Growing Up Sexually
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Note on
Janssen, D. F.
(2002-3). Growing Up Sexually. Amsterdam, The Netherlands
PostScript[to volume index]
The “Sexual Curriculum”: Some Post Hoc Notes
Project
GUS was intended to be elaborated upon as time rolled by; I also included
an invitation page for this purpose. Since exactly no one has to date
contributed in any substantial way to the project, I have withdrawn the promise
of a near-future update. For the time being my reading of the literature is
currently being archived in Topica to which
individual subscriptions are possible, as well as readers’ own input and
reflection (depending on public animo). This solution provides a more dynamic
and (potentially) more interactive forum, not as yet available in another form
as far as the author is concerned. At this board links and references are
collected to keep GUS and subscribers up-to-date about academic writing in
matters of sexual “developments”.
In the section below I would like to make a number of
‘post hoc’ notes pertaining to the discursive localisation of project GUS in
its ‘interim’ appearance (version 0.0).
- A point I hinted at briefly in GUS, the concept of a sexological
“atlas” articulates rather poorly with ‘postmodern’ sentiments against
authoritative grids. The interim Atlas
material is ‘raw’ to some extent, in the sense of its cross-cutting, often
in the rudest sense possible, whatever theoretical and paradigmatic realms
the data surfaced in. Of course,
the anthropology student (like myself) will feel challenged to sort this
out a bit, and then find that this produces rather interesting
preliminaries for further inquiry. Thus, respected ‘holistic’ traditions
may prove unreceptive for the mere concept of people “developing”
“sexual”, and so forth. I eagerly await such sorting out.
- By the phrase ‘sexual curriculum’ I have tried to address
the trichotomous (by that I mean culturally trisected) academic
discursive space that is ‘sexuality development’. In this space, the
historical trichomotisation in question has entailed the separation of
three concurrent “developmental” themes which I ethnocentrically address
as (1) the gender curriculum; (2) the reproductive curriculum;
and (3) the pleasure /erotic curriculum. With GUS, the project I had only vaguely
in mind was, according to Foucault’s understanding of
geneology/archaeology of knowledge,
a comparative ethno-historiography of sexology, more specifically of the
ontogenetic question within this ‘sexological’ stage: how does sexuality
“develop”?. That is: I am not consenting to any ‘trichotomisation’
(gender/reproduction/pleasure), the trichotomisation is the starting point
of a discourse analysis and deconstruction as hinted at infra.
Generally, I guess sexologists would want to study
sexual histories according to an Foucaultian axioma: “Let us give the term
‘genealogy’ to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows
us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this
knowledge tactically today” (1980 [1994:p42]).
That is, if our reality is to be our “history”, then our history be our sexual
trajectories, and sexologists be genealogists. Beausang
calls these ‘personal narratives’.
- I further distinguished two collateral (still, reciprocal)
discursive realms named “curriculum”, which denotes individuals’ normative
discourse, and “trajectory” which denotes individuals’ (auto)biographical
discourse. By this bipolar understanding of sexological praxis I wished to
potentialise the ways these fields have become evaluated, produced,
measured and controlled by means of instrumental constructs such as
“development”, “normality”, “appropriateness”, “transgression”,
“perversion”, and so on. This is an essentially historiographic project,
which would embody, at the discursive level, the processes of discourse
formation and object formation in the West-European setting (cf.
Foucault). That is, it leaves aside whatever realm of determination
(‘biological’ or such) is ‘behind’ individuals’ autobiographical
processes, or the moral universe that would be ‘beyond’ them. This should
be clear: I am not challenging any mode of ‘biological’ representation of
processes.
- Now the project delineated above, one of Foucault’s major unfinished
agenda, has just begun to be actualised as I write. What has to some
extent come to the fore in GUS, was the academic performance of sexology,
which is interesting in itself but it also competes with an
anthropologist’s concern with ‘local’ sexologies of and concerning “real
children”. Apparently, what should be on the agenda are emerging
global/local/’glocal’ developmental sexologies as they are practised where
the ‘sexuality’ is at, or rather where it is ordered, governed, issued,
etc. At this point I came to regard ‘sexological’ and ‘sexual’
praxis as collateral if not identical realms (obviously contra
the historically rooted dichotomy in which they appear to be ordered).
So as I see it, sexological hierarchies function to control and order both
‘sexologies’ (according to traditional meaning) as ‘sexualities’
(according to conventional meaning), archaically and typically within a
medical and medicalising concept of social reality. Some say in the 1970s,
the Western world briefly experienced relief from this order. Today,
without a youth movement (rather than ‘youth culture’), and with
distressing liberties and possibilities such as internet communication, we
find it harder again. We “Americans” are hyperconsumers of our moral
notions, and have these steadily reproduced by our institutions. These
institutes (school, the psychiatrist’s office, the home) run our world; we
sit back and enjoy the scene, the violence, the scandal, the excitement.
- The study of ‘sexual development’ discourses, according to Foucaultian
guidelines, could include the following elements:
- statements about sexuality “developing”, “being developed”,
“having developed”, “not having developed”, and so forth;
- rules which prescribe certain ways of talking about these topics
while excluding others (rules of inclusion and exclusion);
- how knowledge about the topic acquires authority
(embodiment of ‘truth’);
- ‘subjects’ who in some manner personify the discourse
(currently, the a/pre/subsexual or “normative” child, the ‘sexually
aggressive child’, the ‘sexually reactive child’, the ‘sexually abused
child’, the ‘predator’, the ‘survivor’, …);
- practices associated with the institutionalisation of dealing with
the subjects (e.g., scholastic “sex education” programmes, cartoonesk
“healthy touch” curricula);
- discursive (trans)formation (the emergence of a new discourse, and decline
of old ones).
