Postdevelopmental Sexualities: Don’t Bring the Kids

Paper delivered to the XVIth DGSS Conference, June 25-27, 2004, in Lüneburg, Germany [[1]]

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Diederik F. Janssen, MD (diederikjanssen@gmail.com)

Nijmegen, the Netherlands

“For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” ([2])

ABSTRACT. This paper is concerned with contemporary, “postmodern” localisations of “sexual” “development”. A collage of recent perspectives and studies is offered in sketching contemporary theoretical currency in developmental sexology. Countercurrently, the exploration is set to demonstrate that while such localisations reflect on the performances of an academic elite, the case for a child-centred or child-structured account is problematised by a trans-disciplinary (and public) hesitation to ground such an account, leaving theoretical proceedings unsupported. This situation both strains and fuels postmodern theorising of early erotics. A discussion of the “post-modernisation” of Simon and Gagnon “script” theory is followed by a brief sightseeing tour to five areas of attention for contemporary developmental sexologists.

“New” and Newly Crossbred Developmental Sexologies

Recently, William Simon identified his momentous Sexual Conduct (1973) as a ‘prematurely postmodern’ study engaged in an “anti-essentialist formulation for approaching sexualities”. Co-author John Gagnon elaborates their constructionist “script” approach as follows:

 “Human development becomes the constant shuffling of possibilities as individuals face novel demands on adaptation. The idea that there is a single causal pathway from childhood to adulthood (e.g. as the explanation of sexual preference) seemed a cultural prejudice toward continuity. This desire for continuity in the explanation of the human life course remains prevalent both in the scientific construction of biographies as well in the stories that individuals tell about how they came to be what they are”[3].

Indeed, a range of stirrings within the social sciences has in recent decades been reissuing the academic performance of “childhood” and “sexuality”. Just naming them is exciting: postmodernity, post-Enlightenment, poststructuralism, anti-developmentalism, critical pedagogy... This discussion will offer a try at the containment of sexual development from within these ramifications commonly understood collectively as the “postmodern condition”[4] now part of the contemporary academic Alltag. Such postmodernity (here taken as to be versed contra universalism, regularity, rationalism, nomotheticism, structurality, foundationalism, evolutionism, idealism, developmentalism), it has been posited, has generally invited a clarification of the ‘microgeographies’ and ‘localities’ of ‘developments’ and ‘sexualities’ as interdigitating collections of performances, spaces and discourses; hypothetically, therefore, this would have to hold true for ‘sexual development’[5], as it does for the entire realms of human learning and sexual endeavour[6].

My thesis, however, will be that while postmodernity, erotics and childhood do interbreed as dyads in an emergent, and increasingly trans-disciplinary, playground, they might not do so as a triad. Or rather, that while they might interbreed productively in contemplative efforts, they do not on the empirical and implementation side.

In a longer version of this presentation, and in the entirety of a web-based project I have been running for a year[7], I set out to look at contemporary academic manoeuvring in exploration of what I have tentatively phrased post-developmental sexology, ideally connoting an ongoing reconsideration of ‘structural’ and ‘modern’ formulations of erotic trajectories. In postmodern ontologies, for instance, individual trajectories often are juxtaposed versus ‘curricula’, that is to say, conglomerates of practices that embody and contain eventual idiosyncratic trajectories. Our null hypothesis, thus, reads that in a self-congratulating postmodern era such ‘trajectories’ would begin to appear to us as ‘postdevelopmental’, that is, they would succeed in emancipating from curricula insofar as these in the past have been uncompromisingly disciplining in terms of chronology, content and governance.

A more specific problem in our present discussion will be what such sexology would do for “the”[8], or any, child’s perspective. Even here, we should bear in mind that the term “child-centeredness” historically “balances on many layers of complex and sometimes contradictory meanings that have been forged over the years by competing interest groups, each appropriating the term and, adding to and taking away from the existing meaning, moulding it to their own purposes”[9].

