Growing Up Sexually
The Sexual Curriculum (Oct., 2002) [to Volume
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[IV] Janssen,
D. F. (Oct., 2002). Growing Up Sexually. Volume II: The Sexual
Curriculum: The Manufacture and Performance of Pre-Adult Sexualities.
Interim Report. Amsterdam, The Netherlands 17
[previous
chapter] Selected
Theoretical Proceedings
Contents
Selected
Theoretical Proceedings 17.1 Locating
Processes via Cross-Cultural Data 17.2 Locating
Agents: The Instructor 17.4 Locating
Objects: The Salient and Significant Body 17.6 Locating
"Sexual Behavior Identity": Cultural Self and Spaces between Construct and
Performance 17.7
Construct and "Control": An Interpretation 17.8 The
Segmental Hierarchy of Sex: Suggestions for Further Exploration 17.11
Constructionism and Activism 17.12
Cultures and Developments 17.0 Introduction [up] [contents]
The
following statements include a selection of general formulations resulting from
the project "Growing Up Sexually". In
part, these are confirmations of explicit and implicit hypotheticals associated
with the constructionist entry. Further remarks are made on the position of
sexologists and sexology in the interpretations and claims reviewed. 17.1 Locating
Processes via Cross-Cultural Data [up] [contents]
As
detailed in chapter
16, in Western discourse the process of eroticisation of personhood
(and bodies) is an avoided issue. This was explained by addressing the fact
that such categories are not positively defined within the socialisation
process (but rather by a negative proxy processes) and therefore have no performative
contextual or textual autonomy. This cultural perspective, however tentatively,
can be challenged by cross-cultural data. In contemporary sexology, as a whole,
the issue of the "manufactured" and "consumed" person/body is addressed without
a due reference to "developmental" processes. Here too, cross-cultural
perspectives are able to address, deconstruct and reformulate these tendencies.
Developmental eroticism, clearly, contemporarily is of a cultural "substance"
other than that of "gender" ("identity", "orientation") and bodiliness
("image", "attitude", etc.). The review offers, but does not address fully, the
hypothesis that "eroticism" is a factor for which the cultural barriers to
"operationalisation", both within sexological praxis (to define) and
pedagogical discourses (to make practicable), are variable, rendering
its curricular performance less contextual, more optional, and more ambiguous
in some societies as compared to others. 17.2 Locating
Agents: The Instructor [up] [contents]
Cultural and subcultural differences are noted in the
specifics of developmental sexologies (§3.4). Specifically, the
identification of promoting agents is a salient factor (chapter 7). Cross-culturally, this
ranges from the employment of an exclusively appointed Instructor, providing a
fully integrated, personal, pragmatic (or practical)
sexological curriculum, to a situation where authorities leave (however
critical) issues to more or less unchecked (optional) peer dynamics. In the
last case, the extent and content of the curriculum may be variable, largely
unmonitored, and more likely to evoke contextual ambiguity. Theoretically, the
persona of the Educator thus ranges from a single key informant to a mist of
influences that renders any organised or purposeful localisation of (control
of, participation in) eroticisation and gendering processes a complex and
perhaps unfruitful quest. This relates to the antithesis between the use of
ritual-derived discontinuity, and the highly indefinite (yet increasingly
proscribed) chronology that characterises post-industrial growing up sexually. In
technocratic societies, this has created a culturalist free run on the matter for
academics as well as moral observers. As some may argue, a traditionalism-versus-modernism
curriculum has been replaced by two other curricula: the perpetual redoing of
modernism in Western societies (e.g., "post-modernism"), and the struggle
between modernism, revival and reinvention in "developing" regions. Thus, any Educator's
role is likely to undergo continuous chance, which has only recently been
monitored by anthropologists and sociologists. 17.3 Locating Sexologies [up] [contents]
The
"Educator problem" identified above can be traced along the lines of
development characterising European scientific discourses, which, very globally
speaking, appear to be synchronised with lay developmental sexologies. Genetic
agents have successively been located within the biological realm, within the
pedagogical and sexagogical situation (pedagogues, parents, extraordinary
agogues), and lastly within what would be a dense cultural soup of sexologies
that vicariously, and agentlessly,
determines power configurations. The presence of these sexological principles
in non-European settings (§3.3) is hard to interpret
historically given the paucity of information provided by older sources. The
preliminary conclusion reads that for most cases, traditional developmental
(ontogenetic) sexologies are not available. Future research has to address what
appears to be socially and sociologically parallel evolutions, specifically by
disentangling pre-contact and post-contact sexology, and by separating native
from (implicit) interpretative and comparative sexology. Research is further to
address curricular (age graded) sub- and countercultural sexologies and their
