(1) Chapter 1 - Introduction

Verwijzingen naar het spel van haar dochter, de opmerking dat dit boek een persoonlijke reis is.

[Wat suggereert zo'n opmerking nu eigenlijk? Dat hier allerlei subjectieve indrukken worden weergegeven ver van wetenschap? Geen goed begin. Vaag taalgebruik.]

Seksualisering is disciplinering.

"Hence, sexualization and its effects, as discussed by numerous experts, become some kind of ‘disciplinary power’ (Foucault 1979) through which children control themselves. In fact, Rose (1989/1999), who I discuss later on in this book, following Foucault, has presented a compelling argument about how psychology (littered with tests measuring masculinity, femininity, IQ, child development, attitudes, etc.) constitutes the production of a body of knowledge which is used to regulate people while making it appear as though it is in their interest, and carrying the stamp of ‘science’ all the while." [mijn nadruk] (2)

[Dat lijkt mij nu toch ook.]

Voorbeelden uit de media waar organisaties negatief reageren op mediauitingen om 'het onschuldige kind' te beschermen.

"These moral values work on a public/private axis, for they have gradually become institutionalized in the form of policies on national, European and international levels, while being complemented by the self-disciplining mechanisms followed by individuals in order to realize the collective enterprise of constructing a secure world for children. Moral judgements about children’s welfare are perhaps nowhere more fleeting and controversial than when it comes to children’s sexuality. In fact, childhood sexuality is more often than not censored, since moralizers reject the idea that there is any form of sexual experience or knowledge that is indeed ‘good’ for children (Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers 1999) — an idea that, as we shall see, has deep historical roots. It is within such a contextual framework that this book project has developed and unfolds, bringing together a historical contextualization of childhood, sexuality and pornography with contemporary empirical accounts regarding the ‘presentation of the self’ and self-management." [mijn nadruk] (5)

[Het is me nog steeds niet duidelijk waar de auteur nu staat in dat debat. Ze blijft tot nu toe hangen in vage abstracties. Volgens mij is het iemand met een Foucault / postmodernisme achtergrond. Iemand die het over 'narratives' heeft en zo.]

(11) Chapter 2 - The Way We Are ...: The Reiteration of Sexualization in Academia, Policy and the Media

"As far as public anxieties go — at least in the Anglophone world — a barrage of think-tank, task-force and government reports, along with extensive news coverage both in the press and in broadcasting, as well as parenting manuals have inundated the public agenda since 2006 with discussions about the sexualization of young girls."(12)

Een concreet historisch overzicht volgt. Het debat start in Australië, komt terecht in de USA (het APA-rapport), en de UK (Bailey Review etc.).

[Dat is een prima overzicht en noemt vele rapporten, media-uitingen, betrokkenen, en discussiepunten. Je ziet er echt het karakter van een 'moral panic' aan af, vind ik.]

Tegengeluiden kwamen er ook, zoals het Sexualization Report van Attwood ea van 2013.

"Taking into account the inaccurate and often sensationalist knowledge that is being disseminated and reiterated about sexualization publicly, in academia, the media, popular books, expert manuals, policy reports or public statements, the authors want to shed light on what we know, or do not know, about sexualization, drawing from a multidisciplinary expert knowledge, while distancing themselves from effects research and findings. In that respect, it is part of the criticism voiced against ‘the peril of sexualization’."(18)

"Other criticism focuses on the methodological and epistemological limitations of the Papadopoulos (2010), APA (2007) and Australian Senate (2008) reports — and similarly minded research and policy documents. Such criticism revolves around the weakness, vagueness and inconsistency of their key terms; the partial and simplistic analyses of media texts, which are usually premised on psychological studies to support — unfounded — claims about audiences; their failure to engage with the social and cultural context of sexuality, and the ways in which children and teenagers make sense of and use sexual content, or how sexual meanings are being set up and negotiated (Bragg et al. 2010, 2012). Further challenges to the evidence (or ‘evidence’) usually put forward about the ‘onslaught’ on children by ‘rampant media sexualization’ comes from the fact that a lot of previous work has focused on media and advertising (rather than sexualized goods), using US university students (rather than children), and discusses girls (rather than boys), which says a lot about the anxieties that surround girls’ sexuality within the public debate (Bragg et al. 2011, 281). This kind of critique is representative of the body of academic literature and research that exposes the weaknesses of the effects approach when it comes to issues such as media violence, pornography and sexualization, in that it attempts to analyse rather than moralize about the contemporary mainstreaming of sex (see, among others, Attwood 2006, 2009; Buckingham 2009; Buckingham and Bragg 2004; Duschinsky 2010; Duits and van Zoonen 2011; Egan and Hawkes 2008; Lumby and Albury 2010; Russell and Tyler 2005; Willett 2008)." [mijn nadruk] (19-20)