In the remaining time, I would like to briefly review the ‘postmodernization’ of traditional script theory, followed by a brief tour around a number of test grounds pertaining to the prepubertal case of intimacy development. Predominantly referring to Anglo-Saxon literature, I will mainly address the voice of an American and British elite academic forum.

Preliminarily we might note that in recent days self-critical and self-aware ramifications of social life have fostered an ongoing cross-disciplinarisation of matters that, incidentally, are increasingly cross-bred thematically as well. As Middleton argues, while negotiating imaginable “impasses”[10] of negativism, and among alternative imperatives, we could “let neo-Marxist and postmodern and poststructural theories “rub against each other” ”[11]. Likewise, Stein[12] argues for a blending of sociological and cultural analysis that combine insights of psychoanalysis, symbolic interactionism, and discourse analysis that help focus on “the cultural scenarios that make sexual practices possible in culture”. Others, including Peter Redman (writing about boyhood masculinities) and Steven Angelides[13] (addressing paedophilia as a “cultural panic”), join this call by advocating fusions of constructionist and psychodynamic theorizing of the broad terrain of growing up sexually.

Concluding, there is considerable theoretical eclecticism, in terms of hybridization of entry styles, mixing different perspectives, and in de- and re-contextualizing conventional limitations of approach. How is our “script” taking this toll?

Postmodernised Scripts (?)[14]

One of many species of developmental sexology, Gagnon and Simon’s script theory is widely adopted in discussions of the sexual curriculum in childhood, yet it is hardly studied in this age group (an overview of studies is found in GUS, Vol. II, p41). In 1981, DeLamater[15] even offered a simplification of script theory advocating the idea that children “are unaware of the sexual significance” (emph. added) of behaviours later to be recognised as “sexual”. Early constructionists thus minimised children’s active participation in their “development”, that is, practices other than reception and assimilation of the available propaganda. Moreover, they normalised some “adult” case of sexological signification. Judging from a 1984 article, for instance, it appears that Simon and Gagnon normalised (or at least failed to point out the constructedness of) an adult, “societal”, “real” concept of “true”, “actual”, “manifest”, “explicit” “sexuality” that in an essential sense would escape “the” developing subject in his “childhood”.

In more contemporaneous articles[16], however, the authors comment on a revolutionary emancipation of Performance in relation to Curriculum, writing, “Lifecycle stages once appeared to specify behaviour; now commitment to behaviour increasingly specifies one’s life-cycle stage”. Whittier and Simon’s (2001) discussion of individuals’ “personal sexual culture” furthermore issues the concept of “intrapsychic scripting”, demonstrated by “the exhibition of several major domains of meaning as they are contained in the subjects’ reports of their sexuality”. Simon had previously argued for a trichotomy of texts including cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts. Illustratively, despite this imminent bankruptcy of independent stages, the authors[17] continued to write about “life cycles” textually ordered by stage-stratifications in terms of institutionally and biologically sanctioned “transitions”.

Contemporary authors indeed argue that it is essential to consider the ways in which individuals “construct a sense of themselves as sexual beings”[18]. Gender, for instance, is not so much a construed, but a negotiated performance in which the child represents an assertive and productive agent, however choosing from available options. Gender appears to be renegotiated and relocated through “a cycle of practice”[19]. For neo-constructionists, childhood “exists as a type of performance space or ‘cultural geography’ in which various images and identities are enacted”[20]. Constructionists describe, for instance, “how pubertal events (menarche, breast development, shaving, voice change, weight gain) evoke cultural meanings about gender and gendered bodies that adolescents [!] then use to construct personal meaning and sexual subjectivity”[21]. Research suggests that individual scripts are in fact personal modifications of subcultural scripts. Exploring developmental ghetto sexual identities, one study[22] found that girls had to “negotiate the dominant [stereotypical black, “ghetto”] sexual script and their own personal narrative to create personal and social equilibrium”. Using Edwards’ theory on “script formulations”, it could be argued that “[d]iscourse does not simply reflect or express ready-made cognitive schemas; rather, scripts are actively constructed in interactions through which people ‘work up’ events as scripted (or as breaches of scripts), and this ‘script talk’ is analysable in its own right”[23]. Scripts, thus, do not create (sexuality), they get created, as such. This specification of “performative sexualities” reinvents essentialist and monolithic notions such as sexual “learning”, “informing”, “thinking”, “knowing”, “perceiving” and “understanding”[24], “theorising” (as in psychodynamic theory), and so on. “Scripts”, in short, have been externalised as “discourses”, “scenes” and, abstractly, “spaces” in which one is to manoeuvre and carve particular routes to a variable degree inspired by established routes that are privately construed as such (as routes, as established) in micro-contextual interactions. We now have hierarchies of scripts, and personal ways of navigating these hierarchies. Concluding, so much for “the” child and “the” script.

