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Age Trouble
Diederik F. Janssen, MD, BA
December 2005
Unpublished reflection.
[download me in PDF]
In this article I offer a
poststructural perspective on paedophilia. I situate this “para”philia in the
notion of its “troubling” properties, or potential for destabilisation and
denormalisation of categories normally “assumed” and “acknowledged” in the
debates over sexual abuse: the erotic, age, and the individual. As a
multi-axial problem, paedophilia is an interesting “edge case” for
poststructural theory, inviting a rubbing together of queer theory,
postdevelopmental psychology, and critical ethnography. In this article I
explore the problematic and bluntly absent status of such rubbing. I argue
that paedophilia has come to be manoeuvred outside the empiricist model, and
that a poststructural view is therefore productive. Age trouble
parasitizes on the notion of performativity in Judith Butler’s pivotal work Gender
Trouble (1990) as applied to identitarian concepts of life phases.
KEYWORDS: paedophilia; paraphilia; childhood sexuality; activism; queer
theory; poststructuralism; postdevelopmental psychology; Judith Butler;
Michel Foucault
This
text is about a methodological impasse in child sexual abuse research, an
impasse which renders a critical perspective on matters and processes both
impossible and unworkably suspect. More interestingly, I think, is the
hypothesis that this casus, dark and heavy as it is, articulates problems at
a larger radius, problems that have to do with shifting power paradigms
(gender, age), the pretences of welfare society, civil entitlement, the Great
Necessary Beast of pedagogy, and, at a very basic level, the tragic sides of truth
culture. To me these are all very interesting subjects, and it is with
these in mind that I turn to this ultimate area of cultural convergence.
Although
this discussion is (as observed) unworkably suspect, I will try to outline
how one might parasitize on the obvious successes of the queer movement.
First I outline (twice) how in child sexual abuse matters, the empirical
moment was lost to follow up, how it became impossible and unproductive to
take empirical data seriously. Secondly, I hint at an adaptation of queer
perspectives on gender as they inform a deconstruction of this other
overdetermined demographic: age. The implications of this are test-cased
twice¾first, on the twin doctrine of a “paedophilic” movement/identity
that came to be potentialised in the last quarter of the West-European 20th
century; secondly, on the tandem fixture of “the” sexually abused child, as
it became increasingly “recognised” and “known” (and dare I add, assumed).
Inclusiveness of age-disparateness in sexology has in the past
provoked opposition from a culture of fundamentalists who wish to
un-acknowledge the difference between analysis and apology. This is not to
say of course that analysis can ever be virginal of political intention.
However, one might care to observe that critics in paedophilia studies are
commonly held to be “apologists” to the extent that exercising any elementary
level of critique is considered taking up a renegade advocacy role (e.g.
Lord, 2003). This diagnoses paedophilia’s special status among the
“disorders”, “plights”, “causes” and “identities” it is routinely grouped
with: a “para” to the otherwise undefined psychocultural performance of
“philia”.
Paedophilia’s place in cultural taxonomies is important since such a
localisation helps situating the at times absurd manoeuvring of activists to
sell their position as one supported by what they take to be scientific
evidentiality. In the U.S. (obviously the epicentre of post-1970 global
rhetoric over what came to be addressed as “sexual abuse”), this
evidentialism informs a well-funded pseudo-secular forum whose moral
curriculum has come to rely heavily on research, myth-busting “facts”, and
stomach-upsetting “truths”. The courageous counter-evidential movement,
however, although it provokes hilarious self-compromising manoeuvres by the
Evidential Front, has major limitations.
Allow me to illustrate. In late September 2005, Haworth Press Inc.,
after announcing the cancellation of a promising edited monograph on “Greek
Homosexualities”, eventually decided to proceed with publication
conditional to throwing out a politically inclined contribution by Bruce
Rind. In an early press release, Haworth’s Rebecca
Browne offered the (too euphemistically phrased) explanation that the Rind
chapter “could be interpreted as advocating adult and adolescent sexuality”.[1]
My interpretation of this event is that the ban call (claimed by the
arch-conservative WorldNetDaily.com in
an apparent attempt to market a book written by its Managing Editor and
“whistleblower” David Kupelian)[2]
was occasioned more by Rind’s decade-long appeal to empiricism, rather than
by the content of his advocacy per se. Indeed this claim is suspect,
where he offers “An Integration of Cross-Cultural, Cross-Species, and
Empirical Data”. In his preview abstract he proposed to knit together “a vast
array of cross-cultural data”, “a wealth of cross-species data with important
parallels”, to argue that what he calls pederasty, contra “highly inadequate”
feminist and psychiatric models,
“can benefit the
adolescent when practiced according to the ancient Greek form”.[3]
This
apparently evolutionist, positivist, functionalist, eclectic, and above all
naive synthetic-comparativist agenda justifiably invites criticism, since it
seems to rehearse the entire history of outmoded anthropological models right
down to the 19th century armchair evolutionists. Beneficence,
adolescence, praxis and formality are crucially disparate foci when comparing
“the” Greek (a lot of controversy even then) and “us”. In any case Rind’s
grasp of “Greek Homosexuality” registers with politically aggressive parties
that defend a truth against what they recognise as rival truth-claims. “Woe
unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light,
and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
(Isaiah 5:20).