"Although critics of the effects approach suggest that what is needed is a more holistic account of the role of the media in children’s lives — so as to break away from the simplicity of effects — in no way do they imply that media have no effects whatsoever on people’s lives. What they do argue is that ‘the notion of cause-and-effect is itself a narrow and misleading way of conceiving of the role of social and cultural factors (and of media) in children’s lives’ (Buckingham 2011, 52)."(21)

Een andere stroom van publicaties in lijn met de eerder genoemde rapporten:

"Apart from the policy-related reports I have discussed, Sue Palmer’s (2006) bestseller (Toxic Childhood: How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and What We can Do About It), and its 2013 follow-up (21st Century Girls: How Female Minds Develop, How to Raise Bright, Balanced Girls and Why Today’s World Needs Them More Than Ever), marked the start of a proliferation of similarly minded publications (e.g. Carey 2011; Durham 2008; Hamilton 2009; Levin and Kilbourne 2008; Mayo and Nairn 2008; Oppliger 2008; Tankard-Reist 2009; Warburton and Braunstein 2012), which have inundated the academic and public agenda."(21)

"Time and again conversations on sexualities in — either early or later — childhood are silenced in the name of childhood innocence and developmental appropriateness, and provisions are made so that discussion is turned to ‘safe’ or ‘appropriate’ issues — even more so when the sanctity of heteronormativity is breached and non-normalized sexualities are brought to the fore (Semann and William 2010). In this sense, any discussion relating to childhood sexuality is ‘dangerous business’ and, as such, it constitutes a ‘call for action’ in order to protect those ‘at risk’. Hence, concomitant with the fear of rising commercialism is the fear of the loss of childhood innocence, as a result of the way in which the media precipitate the premature and inappropriate sexualization of children. Premised upon ‘expert knowledge’ about children, sexuality and popular culture, usually with psychological underpinnings (see, for example, Walkerdine 1997, 2001 , 2009), these morally inflected adult concerns are channelled into fierce lobbying that calls for stricter intervention in media regulation and censorship. In this process, what goes amiss is the way in which discussions about adult protectionism and socially constructed notions of children’s sexuality are framed as accounts of protecting innocent children from age-inappropriate sexuality (Taylor 2010)." [mijn nadruk] (22)

(33) Chapter 3 - A Historical Contextualization of the Discussion About the Sexualization of Childhood

[Ook in dit hoofdstuk een goede historische samenvatting van de ontwikkeling in het denken over kinderen en over 'childhood'.]

"Fears about the impact of popular culture on the young abound, and have been well and critically discussed over the past years. Some accounts take a historical pitch and trace anxieties all the way back to the nineteenth century, whether to discuss the penny dreadfuls (comics), the romantic novel, the music hall, the telegraph and the telephone, and the early cinema (Boethius 1995; Buckingham 1993 ; Critcher 2008; Egan and Hawkes 2010; Marvin 1988; Springhall 1998 )."(33)

"Inextricably linked with the notion of moral panics is an intrinsic fear of popular culture, as morally debasing, lacking in cultural status and massively produced, as well as a concern about leisure and culture. (...) Moral panics are symptoms of more general anxieties provoked by the rapid pace of social change, as this is effected by technological developments within modernity. A good way to illustrate this is the way in which the social construction of the sexual child evolved in the age of modernity." [mijn nadruk] (34)