vicissitudes and interactions over time. 17.4 Locating
Objects: The Salient and Significant Body [up] [contents]
Convincingly
suggested by data collected in chapters 5, 12 and 13, the body is socialised and culturalised (a)
along a spectrum of meanings, ranging from patriarchal-complementarist
interpretations (reproduction), to the individualist-essentialist commercial
interpretations of industrial society; and (b) along a gradient of definition
and insistence with which meanings are made available, particularly
intergenerationally. Cross-culturally, this produces chronological and
operational differences within gender (at least hypothetically dyadic),
reproductive (economic/medical/social), and erotic (individualist, private)
spheres. Specifically, it produces 'sexologically' monovalent, oligovalent or
polyvalent cultures, and inherently, curricular subculturing. As feminist
perspectives have argued, the body is invaded with meanings within a complex,
culturally specific complementation-identification schema based on and inspired
by larger socioeconomically informed political agendas. Within a constructionist
perspective it was argued that bodies have no meaning until they are given
meaning, a perspective not compromised by currently available data. Descending
to the level of organs and organ functions, the theory applies as well, or even
better. Organs and bodies are instrumentalised (operationalised) to secure and consolidate familial, dyadic and/or
individualist agendas, however poorly defined, curricularly consistent or
mutually conflicting. This occurs at a gradient of centralising –
decentralising factual bodies as the sites of social significance (chapter 13).
Expanding on the classical constructionist perspective, the body represents a
medium through which the active doing and the active not-doing (IV.4) of sex shape the identities
that are ascribed to these performances. "Cultures", thus, determine how bodies
contribute to sexuality-as-praxis, and as
such inform sexuality-as-identity or sexuality-as-orientation discourses. 17.5 Locating
Significant Sex [up] [contents]
Following
from the previous observations on operationalisation, the activities that be
scheduled and pursued toward as well
as with the help of bodies acquire a
definition within collateral interest agendas and schedules. Within the so
created curriculum of possibilities
and probabilities, guiding principles are to direct the child toward gender
stereotypes, allosexual orientation, heterosexual orientation, and to coital
orientation (chapters 9, 8, 6). Cultures differ in their tenacity to effect
this end, but it is hypothesised that these four positively formulated
principles are either dealt with within the same compelling efficacy (Puerto
Rico for a convincing ideal type), or are collectively underrepresented in
factual pedagogical curricula (consider 20th century U.S. white
middle class), regardless of an obvious appeal to academic productivism. Chapter 6
on coitocentrism and coitality offers the perspective that a variety of factors
(e.g., age) renders it salient only in a carefully organised (age-graded)
interactive dimension or discursive curriculum. The child does not grow up to
meet one specific discursive truth about sexuality owing to some specific educational
effort; rather, (s)he grows up while manufacturing his / her own, perhaps in spite of such efforts (cf. §4.5.3),
perhaps not. The gender dimension, for instance, is actively engineered and
instrumentalised, curricularly (gradually) and continuously so, and in variable
degrees of opposition to established dominant ("adult") discourses. 17.6 Locating
"Sexual Behavior Identity": Cultural Self and Spaces between Construct and
Performance [up]
[contents]
Concluding
from §7.2.11, pedagogical practices are
capable of defining "sexual identities" on the basis of specific behaviours
rather than hypothetical scenarios. This relocates western discourses around
such "identities" as absolute (universal) entities. Throughout the project,
there have been arguments in classifying self-concepts as operational
(practice-based, pragmatic), or as characterised by a compromised
"operationalisation" potential. By this is understood the manner in which
images of the self are informed by images of the performing self. In other words, cultures differ in the
degree of dissociation or approximation of imagined (construed) and
actualisable (performed) sexuality/intimacy/erotics. In most cultures for which
data were collected, it is reasonable to assume that "developmental sexuality"
is less physically performative than it is verbally performative, and less
verbally performative than it is "cognitively performative". The "sexual self"
as performing self, thus, varies in the ways by which it acquires existence, as
well as its "developmental" relocalisation. 17.7 Construct and "Control": An Interpretation [up] [contents]
As
a result of the methodological choices made (see also §I.7 further on), the inevitable conclusion
reads that control of sexual behaviour is generated through the execution of
communications that narrow possibilities, or rather, direct probabilities. The
child is manoeuvred into a position that makes certain sexual agenda plausible,
yet, depending on formal or informal communications, optional and variably
feasible. This view reserves a high salience for the "operational" element in
sexual communications: how is and
should the thing be done? As
detailed in chapter 8.1, parents utilise