However this debate seems to deny some thirty years of
poststructural thoughts on sexuality, from which it can be argued that
“paedophilia” is a textbook example of Foucaultian discourse formation, a
contemporary crux of policing “too young” and “significantly older” bodies as
such, especially through a rhetorical pretence of abuse “realities”,
linear models of cultural victimhood, binary meritocratic evaluations
(loss/benefit), comparable and reclaimable histories down to the proto-human,
mistaken feminisms, and evidential meta-reviews. Rind, in an unfortunately
persistent way, joins a substantialist position that has been elaborated by
the marketing orgy of therapy and survivor culture, a steady propaganda of
“fact sheets” and “evidence based” psychiatry, the cultural domain’s
expectable appropriation of grim plots and inescapable sufferings[4], and the international
industry of child rights.
The ease with which this mainstreamed case is versed against positivistic
apologists, from grandpa Edward Brongersma (1990) to more recent work, is
only characteristic of a science culture that clings to a reductionist
paradigm of truth, a paradigm that has received duly severe criticism in
social science. The popular traumatology of paedophilia[6], I would argue, is one of
many enduring fictions that hurt the most where and when the assumption is
made that its effects are or can be rooted in a pedagogical routine
vis-à-vis which there would be, empirically and evidentially, no legitimate
possibility of dissent. Please, please note that I am saying this from what
can be called a hard (as opposed to weak) constructionist
framework, which considers fictional all opportune claims to non-contingency.
Fictions are the fabric of the good life, not the lamentable or avoidable
delusions that put it in jeopardy.
Now, evidentialists are numerists who pride themselves on the
significant and the generalizable, but they shy away from process, context and
exception. This is all too well known in the more negotiable areas of human
interest. The fact that we live in an evidentialist culture in which
individuals are policed by the “generally true” has led apologists to opt for
contestation of evidence, rather than an analysis of the micro-cultures that
invite, produce and digest pedagogically hegemonic routines as scientifically
sound protocols. In other words, counter-evidentialism in paedophilia
activism neglects the opportunity to engage in a critical ethnography of
“sexual abuse” as a contemporary social plot. More specifically,
evidentialists deprive themselves of an ethnomethodology of sexual
abuse, focussing on the actual, real-time, moment-to-moment re/production of
pedagogical truisms. With this, they are depriving themselves of what Western
society has been depriving itself of for a quarter of a century (and I mean
to say that this has been more of a project than of blindness). The question
is not why what is a priori called “abusive” is actually “beneficial”
in some cases, but why it so sporadically escapes the victim discourse, and
why this discourse is so successful in effecting real, lasting symptoms.
The assumptive regimen of truth obviously includes Rind’s oeuvre which
is premised on the idea of incontrovertible contra-evidence. Over the past
decades this routine has been consolidated by legal imperatives that make it
seem impossible not to partake in hegemonic truth-abiding. And indeed a 1998
writing first-authored by Rind has invited an epoch-making and truly
alienating response by both the American Psychological Association and the
U.S. Senate.[7]
Again, in my view, this mainstream register informs a politics over truth,
but bizarrely up to the point that the truth is said not to be able to handle
a dialectic model of controversy. This officially ended the scientific era of
paedophilia by American definitions (an era which de facto had been closed
after the 1980s) and this opens up the way for alternative paradigms of
research.
Since
the foregoing critique strikes me as pivotal, and since it seems to me that I
cannot afford to be mistaken here, allow me to deliver it in another way.
If we
are to use ethnology (as Rind does), we might say that the ethnohistorical
standard of child betrothal and age disparate cohabitation coinciding which a
girl’s first menstruation (Janssen, 2003, I, passim) has been replaced
by consent-based legislation (e.g. Bullough, 2005) which obviously operates
under ethical imperatives other than that of the visible body, the lineage or
the tribe. The menarcheal body, as that of the warrior, which used to be
either a cosmologically accomplished or cosmologically compromised body, became
the experiential object, in fact an effect if not, indeed, the
product of expert surveillance and biomedical routine. The patrilinear
and gerontocratic jurisdiction over the specific bodies and acts of specific
initiates is now a medicolegal consensus over what “the child” needs, thinks,
feels and wants. This “any child” is an invention, a necessary and
necessitating fiction.
