Robbie Duschinsky

Sexualisation’s four faces: sexualisation and gender stereotyping in the Bailey Review

This paper explores the considerations of sexualisation and gender stereotyping in the recent UK government report Letting Children be Children. This report, the Bailey Review, claimed to represent the views of parents. However, closer reading reveals that, while the parents who were consulted were concerned about both the sexualisation and the gender stereotyping of products aimed at children, the Bailey Review focuses only on the former and dismisses the latter. ‘Sexualisation’ has four faces in the Bailey Review: it is treated as a process that increases (1) the visibility of sexual content in the public domain, (2) misogyny, (3) the sexuality of children, and (4) the mainstream position of ‘deviant’ sexual behaviours and lifestyles. Through this construction of ‘sexualisation’, gendered relations of power are not only hidden from view but also buttress a narrative in which young women are situated as children, and their sexuality and desire rendered pathological and morally unacceptable as judged by a conservative standard of decency. Comparison of the treatment of sexualisation and gender stereotyping in the review is revealing of the political motivations behind it, and of wider discourse in these areas.

Disorganized attachment in infancy: a review of the phenomenon and its implications for clinicians and policy-makers.

ABSTRACT Disorganized/Disoriented (D) attachment has seen widespread interest from policy makers, practitioners, and clinicians in recent years. However, some of this interest seems to have been based on some false assumptions that (1) attachment measures can be used as definitive assessments of the individual in forensic/child protection settings and that disorganized attachment (2) reliably indicates child maltreatment, (3) is a strong predictor of pathology, and (4) represents a fixed or static “trait” of the child, impervious to development or help. This paper summarizes the evidence showing that these four assumptions are false and misleading. The paper reviews what is known about disorganized infant attachment and clarifies the implications of the classification for clinical and welfare practice with children. In particular, the difference between disorganized attachment and attachment disorder is examined, and a strong case is made for the value of attachment theory for supportive work with families and for the development and evaluation of evidence-based caregiving interventions.

Abjection and self-identity: towards a revised account of purity and impurity

Kristeva describes abjection as ‘the repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck’. Her account of the ‘abject’ has received a great deal of attention since the 1980s, in part due to high demand for theoretical attention to themes of purity and impurity, which remain important in contemporary society. Yet Kristeva herself has noted that ‘my investigation into abjection, violence and horror … picks up on a certain vacuum’, and other scholars have agreed that there is need for further work on what Campkin has described as an ‘under theorized’ topic. This article will begin by exploring the central line of criticism that has been made of Kristevas concept of abjection, before then considering an attempt by Goodnow to address these concerns through a re-reading of Kristeva. Goodnows re-reading of Kristeva, together with some conceptual clarifications from Hegel, will point the way towards a more precise account of purity and impurity. I shall contend that Kristevas work on social abjection sometimes hits upon a pattern, which greater conceptual precision will be able to revise into a new social theory of when and why themes of purity and impurity are invoked in Western societies. It will be argued that impure phenomena are those in which heterogeneity is seen to disturb a qualitative homogeneity, taken to be basic; pure phenomena are those understood to be all-of-a-piece and as a result identical with their essence.

Childhood innocence: essence, education, and performativity

This article will argue that representations of ‘childhood innocence’ do not express a prior and pure essence, but rather produce such representations performatively, through the separation of the pure and natural from the impure and corrupting. Innocence can be understood as a discourse constructing a relationship between subjectivities and their essence, whilst at the same time effacing the signs of this process of construction. Beginning with an analysis of Frank Wedekinds Mine-Haha, it will be suggested that in modern societies discourses can be mobilised to serve to protect and cultivate some individuals, but that they also operate powerful mechanisms of social exclusion, stratification, and normalisation.