"Childhood — the most intensively governed sector of personal existence — and the health, welfare and rearing of children have been linked, in different ways, at different times and societies, to the destiny of the nation and the responsibilities of the state (Rose 1989/1999). Overall, in modern societies the notion that children have yet to learn the skills and conventions of adulthood and have needs that set them apart from the rest, is deeply entrenched. Backed by the scientific rationale of ‘child psychology’, the assumption that children are different is now accepted as a universal human truth and shared by both conservative and progressive proponents of child-rearing (Jackson 1982, 24)." [mijn nadruk] (35)

"Indeed, corporal punishment has acted across history as a tool of constructing selves and others, be they religious, socio-economic, sexual, cultural or political (2014a, 18). Yet, though we (the West) abhor the thought of Sharia law, and construct practising societies as backward and barbaric, we conveniently forget the contemporary cultural or religious conservatives who exhibit a similar attitude — for example, corporal punishment was banned in UK private schools as recently as 1998 (by a narrow majority), while in the US spanking is the default prerogative of schools in numerous states (Geltner 2014b). Furthermore, empirical research has shown that in the USA, the denominations which promulgate fundamentalist and conservative evangelical theology (such as various Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Jehovah’s Witness groups) endorse corporal punishment because they adhere to biblical literalism and thus take seriously the doctrine of original sin (for which corporal punishment is appropriate and necessary) (Ellison and Sherkat 1993)." [mijn nadruk] (39)

[Zo zie je maar weer. Fysiek geweld mag wel, fysiek genieten mag niet.]

"Zornado sketches the relationship between parent and child in Victorian England on the basis of the relationship between the physically dominant and the physically dominated. Childrearing pedagogy meant that the child, from very early on, was taught that those with physical and economic power were morally superior. This meant that moral degradation was associated with the weak, the poor and the child — something that most Victorians accepted as a natural given."(41)

"So, the fear of the working classes — ‘the dangerous poor’ — and the need to control working-class children and youth by instilling middle-class values in them, along with waning demand for child labour, triggered the deployment of the modern institution of childhood. As scientific rationalism rose in the nineteenth century, the new discipline of psychology brought with it new theories of child development which replaced previous views. Modern proponents of psychology redefined childhood as a set of ‘natural’ paths of development on the way to adulthood, and their theories have become entrenched in all our lives through ‘expert’ advice, child-rearing manuals, and the practices of teachers and welfare professionals ever since (Jackson 1982, 43)." [mijn nadruk] (42)

"All these changes in child-rearing practices and images of childhood have shaped our approaches towards children and sex, and towards children’s sexuality. Children were not sheltered from sexual acts, and the lack of any notion of privacy in everyday life during medieval times meant that up to the early seventeenth century, children of all social classes would be well aware of the physical facts of sex once they were past being toddlers. The seventeenth century was a turning point in relation to common habits such as multiple occupancy of beds and bedrooms, or lax attitudes towards children’s sex games. Therefore, whereas sexual references were common in the songs, jokes and stories children heard, and sexual humour was a matter of course during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many traditional texts — such as fairy tales — were subsequently withdrawn from the curriculum and resurfaced expurgated, as childish ‘innocence’ came to be equated with sexual ignorance. Gradually, the fear that any contact with sex sullies childhood innocence prevailed, and has lingered ever since, and in Victorian times this was reinforced by severe physical punishment (Jackson 1982, 47). Following that, the modern child has become the focus of innumerable projects that intend to safeguard it from physical, sexual or moral danger and ensure its ‘normal’ development." [mijn nadruk] (42-43)

"Concern over the young, from juvenile delinquency in the nineteenth century to sexual abuse today, constitutes moral panics, where certain persons or phenomena came to symbolize a range of social anxieties regarding threats to the established order and social values, the decline of morality and social discipline, and the subsequent need to take steps to prevent the spiralling of disorder. Professional groups — doctors, psychologists, social workers — used and exacerbated moral panics so that they could establish and increase their authority." [mijn nadruk] (43)

"Within the context of a ‘risk-averse’ culture, any talk that brings together children and sexuality is bound to be explosive, for children are constructed as being ‘at risk’ from all things sexual, whether that involves child pornography, sex education, children’s media encounters with sexual content or a so-called ‘sexualized’ popular culture. In fact, the degree of access to sexual information children have, and how or when it should be gained, is a contentious issue, as several instances that have grabbed public attention show." [mijn nadruk] (44-45)