The
measurability of “the child” as such historically coincides with the
measurability of experiential sex (Janssen, 2005d). Developmental
psychology has produced a textual order in which “childhood experiences” (of
sexuality, of abusive sexuality) are held to be measurable, preferably by
retrospective clinical questionnaires, extramural follow-up, and strategic
parental monitoring. Memories, also, are held to be referential (other than
mythopoetic). If anything, this measurability is the key pretence of American
sexology (other than in the ancestral German Sexualwissenschaften,
where the pretence was rather an analytic one).
The
problem here is of course that this industry of objectivity is bound to
methodological problems instantiated by its technological imperatives and
discursive embedding in the society it aims to rationalise. As the late
Foucault has argued, the apparatus of knowledge is coterminous with and
generic of its project, its micro-praxis and its referents, as it
manufactures its own plot. As others have confirmed, a lot of discursive
investments are productive of that what they speak of. The
quarter-of-a-century corpus of literature on child sexual abuse seems to be,
if anything, the pivotal test case for this Foucaultian rendering of “the
sexual” (he himself provoked angry feminist commentary on his dealings with
this very subject).[8]
Question is, how can we measure what is immanent to its being measured?
For
some, this anti-positivist framework for what seems to be the holiest of
testing grounds for “our” postfeminist morality, “egalitarianism”, will be
unthinkable, and, it must be said, this unthinkability possibly is the most
profitable and for some in fact economically necessary option.
If we are going to hunt after reality here, we might want to invest
some stamina in the thesis that “an experience”, however neurophysiologically
and experientially “real”, emerges within a biographically realised,
narratively accomplished and performance-based flux of events the assessment
of which is the terrain not that of the clinician, but of the culture critic.
This may include the critical ethnographer, the ethnomethodologist and
(per Foucault) the social genealogist (consider Haug, 2001). As is
well-realised in the scene, child sexual abuse is exceptionally well
researchable by numeric survey, but resists critical ethnographic inquiry
(Janssen, 2003, II, ch.14). Illustratively, “paedophilia”, an archetypically
betwixt-and-between creation born from 20th-century Euro-American
sexual politics, miraculously proves to be a non-topic in anthropology
departments, notwithstanding the discipline’s once pivotal “incest” fixture
and elaborate post-1970 interest in local “homosexualities” and “Other” (e.g.
trans-) erotics. Also, while critiques of developmental psychologists rarely
comment on sex, queer theorists rarely address the issue of social age stratification.
If they do, they lament that “confused” or confusing public digestion of
paedophilia is threatening the civil ascent of the queer.
Here we need to observe that we have a clinical hegemony only
because we have a social scientific silence.
The
problem is this: as much as one cannot assess the psychohistorian’s
allegations of pedagogy’s historically ubiquitous “sexual abusiveness” (e.g.
deMause, 1991) without an avoidance of evolutionist moral centrisms, we
cannot begin to assess the status and corollaries of sexual abuse incidents
without referring to a culture of ubiquitous sexual abuse rhetoric, a
“culture of child molesting” as Kincaid (1998) brilliantly observed. Why this
culture, this paradigm (Satter, 2003)? What decades of numeric and meta-analytic
surveys fail to express is the cultural necessity, the microcontextual
dynamics, and the plot’s social dialectic, the status of which is so
obviously ethnohistorically contingent, that it is almost madness not to
centralise it as such.
Now, what
has been happening in the past 25 years is a frenzied cross-numerification of
demographic contingencies and parameters (age difference, victim
gender, victim-molester affiliation, disclosure modus, ethnicity, maternal
support, and so on), without a reflection on the imperativeness of moral
verdict, its immanence in the process of its genesis, the rooted nature of
research and of researchers (funding, publication, careers, institutions),
and the cultural impossibility to address a procedurally non-judgmental
view other than as such: a morally impossible critique of moral
necessity. This, then, may diagnose the impasse of contemporary sexology (as
of pedagogy), which very definitely is a perennial one: the evasion of a
critical ethnographic responsibility in the face of massive moral consensus,
the neglect to dig deep into its mythopoetic moments, into its real tales,
into how its workings work.
