing of child sexual abuse is a dominant idea within queer theory
Dr EM on Queer Theory as destroyer of boundaries:
Unnervingly, the reframing of child sexual abuse and liberating of paedophilia from the margins of society is a dominant idea within queer theory. Although it has attempted to cloak itself under the rainbow and harness the energy, good will and gains gay, lesbian and bisexual people have fought for over decades Queer theory is anything but progressive. Indeed, it is totally opposed to same sex attraction. As Professor Alassandra Tanesini outlines, a ‘characteristic trait of queer theory is its opposition to any view that treats sexual orientation as anything other than socially constructed’.[4]
It goes back to Foucault.
Foucault’s re-conceptualisation of the triad of discourse, power and knowledge entailed a re-thinking of resistance. Transgression of norms, and in particular sexual norms, became the only response to punishment and classification, which would, in Foucauldian thinking, challenge oppression and power. Although Foucault’s challenge to heteronormative dominance was a welcomed intervention, the extension of his idea that all norms are bad and freeing repressed deviant sexualities is good in and of itself poses serious problems.
Just a little.
Feminists have attempted to develop the cultural norm that rape is bad and that children cannot consent to sexual activity. These activities — rape and child sexual abuse — become reframed in postmodernism, and therefore queer theory, as repressed and a transgression of boundaries which is thus challenging power and helping to liberate the individual. For example, Foucault presented the prosecution of a child molester as a petty collective intolerance where the discourse constructs an offender and victim and enacts state power on an individual.
Well, yes, and that’s because people who think about it from a point of view other than “I want to fuck children” have concluded that preventing child molesters from doing their thing is the way to go, state power and all.
Foucault related how
One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called ‘curdled milk.’ So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.[10]
Ahhhhhhh fuck that noise. It happens that I can speak to this one, because I have been that little girl. I grew up among fields and brooks, which I loved, and one afternoon I was out playing and a guy driving a tractor in the next field stopped and approached me and invited me to sit on his lap – which I was young and stupid enough to do. (I don’t remember what I was thinking. He seemed friendly and nice, and I don’t remember more than that) All he did was feel a (barely emergent) breast, and I must have jumped up and run away, but naturally it shocked and scared me. He didn’t “obtain a few caresses” from me, he copped a feel, and I hated and resented it (it introduced a very unwanted element into my bucolic paradise), and it was in no way an everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality. It was a nasty move by an adult on a child, it was far from routine, and there was nothing fun about it from my point of view. Foucault isn’t being “transgressive” and oh so cool there, he’s just being the usual dreary pathetic male who can’t see or even imagine the point of view of the female half of these “everyday occurrences in the life of village sexuality.” Ugh. That was my first sexual assault but not my last – like all women, I’ve experienced several.
Despite the supposed banality of adult sexual activity with children, Foucault remained concerned with age of consent legislation. In 1977 Foucault signed a petition to the French Parliament arguing for the abolition of all legislation regarding the age of consent, the effective legalisation of paedophilia.[13]
And so we get Peter Tatchell and MAP and NAMBLA and all the rest of it – and now the CBC promoting children doing drag.
A pox on all of it.
That was also the argument made by a lot of people supporting Roy Moore – it’s just their culture, it’s part of Southern culture, it’s what everyone does. It isn’t. There are a lot of southerners who don’t see that as okay, including the girls being felt up.
I, too, have been the victim of many instances of unwanted touching, leering, groping, and other things that were not invited nor consented, and of constantly being asked to perform acts on people I wasn’t interested in. Even if they honor the no, the constant hounding to change your mind is exhausting.
“A familiar game called ‘curdled milk'”??!!?
What is that when it’s at home?
iknklast, I imagine that the constant hounding, as well as being exhausting, engenders a constant low level anxiety/tension that the next person will not take no for an answer. As a male I’ve lived my life utterly free of such constant harassment (there have been other forms of harassment for sure). Unsolicited sexual advances have been vanishing rare, sometimes welcome and when not have been easy to rebuff or gently turn away (not many 160cm women represent a physical threat to me).
Maddog1129, you don’t want to think about that too hard.
Well, he would do that, wouldn’t he.?
Those laws he objects to have existed from time immemorial for many reasons, all having to do with the rights of somebody, and some even having to do with the rights of the child. The most important reason for an ‘age of consent’ is simple: the power in the situation is woefully lopsided in favour of the (usually male) older participant, who being older is usually the initiator, and often more experienced, particularly in the technique of getting his way.
I would advise any young person to trust Foucault as far as he/she could kick a Steinway grand piano; up a steep hill with its wheel brakes on; while dragging behind him/her a garbage truck with all tyres flat and loaded with a mixture of PoMo and fresh cow (no make that bull) manure.
Is it really too much to ask for people to re-examine a pet theory that results in support for pediphilia?
@ Ben, apparently, yes.
I love South Park’s take on this, where NAMBLA members give a big “some day society will understand” speech as one of the characters keeps simply retorting that they have sex with children:
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/104011/rightful-persecution
(Unfortunately the speech is bracketed by some South Park stupidity.)
Everything old is new again. There was a creepy cultural flirtation with sexualizing young children back in the 70s. And it wasn’t confined to radical academic circles, think of well regarded movies like Manhattan or Taxi Driver. It faded away and has since been quietly forgotten. I guess it’s back. And totally woke, apparently…
One of Alice Miller’s books laid the sexualization of children at Freud’s feet. He concocted an entire ‘theory’ of sexual development…before the nature of hormones was even guessed at. Subsequent real science couldn’t hope to pierce the veil of self-validating orthodoxy.
It’s worth recalling the names attached to that petition to remove all age of consent laws. They included: Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge.
All that’s just from the first paragraph of the wiki entry.
Something’s been rotten in the academy for a long, long time.