Ergo, as Carpenter (1995) has verbalised, contemporary register posits that

“[…] it is through the manipulation, rejection and re-creation of their cultural world that young people simultaneously search for and validate their voice and so situate themselves culturally”.

While this all makes for good reading, studies in this genre addressing children are few in number. A recent, predominantly British, school of researchers that, taking a performative-interactionist approach, has recently localised school environments as the central arenas in which sexualities “have their go” in the form of positioning and oppositioning, and through the agonism and antagonism of talk and physical manoeuvring. This line of semi-participant ethnography has been elaborated since the early 1980s by many scholars[25] (scheduled for release this year is a book about “Junior Sexualities” by Emma Renold, advertised as to clarify “children’s understandings of their own sexualities”). Variably remote from the psychological realm, sexualities here are operationalised as public and semi-public verbal and gestural performances, as discursive, and as embedded in-group dynamics. This line of research, although biased by feminist, anti-harassment, and anti-homophobia agenda, provides an alternative to script theory, or rather, it evades the moral impossibilities associated with any method of closing in on the early cognitive script, a problem routinely lamented by self-addressed ‘developmental sexologist’ Prof. John Money. An illustrative fact, Money, certainly after his pioneering 1960s, contributed few insights into ‘lovemap formation’ as it occurs in children (which he postulated), beside the wealth of clinical, retrospective, and culture-critical arguments.

For the remainder of this talk, allow me to briefly hint at empirical proceedings in five thematic test grounds. For the sake of brevity, these emerge from a more general discussion of the problems of developmental psychology[26], and from a more philosophically/historically inclined elaboration of ‘postmodern’ developments / pedagogies / sexualities (in terms of consensus, dialogue, exchange).They include: Ontogenetic ‘Subjectivities; Hi/Stories; Knowledge Regimens, Risk Curricula, and Problem Categories; Gazes, Pacing and Agency; and lastly a note on “New” Pedagogies and Absences.

1. Ontogenetic ‘Subjectivities’

As illustrated by Broude’s overview in 1981 (the title of which is tale-telling: The cultural management of sexuality), the main theoretical position with respect to pre-institutional sexualities taken by cross-culturalists used to be an essentialist structuralist one, mostly departing from psychodynamic ontogenetics. This structuralist hegemony has not succeeded in incorporating an idea of emergent erotic individuality; in fact, it prescribed analysis of “patterns”, “structures” and “inculcated traits” as “cultural”. However, in the various niches of contemporary academia, there seems to exist a blooming transdisciplinary agenda for “developmental subjectivities”[27] as gendered, embodied and desiring. This case for rethinking Selfhoods will be biased by what C. L. Carr (1999) identifies as the range of “rigid, synthetic, and fuzzy” notions of sexual ontology (and we might read: ontogenetics) encountered in the academic scene. From Carr’s instructive overview it may seem that this range of ontologies (essentialist, constructionist and anarchist) is providing a playground for eclecticists. Something of a child’s perspective, however, seems to be underrepresented: the performance of intimacies developing (rather than of being developed) is virtually unstudied in what would be a most interesting period in life (see Kelle, 2001 for a note on the child as developmentalist). Typically, as illustrated by a 2004 article[28], when posed to adolescents, this question is reduced to a simplex chronological binary of being “too-early” or “too-late”. Nevertheless there has been a growing concern for “classroom”, “playground” and “dinner table” subjectivities, as studies with adolescent subjects point out. The case for “performative” subjectivities is marked, and this turn will probably contribute to a more comprehensive coverage in the near future.