Parasitizing on Judith Butler, the very suggestion of
non-traumatic reception of paedophilia amounts to “age trouble” insofar as it
problematises notions of “natural” age stratification. This notion is a
matter of irritation: it itches the great tragic moment of the West, where
the “who” of tribal society is replaced by the “how” of categorical science. Who
(the person, the context, the charisma) turns to how (medicolegal
administration, pop psychology, the demographic). “How” is this tragic?
Because it bypasses and dividuates (indeed: calculates) the one
thing that it promised to keep intact: the individual. As an academic agenda,
age trouble means that we might look whether we can do with age what Butler
does with gender.
For this, we need a critical ethnography of young sexualities. The
grounding work for this was delivered in a book by Gubrium and Buckholdt
(1977, as cited in Janssen, 2005c) which however notably left out
the question of psychosexual maturity. Taking a performative stance on
development, the authors argue that maturity is less a result of “social
negotiation and accomplishment” than immanent in the processes that occasion
the claim of such as result. Current ethnographic research indeed points out
that children continuously negotiate their maturation status, which is always
under threat and never established. When I say “always under threat” I do
mean to say that a paedophilic encounter (in the post-industrial West) is
just this: yet another threat to unitary and hegemonic notions of maturity.
This, in my estimation, is not a naturalisation by trauma (as may be argued),
but a queering of its contingencies.
This is important: the notion of trauma is exceptionalising and
exclusionary in public discourse, while it more productively can be thought
of as ultrastructural to social life. Clinical genres of traumatology that
cater to mass populations for economic or ideological reasons tend to
downplay the political nature of the diagnostic moment. Diagnosis is a
traumatic intervention among traumatic interventions. It feeds the
cultivation of naivety consisting of a dependency on fragile notions like
objectivity, biology, therapy, and amoral psychology. More specifically, it
requires a total and totalising consensus on notions of trauma, trajectory,
intervention, eventuality, normality and disruption.
Psychosexual milestones are just that only as, how and
when they are claimed, narrated, or negotiated as such. In other
words: maturity does not exist other than in the routines, protocols, or
texts by which “it” is claimed. Hence, sexual lives and their traumas are as
much recounted, remembered, recited, narrated, or collected, as
criminological interviews are co-performative of the (occasional,
stage-acted, implicit, tacit) consensus that they could be thus referenced.
Maturity is not a status quo, it is not even work-in-progress¾it is
enduring work on the assertion of progress. In pop psychology these claims of
propulsion amount to a zoo of metaphors, but only to instrumentalise the
tactic of closure. Take a pick: survival, healing, development, acceptance,
recognition, situating matters, overcoming matters, and so on. What we have
here is re-narration, not curation; here we have emplotment not reparation.
Life experiences do not produce maturity, they are the performance
of the claim of its production. As Butlerian gender, life phases have no
“ontological integrity”. As O’Neil (2000, p. 164) concludes, “It is only
through acting one’s age rather than as a reflection of some actuality that
age gains its spectre of substance”. Obviously this observation compromises
the hegemony of objective psycho-traumatology which is rooted in untenably
objectivist and a-cultural ideas about age-appropriateness,
psycho-endocrinology, and “developmental needs”. Every conscientious
anthropologist would rebel against these ideas if s/he had a motive (and a
grant, and the guts) to do so.
With Butler we can
(rhetorically) ask, is “the child” an eternal universal category? Do
narratives of “the child”, as of “woman”, provide
“a false sense of
legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific and, in some cases,
culturally oppressive version of gender [age] identity”?
Age is
not a primary category, but an attribute, a set of secondary narrative
effects. In common usage, age has been that blunt, dead demographic easily
exchangeable with other forms of social calculus[9], and as such a depthless
factor in psycho-social normality, particularly gender normality. As a
chronometric parameter, age, on the other hand, also translates to a heavily
politicised, academised and conventionalised plot, “development”, which
proves resistant to the “new humanities”. Age is a bureaucratic fixture in a
culture that heavily invests in chronometric evaluations (Chudacoff, 1989),
in what Morss (1990) identifies as the biological naturalisation of life
phases, and in “developmental” stages rather than the earlier
medico-hygienist desiderata of regulation, firmness and discipline (Turmel,
2004).
Here’s the thing: Where Jonathan Ned Katz historicises the
“occassionality” of the heterosexual (1995), one might historicise the ascent
and reactivity of “adult sexuality” as a norm that retroactively was to
contain and border Freudian claims to the infantile and the regressive. There
he (predominantly: he) was: the fully responsible adult, all normally engaged
in all normally adult matters, protecting children of the hazardous realities
he embodied. The pivotal moment lies with Von Krafft-Ebing, who first and
simultaneously catalogued both the “paradoxic” child (Janssen, 2001) and the
Paedophile in a contemporary sense. These issues however remained latent
until after the second feminist wave, and ¾as observed¾ were
heavily short-changed by all the good stuff of the third wave
(poststructuralism, queer theory, critical theory).
