Abstract
Reviewed by: Annadís G. Rúdólfsdóttir, University of Iceland, Iceland
This edited volume is an ambitious collection of interdisciplinary and cutting-edge studies into young people’s and children’s sexualities. It offers a range of theoretical perspectives and unpacks and unsettles many of the discursive truths about young sexualities that have dominated public discussion in Western countries. In addition, many of the studies are methodologically innovative and successfully foreground young people’s views and voices whilst respecting their stance as sexual, desiring beings and agents.
My reading of the book is framed by my own background as a feminist critical social psychologist. I am constantly scouring bookshelves and catalogues in search of material to inform my own studies and to find supporting material (theoretical and empirical) for postgraduate students who hail from various parts of the world, including Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The description of the book and its promise to offer interdisciplinary, culturally complex readings and transnational insights into children’s and young people’s sexualities instantly caught my eye and piqued my interest. My appetite was further whetted when I saw that the volume is edited by Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose and R. Danielle Egan. All are leading scholars on children’s sexuality who have produced theoretically and empirically inspiring and innovative work that probes and questions culturally established ideas and assumptions about young people’s and children’s sexual agency and sexualities.
In the introduction to the book, the editors point out how the very idea of children’s sexuality runs counter to the dominant idea of white, middle-class childhood as a time of innocence and purity. Theories about children’s sexuality have been written from the viewpoint of the adult, and there has been a dearth of research that provides space for and respects children’s own voices and perspectives. The “child sexualisation discourse,” as they term it, is gendered and construes young women and girls as a group that is particularly at risk for victimisation and objectification. As such, it undermines and renders young sexualities as pathological. The editors make a compelling argument for this book and its purpose of presenting and bringing together research from different cultural contexts.
The book is divided into five sections. The first section outlines and questions how different disciplines within the social sciences approach young sexualities and attempts to place current ideas and debates in a historical and political context. The chapters in this section provide an important backdrop to the chapters that ensue and draw out some of the key moral and political issues that have infused empirical research and public debates about children’s sexualities in Western societies. They do not skirt around the issue that children are sexual beings and offer theoretical tools and concepts for thinking through research on young sexualities. Chapter 3, on the sociological history of researching childhood and sexualities by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, is especially excellent in terms of suggesting how the topic can be researched and will go straight on my postgraduate student reading list. Chapter 2 (Diederick F. Janssen), covering anthropological perspectives, was insightful, but I struggled to see how it tied in with the research presented in other sections. In Chapter 4, Mary Jane Kehily and Joseph De Lappe explore how the study of youth sub-cultures can provide insight into young people’s gendered and sexual cultures.
In Chapter 5, Tolman, Bowman and Chmielewski describe and analyse the repercussions of the 2007 Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls which draws together research in psychology on the sexualisation of girls. It is a critical reflection on how the report was (mis)appropriated by media and governmental bodies and clarifies some of the original aims of the report. The chapter also partly seems to be written in order to purposefully engage with some of the critique the report has received from UK researchers, including the book’s editors. I found the authors’ thoughts on how academics from the US and UK read differently into the concept of sexualisation when it is presented in inverted commas especially interesting. This chapter should be required reading for those who want to contribute to debates concerning the “sexualisation” of young women.
Chapter 6 (Sara Bragg) unpacks cultural assumptions about boys and sexualisation and how these shape our understanding of children’s relationships with popular culture. This chapter is a useful resource for scholars analysing popular culture. Chapter 7 (R. Danielle Egan) gives an overview of how conceptions of the child have changed in psychoanalytic clinical literature. She argues that a psychoanalytic perspective is useful and would provide a nuanced picture of childhood sexuality.
The second section, “Pre-teen Sexuality: Problematizing Sexual Agency and Sexual Innocence,” consists of empirical research chapters exploring the sexual cultures of children. The chapters based on studies in Sweden (Anna Sparrman), New Zealand (Louisa Allen and Toni Ingram), Australia (Kerry H. Robinson and Cristyn Davies) and New York (Maria Kromidas) show the various resources children draw from when they perform their sexuality and how they are constantly being measured against heteronormative ideals of sexuality. In this regard, Kromida’s chapter draws out how issues of sexuality are always entangled with other categories of difference, such as race. I particularly liked the emphasis placed on pleasure and desire in both Sparrman’s and Allen and Ingram’s chapters. Sparrman’s innovative research on how young children see the sexy body made me question my presumptions about this age group. Allen and Ingram provide a very accessible overview of how girls and young women have been addressed and positioned in debates about sexualisation and, like Sparrman, use interesting methods that allow them to draw out the complex ways in which young women are constituted as sexual subjects.