2. Hi/Stories

Generally, postmodern historians and philosophers question the representation of history and cultural identities: history as “what ‘really’ happened” (external to representation or mediation) vs. history as a “narrative of what happened” with a point of view and cultural/ideological interests. History requires representation, mediation, in narrative, a story-form encoded as historical. This central tenet is immediately transferable to the archives of human trajectories, the “childhoods”. We are looking for local and explicitly contingent hi/stories, well aware of the politics: who can write? for whom? from what standpoint? Plummer[29], examining the making of “sexual stories” from a symbolic interactionist perspective, implied that children are gradually introduced to a culture characterised by a “recent exponential multiplication of [sexual] narratives”, including family, emotional, representational, bodily, gender, erotic, and identity genres. In reality, studies of these stories (addressing ownership, authorship, performance) are sparse as yet, in any case as far as childhood is concerned[30]. As for another peculiarity, while autobiographical material about ´queer´ and gender-disordered childhoods are multiplying in secondary literature, few accounts are available about clinically relevant erotic orientations.

3. Knowledge Regimens, Risk Curricula, and Problem Categories

Much scholarship today issues the interconnectedness of knowledge regulation curricula, ‘risk’ curricula, and the condition of the developmental body[31]. As it turns out, modernist constructions of childhood stem from the dichotomization of innocence and corruption, the latter being synonymous with knowledge[32] or not far from it. Van Manen observes how “knowledge of and access to the cultural secrets of adult life--such as mature erotic knowledge and sexual practices [etc.] become main criteria by which childhood is defined”[33]. This lack of knowledge is subjectified, and used to legitimise a protection-centred[34], reactionist (rather than agonistic) pedagogical bureaucracy, engineering age-stratifying ´knowledge wars´[35]. Note that this is occurring in spite of disappointingly few insights to the subjective autobiographical decursus of ‘innocence’[36]. Filling the gap, authors such as Corteen and Scraton[37] have argued how “innocence” would be “manufactured”, through practices which, as Reynolds[38]has noted, may be part of a wider disempowering objectification agenda.

Abstractly, the concept of innocence invites an analysis of three interlocked procedures, namely transition, transgression and transmission. The contemporary reappraisal of “innocence” can hardly avoid addressing a deeply ingrained triadic scheme composed of inevitable trauma, inevitable knowledge and inevitable “sexuality”, the basic ingredients of psychodynamic theory. Since S. Freud appreciation natural categories and normal structures of the familial-societal complex in conflict with what would be man’s psychic ultrastructure, an inevitable functional structure has been guiding clinical truths as well as academic classificationism. As argued in GUS, age-stratified distributions of sex-as-science translate to the compartimentalisation and curricularisation of sex, processes, as Michel Foucault observed, readily infused by nosological ramifications (that’s nosology, the systematic classification of diseases).

Over the course of two decades, the whole matter has taken on a rather problematic character: the increasing need for truths and their institutional production and management, against the background of the bankruptcy of its very essences. Contra post-modern activism, today we see feverish effort to categorise and diagnose all ingredients of psychodynamic heritage, still intimately joined (knowledge -trauma - sexuality). We now hear about “preadolescent predators”, with “sexual behaviour problems”, as documented by the Child Sexual Behaviour Inventory, an instrument –tipped as the clinical “bible”– solely invented to “diagnose” abusive experiences. Illustratively, since the early 1980s I counted no less than 90 studies providing numeric and statistical impetus to the concept of “reactive sexual behaviour” in prepubertal children, thought of as “symptomatic” of “abusive” experiences.