While age faded in as gender faded out as the organising momentum of
medicolegal sexology, age never entered queer studies, which continued to
exercise a gender paradigm on the erotic. This is an anachronism (cf.
Angelides, 2005, p. 273; cf. Angelides, 2004a,b,c,d). In his hint
at Australian gay activism’s experience with paedophilia (2005), Steven
Angelides centralises its “homophobic” utility by observing the conservative
confusion of abject gender preferences with abject age preferences, and more
generally its usage in the opportune “recuperation” of hegemonic masculinity.
This genderist framework, however, would make paedophilia just another gender
dynamic. It may be more productive to state that the conservative front has
always confused everything abject and everything sexual when deemed
opportune. I think Angelides is more on the mark when observing that “The
discourses of paedophilia and sexuality have undergone profound
transformations, and it is the axis of age, and the distinction between child
and adult sexuality, that [contemporarily] is of utmost social, community and
parental interest and concern”.
This shift was paradigmatic, and Angelides’ point may be stated in a
converse fashion: the post-1970 decursus of homosexuality was already
another instance of the new age-appropriateness ethic, of a stratificationist
project in an otherwise happily queered, egalitarianist culture. The
depsychiatrisation of DSM-II homosexuality as such shifted medicolegal
priorities to age-delimited child-informing issues of gay parenting and
adoption, consent age, homosexual boy Scout mentors and teachers,
homosexuality in sex education curricula and through internet filters, and,
although this is debated, Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood (Sedgwick,
1993 versus Zucker and Spitzer 2005; cf. Wilson, Griffin & Wren, 2002).
This is not the continuation of a homophobic era. It is the reframeworking of
homosexuality in the age paradigm, where homosexuality matters only if it
disturbs the new holy stratification mantra.
Drawing from Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi’s Introduction
to their 2003 Queer Studies (in which age is still not represented
other than in terms of adult “age play”), central to the deconstruction of this
mantra would be that age-defined social loci are ideological fictions that
work to naturalise and thus perpetuate power structures. Age based loci are
provisional and contingent. The child is not a stable and autonomous category
but a supplement that works to stabilise adulthood by functioning as its
binary opposite. As such it enables adulthood to act out its normality, with
“childhood”, “adolescence” and any other inventions emerge as graded
deviations, resolvable in due time. Adulthood came to depend on its
childhoods for its coherence and stability. Per Judith Butler, age is
performatively constituted, age identities are the effect of repeated
performances of cultural signs and conventions. In other words: the salience
of the temporary and that of timing is a political move. “Life phases” are
constituted by regularised and constrained repetitions of social norms.
Drawing from Foucault (historicising the unholy duo of the sexualised child
and the psychiatricised pervert), the age-based subject may be said to be
constituted in and through the meaning systems, normative structures and
culturally prescribed taxonomies that circulate in communities. Both “child”
and “paedo”phile internalise the norms generated by the discourses of
age-delimited intimacies as they are circulated by social institutions and
fora (schools, clinics, mass media, couch) and in so doing become
self-regulating subjects, or subjects who police their own behaviour so they
will appear “normal”—normally framed in time. As a sizeable bibliography[10] shows, all
male teachers work this normality as they attempt to negotiate a culture of
“safety” (Jones, 2003, 2004).