"‘The family’ was invented as an ideological mechanism for reproducing a docile labour force while exploiting the domestic labour of women under the guise of love and duty. Familial ideology thus provided economic functions for capitalism: reproduction of the labour force, socialization of children, exploitation of the unpaid domestic labour of women and so on (Rose 1989/1999, 125–126)."(49)

"The idea that the family was outside public regulation was a myth, since the state establishes the legal framework for legitimate sexual relations and procreation, for children’s welfare in cases of custody and care, or when family property and disputes are concerned (1989/1999, 126– 127). In the early twentieth century, the ‘family’ and the relations within it were used as a social and socializing machine towards military, industrial and moral objectives — not through coercion and control, but through the construction of mothers who would be responsible for hygienic homes and healthy children. Thus the family served these social objectives as long as it operated as a voluntary and responsible machine for the rearing and moralizing of children (1989/1999, 130–133). Once this was accomplished, the images of normality constructed by expertise would serve as a yardstick by which individuals would measure and normalize their own lives and those of their children. In this way, families would be immersed in correct socialization without direct intervention by political authorities into the household. The difficult task of producing normality within the family would guarantee the search for the help and guidance of experts. This serves to show how the incorporation of the expert doctrines for the government of children is practised with our own free will. Socialization, in this sense, is the historically specific outcome of technologies for the government of the subjectivity of citizens (1989/1999, 133)." [mijn nadruk] (49-50)

"The availability of sexual information [voor kinderen - GdG] is hardly ever treated as a positive thing."(52)

"What all this attests to is that, within the public debate about the sexualization of young girls, the potential of popular culture and media for sexual education and learning, or for the assertion of agency and the construction of identity, usually goes missing. As if it wasn’t enough that sex education has always been contentious — with traditionalists usually claiming that it encourages young people to have sex ‘before they are ready’ and progressives responding by citing high levels of sexual information and low teenage pregnancies in countries like the Netherlands, in Britain and the US, sex education in the 1990s tended to concentrate on the protection angle — how not to get pregnant, how not to catch a sexually transmitted disease, how not to be sexually abused or raped (Mills 1992). Instilling normative heterosexuality, fear of disease or pregnancy, and presenting women as potential victims or men as sexually uncontrollable is what contemporary sexual education often amounts to. In fact, more often than not, the term conceals the specific social, educational and economic policies used, and the moral values secretly encouraged and discouraged. One thing that sex education largely ignores is the pleasurable side of sex — the fact that individuals engage in sexual activity in order to seek pleasure for themselves and their partners (Levine 2002). The dark suspicion of a direct link between knowing about sex and doing sex, has created over the years an enduring conundrum for sexual educators — how to inform about sex without flaming children’s lust." [mijn nadruk] (52)

(65) Chapter 4 - The Politics of Sexuality: The Intersection of Sexualization and Pornography

"Although pornography is not the same as sexualization, the public debate about children’s sexualization entails an inherent fear about the spread of pornographic culture and its consumption by young audiences. (...) Indeed, online pornography constitutes one of the most fiercely debated public issues, one that is widely considered as one of the ‘major’ threats that children and teenagers across the globe routinely face, and that we, as responsible parents and members of society, feel morally obliged to protect them from (Levine 2002). As a result, and within a broader context of ‘the politics of sexuality’, discussions of sexualization and discussions of porn are commonly collapsed in the public imagination, fuelled all the more by policy documents, which routinely bring up pornographic content when referring to sexualization (DCSF 2010, 36), the media1 and academia." [mijn nadruk] (65)

"It is my view that the rhetorical move (or ‘jump’, should I say) from sexualization to pornography (and back) when it comes to children and adolescents needs to be contextualized within a nineteenth-century philosophy that expected women (and young girls for that matter) to be confined to the private sphere while abiding to a strictly regulated heteronormativity, and which interpreted pornography as obscene.(...) I believe that in order to make sense of the debate about the sexualization of childhood, we first need to make sense of the way the culture of pornography developed across time and cultures." [mijn nadruk] (66)

Daarom wordt eerst een korte historische schets gegeven van de ontwikkeling van pornografie. Daarna gebeurt hetzelfde voor de ontwikkeling van wetenschappen als biologie en evolutietheorie en psychologie. Over de rol van EU Kids Online en vele andere instanties waarbij het perspectief toch altijd 'de bescherming van het kind' blijft.