Among the ‘hip’ appears to be not the deconstruction of educational and clinical praxis as an exercise of restraint (= control = arbitrary = “bad”) but the “exposure” (outing) of imminent subversion of the status quo, a thesis elaborated by a number of authors including Thorogood[39]. Even acts of rendering “alternative” forms of experience valid and visible simultaneously also construct them as “sites for monitoring and regulation, as the objects of disciplinary power”. Thus, “[l]iberal pluralist “empowerment” models of sex education have the unintended consequence of producing micro-techniques of power and are not unequivocally liberating or resisting”[40]. Not cited by Thorogood, Monk[41] previously had set out to demonstrate how sex education programmes are increasingly “deployed to govern [teenage] sexuality” by problematising its interactional ontology.

So in sum, (1) we seem to have ended up with more politicised knowledge, more risks, and more categories; (2) children’s perceptions and contestations of these issues are hardly ever considered.

4. Gazes, Pacing and Agency

In GUS I have tentatively classified four contemporary gazes of the child as the “incestuous” gaze (psychoanalysis), the “patriarch” gaze (feminism), the “paedophilic” gaze (sociology, forensic psychiatry), and the (male) “peer” (though sexist, heterosexist, objectifying, etc.) gaze[42]. I concluded that these constituted a “gaze curriculum” that allegedly proves traumatic from normative to perverse pole. The crucial issue of “being gazed at”, meanwhile, has been underrepresented in academic discourse, as well as being heavily politicised, until recently; the masculine side appears to be neglected as well. More broadly speaking, the literature is predominantly geared toward ‘exposing’ (‘outing’, ‘naming/shaming’) the scopic environments of the child, not toward children (ideas most prominently developed in James Kincaid and in Chris Jenks). Again, a child’s eye perspective appears to be peripheral in these writings. This articulates badly, conversely, with a related component of postmodern sexologies, which is agency: for, theoretically, “Where the modern child was seen as dependent upon varying levels of adult attention, supervision, and protection, the postmodern child is more often seen as capable of dealing independently with complex issues presented in the media and encountered in the world”[43]. Few studies substantiate the idea that this independency is forthcoming in the area of erotic self-determination, as judged from the ongoing legal cocooning of children, within evermore ‘risky’ (for instance digital) environments. A pioneer of the mentioned ethnographic approach, Barry Thorne[44]argued that the (re-)issuing of children’s agency is a complex task; today, this may have become more “complex”. One factor may be that the whole notion of erotic aptitude seems to be interlocked in increasingly hard to negotiate notions of pacing, timing, ‘hurriedness’, and ‘inappropriate’ introductions, whether ‘cultural’ or incidental in nature.

5. “New” Pedagogies and Absences

A range of people and institutions in the course of the late 20th century have identified themselves with “anti-authoritarian”, “democratic”^[45], “radical”, “critical”, “feminist”, and “queer”^[46] agenda, that is, each activist motive fostered a theoretical programme implying an ontogenetic rationale and pedagogical agenda. Among the broad claims, these people seek to subvert essentialised identities, normalities and hierarchies, primarily in institutional-scholastic settings. In spite of these initiatives, and apart from the new dialectic opportunities they propagate[47], many researchers point out that there is a progressively oppressive industry of body surveillance involved in primary education. For instance, in a series of articles Alison Jones^[48] describes the novel curriculum of self-surveillance and the production of “safety” in the management of New Zealand primary school body proximities. A score of authors suggests the early touch curriculum in the US is likewise changing its face^[49], with potential pleasures of both parties “erased”. This may not prove a very specific culture trait. In England, according to Skelton^[50] and Australia, according to Sumsion^[51], too, male teachers have come to represent an a priori problematic factor in educational settings. Interestingly, all these authors observed the teachers’ side, not the children’s. Concurrently, US mainstream ethics apparently allow ‘abstinence’ governed curricula as elementary reflections on human essentials: Curricula of Risk Management policing Curricula of Risk Behaviour. Meanwhile, sexual abuse prevention programmes are hardly postmodern: they propagandise binary normative notions of touch, with a privileging of the “no” option and eradication of in-between and hybrid realities. Obviously, the production of Not-doing, of preliminalities, anticipations and ‘risks’ (‘virginities’, no-touch, red flag people) is a fruitful yet badly neglected research object in sexology[52].