Now, the exclusion of development within the canonical
postmodern triad (‘race’/ethnicity¾class¾gender) does seem obvious for a number of
reasons. If anything, the concept of pedagogy appears to be rooted, embodied
and institutionalised in a cult of necessity regarding generational
power differentials, at least as far as intimacies are concerned. One can’t
step outside the three interventionalist paradigms of pedagogy:
educationalism, correctionalism, protectionism. This means that intimacy
educationalists have not been able to go beyond what are called
anti-authoritarian, critical, and postmodern formulations of “peer” led,
“participatory”, “dialogical” and “exchange” based routes of education (which
usually and safely means post-teen education). ‘Sex’ologically, then, we are
not post-educational, post-developmental (cf. Janssen, 2004). This, I will be
arguing, informs a culture critique of paedophilia where, in the public
encounter, it is the tale of the developmentally unforthcoming depriving
developing Others from their forthcoming piece of the adult cake, in a hip
metaphor, a “cycle of abuse”. It is at this mythopoetic site that comments
need to be made.[11]
It is clear that in doing so we need to put on hold a normative
sentimentalism in which the matter is usually immersed. As always, we have to
look at the anxiety-driven plots and tropes indigenous to West-European
sentimentality. The villain, usually over religious, ethnic or gender
orientation lines, has commonly been understood as molesting children
(Bronski, 1998, p. 112). In the 20th century this accusation
consolidated from an attribute to a category. Ken Plummer (1995, p. 30) cites
Gayle Rubin in the observation that in an imagined Western hierarchical
system of sex value (an interesting neurosis), at rock bottom roam “those
whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries”. Paedophilia seems the
residue after all humanity and worth has been flushed out. To this extent,
who thus classifies himself or allows himself to be thus classified deprives
himself from conventional, indeed residual, humanist coverage. Thus deprived,
the reigning level of conventional social reference operates at the
sentimentalist level. If ‘paedophiles’ aren’t emotionalists themselves, then,
their social containment (e.g., Howitt, 2002) certainly is. Lynch (2002)
observes how, instead of child-centeredness, there exists this “constellation
of emotional expressions of disgust, fear of contagion, and pollution
avoidance” at work in the would-be detached grids of legislative arenas that
regulate the accessed child as such. Of course, child-centeredness is no
unproblematic alternative (certainly no singular one, as Chung and Walsh
[2000] observe) to however sincere an Emotionality.
Once,
“Pedophiles were another ‘minority within the minority’ and the question of
boy love was recurrent in virtually every issue [of Gai Pied, a
forefront French gay lib mag]” (Chassaigne, 2005). Not surprisingly, with the
gradual marginalisation of age politics from West-European gay radical
circles (arguably the most thinkable place for such a politics), and with the
overtly political non-coverage of age (other than the not-too-young) in queer
theory (cf. Janssen, 2005d), whatever remained in terms of a
movement, apart from a brief international forum related to the Paidika
journal (Amsterdam, 1987-1995), a radical (or even stable) platform never
materialised. The overrepresentation of medicolegal truths, then, continues
to inform an uncontested iatric hegemony. This bulwark is largely left
intact by feminist appraisals. Some attention has been given within media
studies[12]
and some heretic efforts do exist[13]; however, a movement is not
there.
If we are to conclude with Jeffrey Weeks (and Judith Butler) that
paedophilias (sic) could aspire to productive and transformational
‘oppositional identities’, as ‘necessary fictions’, or ‘sites of necessary
trouble’, then a major role would be carved out in establishing a critique of
what I call the sexual Curriculum, or the total cultural apparatus
that fixes subjects to their appropriate locus on The Social Timeline
(Janssen, forthcoming 2).
I do not think age-pivoted identities have to be oppositional (to
myths, e.g., to hegemonic age-identified sexualities), collective,
alternative, or necessary (as Weeks appears to allow in his metaphor). I also
depart from Weeks’ imperatives of comfort, support, belonging, hope and
survival, which I gather are rooted in unproductive American obsessions with
redemption, therapy, a-traumatic self-deployment, unproblematic (e.g. “human”
or “child”) rights, self-evident truths, and anthropological parochialism.
Clearly, these are luxuries self-identifying paedophiles cannot currently
afford, and perhaps it is not just possible but even more productive to make
other kinds of investments.
In social science, “the paedophile” is an exemplary case history of
discourse formation and subjectivity (Michel Foucault), an “abject” or
“queer” desire rooted in a praxis of shame, a “betwixt-and-between” itch to
categorical “age society” (typically a man-boy or some self-conscious form of
Peter Pan). In discursive psychology, the paedophile proves not so much a
compromised male, as an “adult manqué”, a failure to live up to the standard
of being able to accommodate a sexualisation process as a pivotal
coming-of-age ordeal or developmental challenge. Thus, the paedophile “is”
and “causes” a disruption of hegemonic organizations of age
stratification, both in the social construct of the persona as in the
politics of the interpersonal.
Ten
years ago, Dynes (1995) argued that “[…] it might seem that ‘queeritude’
encourages any and all transgressions into forbidden zones, including sadism,
masochism, and trans-sexualism. As if by common consent, however, pedophilia
remains taboo. There are still, it seems, some limits”. Gayle Rubin
(1992)however seemed to care enough to pay lip service to “the community of
men who love underaged youth”. What community?
The category
of a “paedo”phile was a product of second half 20th century and
the social actors who “reversed” its deployment by mobilising politically
around it. This reversal contributed to the consolidation of the binary
organizations by reifying and further entrenching the categories involved.