various discursive pedagogisms to operationalise preadult sexual behaviour
along a gradient from promotion to antagonism. Thus, it was concluded that
discourses, rooted in larger, structuring complexities, add up to developmental
sexologies producing the various pedagogical spaces that locate and legitimise
curricularising interventions. Moving into and out of these sexological spaces,
children themselves rework and recombine (fragmentary) discursive material to
curricular identities/roles that govern complementation, identification,
discomplementation and disidentification activities
as such. The localisation of control, authority, agency and power in this
interactive system depends on the continuous, subjective, situated
repositioning of the localiser. 17.8 The Segmental Hierarchy of Sex: Suggestions for
Further Exploration [up] [contents]
A
cross-cultural perspective on the formation of age based sexual and sexological
subcultures has not been offered previously. Various sections of the current
project offer the perspective that erotic societies are actively being
segmentalised ([vide chapters on coital
development, sexologies, verbal subculturing; also genital preparations, and primal scene, i.e. chs. 3, 6, 10, 13),
age based segments being governed by their own social principles and
discourses, and deserving their own sociology. A hypothetical schema to explain
the sexological orientation and agenda of peer subcultures on the basis of the
agenda of authority subcultures should receive further attention. These
contra-agendas would counteract authorial tendencies to limit the freedom of
social choice and social intercourse. Contemporary sociologists, having begun
to explore the heterosexual and gendered geography of school environments via
ethnographic accounts, might attempt a bicultural or non-Western approach.
These matters are important guidelines for school policies on education,
awareness and rapport; cross-cultural efforts, furthermore, provide an entry to
understanding these subcultures at a more fundamental level. Of course, a "grass-roots"
concepts of curricular segmentalism should be a priority issue. The question
is: how do children produce, lament or appreciate their segmental world? 17.9 Sexuality
and Sexologist [up] [contents]
During
the data collecting, it was tacitly assumed that sexology creates sexuality
which then re-creates sexologies. A reformulation of this (sexuality creates
sexology re-creating sexualities) was to some extent test-cased in the
Mead/Freedman controversy, Freedman suggesting that Mead in part operated from
personal agenda to incorrectly interpret Samoa adolescent sexuality, and was
"hoaxed" by informants (see Atlas
Volume under Samoa).
A comparatively similar example is the Money / Colapinto case (see Atlas Volume under Australia/Yolngu), which, I believe is entirely negotiable on this point (ibid.). Another case in which personal
interest may have biased ethnographic output is that of Lizot's alleged sexual
excursions with young Yanomamö. Outside the ethnological setting, developmental
sexologists appear to be likely objects for morality quests in general (Kinsey,
Bullough et al. / Reisman, Sandfort / Penthouse, Rind et al. / U.S. Congress),
providing an entry for a view on sexological cultures and academic identity. Please
note that the argument here is not in defence of any party. The case is that
most of these debates extend to the persona behind the thesis, which of course
is beside the current point. Still, how have, in these or other cases,
counterhegemonic (?) agenda contributed to coverage of preadult sexualities? In
general, how have arbitrary entries (consider §2.7) shaped academic performance on
the matter? 17.10 Sexology
and Culture [up]
[contents]
The collective of "cultural" paradigms defining "the
sexual" has a decisive impact on "developmental sexology". So much so, the construct
and the process of "doing developmental sexology" forms an object of study and
deconstruction in itself. The current project only fragmentarily addresses this
issue within historical and ethnographic academic writing (e.g., chapters 1,
2 and 16; §14.4;
appendices 1
and 2).
17.11 Constructionism and Activism [up]
[contents]
Contemporary
American constructionist-interactionist-performative ideologies of sexuality are
definitely inspired by, directed to, and legitimised by certain activist
agendas, all closely related to the concept of abuse of (legitimate or
fraudulent) hierarchies; these authors typically address "sexist" /
gynecomysic, "homophobic", and otherwise victimising, abusive performances.
Apparently normalising less "hegemonic", more "adult" sexual discourse, the
male adolescent (and increasingly "pre-adolescent") trajectory is characterised
by a culpable, unjust, abject and erroneous sexualism, to be corrected by the
pedagogical context in which they arise. While one may or may not identify with
these of other reformative, protectionist and accusatory agendas, the
unilateralism implied tends to compromise an open understanding of processes,
as well as non-political hypothesis testing. 17.12 Cultures
and Developments: Perspectives for Theoretical
Elaboration [up]
[contents]
The
currently available literature sensitises any discussion of sexual behaviour
development. Importantly, the application of developmental narratives warrants
further study, or perhaps a specific methodological attitude (appendix IV). [last revised] |