The third section, “Queering Young Sexualities: Gender, Place and History,” focuses on children and young people who do not identify with heteronormative sexual identities. This section contains the only chapter in the book based on research in Africa. Deevia Bhana writes about her extensive research on young people’s sexualities in South Africa. This is one of my favourite chapters in the book. She outlines how homosexuality has been constructed as un-African, yet is supported by law. She then points out how dominant cultural views of homosexuality as un-African can be challenged. Other chapters include research from Iceland (Jón Ingvar Kjaran), the US (Elisabeth Payne) and Wales (Emma Renold and Gabriel Ivinson). All of these studies provide a nuanced, multi-layered account of what it is like growing up and finding your place as a queer in a heteronormative culture. Renold and Ivinson’s theoretical introduction to their study is engaging and novel, as is their diffractive methodology. Bhana’s and Payne’s contributions were the only studies that engaged with religion in this book: a notable omission in a book that aims to be transnational.
The fourth section, “Young Sexualities and the Cultural Imagination,” places its attention on the cultural and political context and how young people and children engage with it. The chapters explore how sexualisation has been conflated with pornification and on how sexual material travels from one culture to another. The cultural analyses extend to Brazil (Diego Costa), with a multi-layered unpacking of the role of the media phenomenon Xuxa in Brazilian culture. Anna Madill, in turn, explores how Japanese Manga comics can be read in different ways and what kind of dilemmas those comics have raised in relation to child pornography prohibition laws in the UK. Herriot and Hiseler focus on the various documentaries addressing the sexualisation of girls that have been produced in North America. This is an interesting and well thought through analysis. They argue convincingly that the documentaries’ presumptions about girls’ sexual innocence and pre-occupation with risk disregard young women’s sexual agency and end up as vehicles for slut-shaming. A notable exemption, they point out, is Jessica Valenti’s documentary The Purity Myth. This is a well-written analysis which reveals the double standards in public adult anxieties and moral panic about girls’ corruption through sexualisation.
The fifth, and last, section is on “New Media: Digital Technologies and Young Sexual Cultures.” This section focuses on the role of digital media in young people’s lives and sexual cultures and how it has been represented in public debates about children’s sexualisation or even pornification. Digital media has become an important forum for social relations and performance of gendered identities and sexualities, and thus presents new opportunities for research. However, as reflected in Herriot and Hiseler’s chapter in the section before, there are repeated moral panics about young people’s use of this media and calls to curb and control their use of it. But what place does digital media have in young people’s and children’s lives and how do they engage with it and negotiate its content? This section gives good insight into those questions. Sue Jackson and Tina Vare’s chapter offers an example of how girls’ sexual cultures can be researched using video diaries. Monique Mulholland writes about her research with teenage girls in South Australia and how they tackle pornographic material. Lara Karaian explores how Canadian legal discourse makes sense of young female texters who are construed as sexually self-exploiting, i.e. an underage person who snaps and then shares a photo of herself is breaking the law, even though she is doing it for her own pleasure. Laura Harvey and Jessica Ringrose also focus on sexters, but boys this time. This is a fascinating chapter that moves beyond the usual depiction of male sexters as sexual predators. The boys’ acts are precisely contextualised, which gives a clear understanding of their actions and what is at stake for them.
Despite the different methodologies and theoretical orientations, the book reads as a coherent whole. There are some repetitions and overlaps, especially in relation to theorisations of sexualisation, but the different contexts to which these are applied add to the book’s strength. The book’s backbone would have been stronger if some of the more novel theories and concepts that are currently in use in research on children’s sexualities, and adopted by various contributors to this book, had been explained and outlined in the first section. Affect theory, Deleuze, Guattari, schizoid subjectivities: how do these theoretical thinkers and concepts fit into the history of research into children’s sexualisation?
In the introduction to the book, the authors claim they want to show the rich diversity of scholarship on children’s sexuality. I feel that they have achieved this goal. They address blind spots in policies and popular debates and challenge and disrupt some well-entrenched ideas about children’s sexualities. They also provide complex transnational accounts of young sexualities. However, with a few notable exceptions, the scholarship seems mostly to take a Western perspective. Of the 31 contributors to this volume, 30 are placed in Western universities. Religion and its link to honour and shame is a concept that frequently crops up when discussing sexualities in a transnational context that includes the Global North and the Global South. Religious discourse has an important structuring effect on anxieties around bodies, pleasure and shame. In this book, religion is not even listed in the index.
If I were to describe this book in one word I would go for “dense.” There are 23 chapters and it is hard to find fault with any of them. In this regard, the book is an absolute treasure trove for academics who want to bring a critical perspective to empirical research on young sexualities. The writing in the book is also often dense and at times inaccessible. The chapters, particularly those written by the editors, require full attention and need to be read more than once to grasp their content. That is effort well spent, as following their line of thought opens up new ways of envisioning and approaching young sexualities. However, the book is also dense in a literal sense. The print is miniscule, the margins tiny, and this diminishes somewhat the pleasure in reading. Also, it has to be pointed out that the book sports one of the ugliest book covers I have seen in a long while. Nevertheless, I hope people comply with the old saying of not judging a book by its cover as its content is both fascinating and rewarding.