This analysis however may seem to neglect institutional underpinnings of
discursive formation, particularly the role of medical and justice apparatus.
It may be worthwhile to examine institutional sources of discursive power,
and how institutions are in part discursively constructed.
Paedophilia
could not be contained within a gender politics that included the
deconstructed other sexes, other genders, other gender
orientations; paedophilia never postmodernised (Simon, 1989, 1996).
There’s no argument however to exclude deconstructed, other
pedagogical principles from queer phenomenology.
Contra
much elaboration of the reverse case, dominant clinical perceptions of
paedophilia have contained age as erotic index, rather than identity fixture.
In part this may be exponential to the “orientation identity” terrorism as
seen in much of American sexology. The issue of identitarianism in
paedophilia is obviously complicated since at no level (law, employment,
consumption to name a few) can such an identity be productively claimed:
paedophiles always lose. This may have had the historical effect that,
contrasting the self-fashioning agency and mobility gained by the queer
industry, paedophiles never developed the imperative or the tools to perform
close self-analysis or clever counter-culturalism. Paedophiles are often
culturally impotent if not invisible: instead of contributing to the
deconstruction project, they make an ass of themselves in transgressive
venues. This is unfortunate from every imaginable angle: stigma theory, truth
culture, coherent and hospitable poststructuralism, critical pedagogy, honest
parenthood, justice, psychiatry¾these are all delivered to the blunt
superficialities of the therapy doctrine. It may be regarded a sad thing, for
instance, that paedophiles find no venue (no serious venue, in any case) to
contest their sexualisation, their praxis being reduced to crime potential,
their gaze to that of the pornographer, their sentiments to those of
orientation.
In the
remainder of this article I will offer some points of departure for engaging
in age trouble. I would like to stress the obvious here, that I do this not
for the sake of the paedophilic encounter, but to recognise its current
ethnographic salience in de deconstruction of age stratification as a “total”
system. If anything should be clear, it is the centrality of this system that
is at stake.
Western
humanist writing over de course of the late 20th century produced
academic discourses that demonstrate clear paradigmatic idées fixes
and pivots: among these, “erotics”, “sexual performance” and “gender”. A
discussion of curriculum here is usually organised around issues of becoming,
that is to say, one is entitled, included and reckoned when one has become,
only marginally so when one is becoming. For instance, the inclusion
of ‘Q’ for ‘questioning’ to the addressee mantras of G/L/B/T/S/A communities
suggests a cognitive trajectory ending in choice…there’s no ‘N’ (Not
affiliated) either. As Plummer notes for the post-1970 Anglo-Saxon case, this
gender bulwark’s dealing with trajectories has typically teased out modernist
therapeutic tales of “suffering, surviving, surpassing”, with unambiguous
entries, courses and exits (discussed in Janssen, 2005c). The net
result of this process has been that pre-adult intimacies have been reduced
to exactly these, performances of preceding, aspiring, attempting,
experimenting, play (Janssen, 2005b), developing, approaching,
awakening, budding, blossoming, arriving at some imagined ‘minimal’ status
or, horribly, some stable or ‘end’-stage (‘being gay’). Although a number of
efforts document tales of inconsequential, unproductive and otherwise
atypical trajectories, naive realist formulations of trajectories show up in
the writings of even forefront genderists (Janssen, 2004). “Development”
seems a mantra too appealing and too instrumental to abandon it to the
deconstructionist, while institutions by necessity entirely refute subjective
approaches to matters of ontology, and perform utterly obscene forms of
reductionism (consent ages).
Jacqui
Gabb’s (2004a,b) research assessed “the effects of cultural
debates, social policy and government legislation on “families’ ‘intimate
practice’ and how these cultural changes and social discourses structure the
emotional currency of families”.
This
proposed nexus between the discursive and emotional realm seems to be of
interest to paedophilia as a tale of “sexuality”. American 1970s discourse of
sexual performance allows that what are considered intimate matters of
identity prove decidedly suitable for technologising, therapeuticising, and
marketing. This of course was the Foucaultian insight: a culture of silence
turned out to be a culture of constant, compulsive, and propulsive
communication (indeed: “intimation”). This meant reification, mass
confession, and mass representation of erotic performativity. This culture of
orchestration suggested, and was to suggest, that the erotic could be and
should be thought of in terms of managerialism(cf. Tyler,
2004), superimposed on the popular notion of the erotic as a biological (and
hence biologically scheduled) modality. That is to say, eroticism was being
reduced to, and contained in, market-driven performance-centred
mass-circulated imperatives of self-realisation and self-enhancement.