I again recall that Foucault himself left some work to
be done here.
- A recent off-shoot paper of GUS
might, inter alia, give rise to the idea that the project was born
out of an anti-protectionist, perhaps even ‘neoliberalist’ view of child
rearing. Personally, I have to say I am
interested in Germanic interpretations of Geschlechtswissenschaft,
anti-authoritäre Erziehung, Frei-Körper Kultur, Psychoanalyse,
Sexualerziehung, etc., from a historical and epistemological point
of view. As for ‘abuse’ according to contemporary Americanist discourse, I
guess it is somehow, eventually, an understandable paradigmatic
peculiarity of postfeminist societies (which I called “paedocentric”) as
well as of self-sustaining ‘bureaucracies’ serving such societies.
Possibly not something to be focussing on, with other issues pressing (cf.
Kincaid, 1998).
Project GUS itself hardly addressed the issue in other than oblique fashions,
for a number of reasons, one prominent of these being the inability of the
contemporary globalist psycho/socio/pedagogical constellation to address
these matters in an unbiased way; this being my personal reflection.
Generally, the anthropological niche has failed to commit itself in
establishing a curriculum of ‘thick’ descriptions addressing processes of
sexual “development”. By this I think of in-depth semi-structured
interviews, discursive analysis, and then something of a relativist
synthetetic project ready to incorporate future modifications. I daresay
we don’t need any more Child Sexual Behaviour Inventories of the
sort that we now judge issues with. However, I gather there’s little room
for a radical anthropology of early sexuality either; those Bornemannian
days seem to be over.
- The project gave rise to a reflection on the legitimacy of
developing sexualities to be studied in ‘cultural’ terms, and on such
level (cf. point 1 supra).
Today, I am rather sceptical of any level of analysis given the hegemony
of a number of mainstreamed absolutisms and dichotomies in casu, in an age
so obviously and proudly “past it all” on the academic level. This surely
makes for a peculiar vacuum. I might agree with project supervisor and
former-president of the then Dutch Social Sexological Research Institute
[formerly NISSO] Dr. Jur. Cees J. Straver sexuality and associated
physical affinity are best described in terms of “emotions” expressed
within or without cultural grids; on the other hand, an anthropologist can
deal with emotions only when symptomatised by stories, by actions, by such
grids. That is, I am perfectly content to study stories, featuring
“emotions” as such (words, stories), not as probable ‘root realities’ nor
as smallest undividable “sexual” particles.
As for ‘emotions’, I maintain there is a strong case
for what I nicked “proto-erotic” currents as a go-between of predominantly
adrenergically mediated biopsychological processes, and predominantly gonadally
mediated processes. To exclusively reserve the term “erotocism” for the latter
would be akin to ruling out a fading out/fading in scheme in the effectuation
of attractions in general, and also the probable tight curricular
interdigitation of both bioprocessual “generations” as is concerned the “erotic”
appeal. There’s work to be done here.
As for ‘cultures’, it seems obvious the “individual”
is not of an anthropologist’s prime interest, while the interactive,
institutional and eventual counter-institutional is. That is, anthropologists
will (and probably should) primarily commit themselves to studies and theories
of “curricula” rather than the more hypothetical, more problematic, and more
recalcitrant “trajectories” that might prove symptomatic of them. The
Curriculum in terms of biopower, then, is hegemonic Discourse in need of
exploration; trajectories, on the other hand, should be expressions of the
enforcement and formation of Curricular processes. Might they prove subverting
any Curricular principle, then they should not. I would say that these
subversions are the salt and pepper of developmental sexology.
Taking the “paedophilic” encounter as a too-easy and
too-cheap index of contemporary parenting and moral globalism, the sexologist
would have to resist being institutionalised
into the kind of ethnographies to perform, be it
ethnocriminologies/-victimologies (focussing on active of passive deviations
from institutionalised regulation of social behaviour) or ethnopsychiatries
(focussing on deviations from public conventions on mental process and
productivity, as contributing to such social behaviour), rather than biologies
(focussing on deviations from neuro-endocrinological homeostasis, such
according to contemporary clinical consensus). I am not advocating any type of
“integrative approach” either. Let the facts (stories, rather) speak, not the
institutions (I am a freshman student, maybe I am too optimistic).
- In discussing sexual education of the blind, Patrick White recently
expressed the “hope that in the future blind people will wrest control of
the story of their own sexuality from the hands of the sighted, for the
available material, painfully limited though it is, constitutes the
totality of our cultural inheritance of official information on the
subject”. I subscribe to such hope,
impolitely lumping blindnesses into what may be a universal threat, and
corresponding sightednesses somewhere near to such.
- Lastly, I want to express my hope that “sexology” even when a
peculiar ethnohistorical niche will be able to succeed in subverting and
deconstructing today’s multidisciplinary (in the Foucaultian sense)
dichotomies, of which there too many. But let’s try and invent
constructive alternatives to the boring anti-Americanisms here. Of many
ethnographic entries in “sexological” “atlases”, mine for one, there’s a
skeleton without the flesh, there’s no interstitium, no connective tissue,
no organicity. We simply can not afford dealing with presumed bones while
ignoring the organism they may erect. If we cannot touch the child
academically, as retired Prof. John Money observed, then we should bear in
mind that our Child would paradoxically the product of a protracted case
for ‘evidence-based moralities’.
The author, June 2003
Footnotes [up]
White,
P. (2003) Sex Education; Or,
How The Blind Became Heterosexual, GLQ 9,1–2:133–47, at p134
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