Postmodernist entries to pre-institutional sexuality can at times be distinctly emancipating and interventionalist[53]. The feminist case for authentic “girlhoods” has proven some instrumentality in observing, localising, penetrating, conserving, deconstructing, imagining, and saving such ’hoods; to consolidate such ventures, a number of authors have issued how ‘the child’ would be “a feminist issue”. What impresses the unsuspecting reader is the degree of essentialism involved in these writings. In general, D. Carr[54] argues that conceptions of moral formation have been “inherently normative—precisely, more evaluative than descriptive—”. The new pedagogies, thus, may prove too self-centred, too interventionalist, too universalist and too evaluative to forge truly honest micro­accounts of emerging sexualities.

Summarising Arguments

In matters concerning developmental sexology, the usual context for writing about “postmodernities” is, paradoxically enough, that of an era in which children in general are seen to be trapped in particular, inescapable new kinds of passive reception or “cultural” immersion, in terms of risk discourses (Valerie Walkerdine), deprivation with regard to normative structure (Kay Hymowitz)[55], recruitment in nostalgia projects (Chris Jenks[56]) and in otherwise regimental ‘cultures’ (James Kincaid). This brand of culture-critique in itself is not very hopeful; it is not very post-modern either.

However it remains possible to look at the instruments of an enduring modern regimen that serves to align, civilise and uniformise human pathways, possibilities and imminent originality. In the expectation of a major event on matters next year[57], I do not claim that erotic authenticity is anywhere likely or attainable a concept. I do think, however, that when it comes to ‘American’ Eros, there has been an increased sensitivity regarding any form of dissent (if only ‘developmental’), and that such vigilance is progressively vandalising even the developments formerly contained as ‘essential’, ‘likely’, ‘natural’, ‘explicable’, ‘anticipating’, ‘entitled’ and ‘important’. What remains is an unworkable situation for ‘development’, as an action and as a passion.

A perspective proposed by many including Simon and Gagnon, post-industrial contexts would be fading out on curricular categories. In my view, however, the essence of sexological cultures worldwide, with gender and other dichotomies eroding, seems increasingly tied up to curricular status quo (i.e., age stratification), and as far as I am concerned today this is seen to run deeper discursively than gender configurations (a point I like to refine in future elaborations). To counterbalance ongoing medico-legal encroaching on children’s life spaces (in terms of ‘prevention’, ‘awareness’, and ‘health promotion’), some humanistic implications of my reviewing can nonetheless be listed in brief (for someone at home in contemporary literature it will seem obvious that today these are remote from substantial implementation):

• With regard to ontological status, one imagines a de-privileging of adult sexualities as norm, normal and normative, that is, a reconsideration of the reductionism implied in mainstream “development” stories. In issues addressed with the term ‘sexuality’, the discursively non-developable seems to be obscured by the discursively developable and the developable reduced to its developing. In other words, “the boy is just being curious, of course this will pass over when he’s satisfied, don’t worry about it too much”;
• As is concerned functional-structural status, one observes the need for deconstructionist approaches to pre-adult sexualities when propagandised as “necessary”, “essential”, “healthy”, “critical”, “at risk”, “plausible”, “contributory”, and, indeed, “developmental” (I leave out more horrendous formulations like “sexual learning”);
• Obviously the foregoing necessitates a reassignment of methodological priority to privilege recognition of agency, performance and subjectivities;
• Thematically, study needs to appreciate the ways in which Curricula might be contested, adapted and digested (rather than internalised). A rather well explored topic is that of the development / construction of “variant” orientation within alleged “variant-phobic” or “normalist” environments (e.g., “homosexuality” within U.S. “homophobic” and “heterosexist” society). A rather unexplored theme is that of “deviate” orientation within “deviance-hostile” environments (e.g., “paedophilia” within U.S. “abuse culture” [Kincaid]). Both the fact that such studies are apparently not appreciated or funded, and the data they might generate, are dramatically and immediately “culture”-identifying, and of obvious interest to constructionists. In identifying and mapping the cultural manufacture of normalities, study needs to be directed to these nonnormative or atypical trajectories, as well as to the atypical in not so institutionally atypical trajectories.

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