This
regimentation tended to exclude young consumers but aggressively include the
pedagogue. Crucially this pedagogisation of entitled subjects came to border
the adult scene characterised by imperatives of anticipation and modelling.
This marks a culture of flux, in which essences should “become”, and alter to
become better. The counter-argument of course reads that essences are mythic
constraints on diversity, and that the maxim of betterment is a capitalist
trick. The capitalism of the erotic also erases the proto-eroticism of
childhood which is imagined only in terms of the adult and the pubertal
(Janssen, 2005d), in terms of an ideal yet unholy absence.
Preadolescence
¾it is the adrenergic world of undefined unarticulated tension,
excitement, immersion and absorption in the new and untrodden. It is the
stage where identitarianism is not yet pronounced, any partiality excusable,
yet, according its 21st century poetics, every act of
participation is a magnet for parasitic, abject “usage”. This stage excludes
“the sexual” as we know it (as we like it), but then, the child is not immune
to it as such. Far from it: here, it is more potently identitarian
than ever, it is out of control, our control.
The
discursive localisation of paedophilia in the realm and the sphere of “the
sexual” is opportune in the sense that it locates the child in the realm of
the adult. Paedophilia, then, is ectopy, a child out of place. Hence
the child is object, victim, ignorant and innocent of what the acquaintance
is construed to be about, namely sexual=adult desire. Hence, the peculiar
nosological entity of the “sexualised child”, a 1990s American clinical
invention which seems to juxtapose (that is: propagandise the existence of)
natural and “hurried” chronologies of sexual inauguration. As the
well-marketed and well-received argument goes, the adultified child is
rendered ectopic to its peer culture.
The
naïve objection that “children are not innocent” is an endorsement of the
privileged claim of “the sexual” as a universal human experience (which the
child “learns” or “grows into”), or at least an incorrect observation given
the low status of sexological sophistication in Euro-American children (and
adults, for that matter). Obviously they are innocent, and this is why
they cannot resist a victim narrative.
Here
we touch the core issue: sexual abuse occurs where the sexual is defined
present, where it is demarcated. The elaborate bureaucratisation of this
definition ensures that this is always the case where bureaucratic
(medicolegal) procedures are present. This state of centralisation also
dictates that alternative definitions, definitions that might be
considered indigenous to the subjects most directly involved are either not
considered or, more likely, considered only in terms of the bureaucratic
protocol. This leads, for instance, to the suspect juridical-clinical notion
of “cognitive distortions” meant to neutralise dissenting truth-versions by
people subject to a diagnostic or reintegration trajectory. Most of these
notions are as much “distorted” as paedophilia is a “disorder”, namely in
terms of an apparent failure of social processes to produce a normal plot, an
approved text, a normative subject.
Question
is whether classificatory adults might partake in the pre-managerial,
pre-propaedeutic, proto-erotic realm. Obviously this question is neither
posed nor answered, since the problem, as observed, is taken to be strictly
genital. This is, as many things in social politics, a rather unfortunate
project of disambiguation, a bizarre desexualisation/sexualisation proposal
that one might expect from a person who has known no intimate life
whatsoever, has no frame of reference, and no eye for the subtleties of
life’s often paradoxical sentimentalities. It is the worst kind of eclectic
Freudianism. Sadly, it is also a deep public consensus to drive this project
to its ugly extremes.
The paedophile
is the regressive option, it transgresses where it regresses. But how is
regression pathological?[14]
Where does it cross what line? Does it, other than parenthood, produce an
unproductive nostalgia, an unworkable stagnation? Yes. Does it produce a need
for rejuvenation surgery or decelerating hormone therapy? No. Does it
compromise a stabilising mythology of human procreation? I would say that it
might. Does it, in its negation, sustain and feed an ongoing fictional fabric
of intellectual progress, of trajectorial selfhood and of cultural
ascendancy? Quite so. Does it, by its very definition, solve perennial
problems of ambiguity, uncertainty and prospectively titrated purpose? Yes.
So is
paedophilia (the idea of a felt desire for approximation and unification with
the immature) damaging? No¾ if it feeds and delivers a desirable plot of
transgression, protection, and survival, which it does. No¾ if it
is referenced as a protocol of social organization, since its localisation
stages an enforcement that seems to need continuous staging. No¾ if it
satisfactorily allocates a pervasive danger, and renders a troubling
situation (cultural indoctrination and blindness) solvable, which it does. No¾ if it
provides a “preferential” (orientational) Self as an “identitarian” Self,
which it strikingly (if unfortunately) does.
§ Alcoff, L. M. (1996) Dangerous
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