Sexual dysfunction and paraphilias in the DSM-5: Pathology, heterogeneity, and gender

In the forthcoming 5 th Edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), as in previous editions, there are two overarching types of sexual problems. The first type is the ‘sexual dysfunctions’. Animating this category, we would argue, is a concern to address sexual experiences and behaviours understood as insufficiently intense in duration, magnitude or frequency. The disorders included in the category are thus predominantly those associated with a lack of arousal or pleasure, or which are physically inimical to penetration. The second type of sexual problem is labelled ‘the paraphilias’. DSM-5 distinguishes within the paraphilias as a diagnostic category between ‘paraphilias’ and ‘paraphilic disorders’: the former are understood as merely abnormal whereas the latter are pathological and require correction. Organising the category of the paraphilias, we would suggest, is a concern with forms of subjectivity with illegitimate objects of sexual attraction or pleasure. This ‘point of view’ article sets out to explore and explain, with swift brushstrokes, the gendered logic underlying the delineation of pathological desires, pleasures and acts in the proposed sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias. Our focus is on changes from previous editions of the DSM. We shall contend that the proposed sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias utilise, refract and ultimately naturalise troubling societal assumptions about gender. Kristeva (1980 [1975]: 133) has argued that ‘the notion of heterogeneity is indispensable’ as a starting point for investigations of the logic of classificatory structures, and their role in organising and occluding relations of gender power. That is to say, confronted with a taxonomic system of forms of human life, Kristeva suggests that

Doing the möbius strip: The politics of the Bailey Review

In media and policy discourses on sexualisation, there has been an apparent split. Some have constructed young women as innocent children, incapable of meaningful sexual and commercial choices; others have treated young women as neo-liberal adults, agentic and savvy choice-makers. We analyse how the Bailey Review on the Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood (published by the UK Department of Education) attempts to manage the tensions associated with making both arguments at once. We theorise the split as ‘doing the möbius strip’, as both sides agree on the assumption that commercial and sexual choice is either present or absent for young women. In this way, they reframe the contradictions and inequalities that shape young women’s behaviours as a problem of propriety and decency.

What does sexualisation mean

‘Sexualisation’ has been dismissed by some as no more than yet another moral panic about youth and sex. However, it is striking that the term appears to have helped galvanise feminist activism, speaking in some way to the experiences of young people. Building from a history and analysis of the term, I propose that ‘sexualisation’ has served as an interpretive theory of contradictory gender norms, using the figure of the ‘girl’ to gesture towards an intensifying contradiction between the demands that young women display both desirability and innocence. In addressing sexist dimensions of gender norms through the figure of the ‘girl’, a minor, discourses on sexualisation can help circumvent liberal objections about free choice. However, I also express concern that the term has facilitated a focus in media and policy texts which attends less to gender inequity than to sexuality as a contaminant of young femininity.

Managing the Tensions of Essentialism: Purity and Impurity

This article proposes a new interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu, as a theorist of purity and impurity. Bourdieu’s writings indicate that through the adjudication of things or people as relatively impure or pure an image is constructed of their essential truth. Building from Bourdieu, we will show how themes of purity and impurity can be used to manage the tensions associated with attempts to impute an essence to human nature or to reality, ensuring that the moral and epistemological significance of complexity is masked. This is the reason why themes of purity and impurity so often attend polarized worldviews, and why they are frequently mobilized for justifying and operating biopolitical processes of social stratification and regulation.

The 2010 UK Home Office ‘Sexualisation of Young People’ Review: A Discursive Policy Analysis

This paper offers a discursive policy analysis of the 2010 UK Home Office Sexualisation of Young People Review, authored by Linda Papadopoulos (2010a). It will scrutinise the narrative presented by the text of the danger posed by cultural representations to healthy development, and trace the way that the text links this danger to catastrophic outcomes: child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. Examining this narrative, the article will propose that the UK Review deploys spatial metaphors to naturalise a gendered account of childhood, sexuality and danger, evoking the creeping influence of a corrupting culture on a girl’s most private self. The article will also demonstrate that this spatial narrative underpins the epistemological structure of the text – its separation of the primary from the secondary, the real from the artificial.

Purity, power and cruelty

One of the most significant theoretical paradigms for understanding themes of purity and impurity available to researchers is that of Mary Douglas. However her account is problematic: it neglects the analysis of power-relations and subjectivity due to its universalizing, structural-functionalist scope. By contrast Primo Levi’s writings offer an example of a particular cultural economy of purity, and shed light on how a contingent form of purity judgement in Fascist ideology refracted into multiple lived discourses. Levi traces changes in purity narratives across different institutional and social contexts, even within the psyche of a single perpetrator or victim. His writings show the pressing need for a new theory of purity and impurity, and offers fundamental insights towards such an account.