"I see the following issues being played out at this point. To begin with, it transpires that policy rhetoric, as part of the overall public agenda, conflates three quite distinct areas: child pornography (i.e. the depiction of children in sexually explicit contexts), grooming (i.e. adults trying to lure children into sexual activity online), and online porn (i.e. adult pornography that children and teens may access, unwittingly or not (McKee et al. 2008). Inevitably, the message that comes across is that the consumption of pornography by young audiences is on a par with criminal activities such as child prostitution, child sex trafficking and abuse, or child sexual exploitation — no wonder, then, that pornography is characterized as ‘a corrupting flood’, from which we need to protect the youth (Maddison 2010). In addition, the social construction of children as essentially, and necessarily, asexual is beyond any challenge; the consumption of pornography is (re)presented, even within policy rhetoric, as a major threat to the very essence of childhood, synonymous with a ‘fall from grace’. Consider how such rhetoric brings together government departments and stakeholders from law enforcement, the industry, and the civic and public sectors across the world, and we can see how it is possible to talk about a globalized agenda of risk. The incorporation of and increasing reliance on various ‘child protection’ experts, consultants, specialists and centres, with a background in education, public health, criminology, social work, law, psychology, medicine or law enforcement in the overall discussion of children’s online experiences, gives the rhetoric a further slant towards risk management. [mijn nadruk] "(80)

"It is not a coincidence, in my view, that most of the talk about children’s and teenagers’ consumption of pornography and of a sexualized media culture is framed within a context of abuse (that comes from ‘a nexus of risk’ which includes pornography - trafficking - prostitution - sexual harassment - sexual exploitation - sexual work and the like)."(80)

"At this point, I want to further unpack the prevailing narrative of ‘risk’ when it comes to the intersection of children, sexuality, pornography and online technologies, which are accountable for the emergence of a cer- tain ‘social problem’ (that of children’s sexualization)."(81)

"In a world where ‘everything is child abuse’ (McKee 2010), there is a point to be raised about how ‘risk thinking’ reinforces the waning of inter-community trust, makes parents feel isolated and vulnerable, and cements a culture of suspicion and heightened risk assessment, thus leading to further social problems (Stokes 2009). ‘Paranoid parenting’ (Furedi 2001) envelops everything, from ‘stranger danger’, child abduction and child (sexual) abuse to meeting with strangers (where children are lured by unknown adults they have met online, in an offline meeting), pornography (either in the form of child pornography or in terms of children’s engagement with sexual content) and sexualization (as a result of an insipid, sexually saturated popular culture). Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow (2008) are among the few academics who have been vocal about the way parents, and all adults interacting with children in the UK, have been transformed in the regulatory and public imagination into potential child abusers within he last decade, barred from any contact with children until cleared by a database. This development, they continue, means that adults working with children (other parents, teachers, sports coaches, scoutmasters, busdrivers, Christmas Santas and other volunteers) are no longer trusted to engage with children on their own initiative — instead they are expected to be ‘CRB-checked’ (Criminal Records Bureau). Such vetting, however, not only encourages the cultural distancing of generations, but weakens the bonds of community life. Furedi is deemed controversial and his views are widely and publicly contested, yet I think the deeper implications of what he argues are worth considering." [mijn nadruk] (84-85)

"However, the end result of this culture of protectionism is that no-one is immune from its governmentalizing effects. Risk becomes a shared culture and a unifying speech genre within which to make sense of children’s place in the world. Risk assessment — and the coping strategies for risky endeavours and experiences — becomes a value system in itself, and informs interviews with children and parents (or any other adult) alike. In what follows, I will offer a critical reading of the latest EU Kids Online qualitative findings on (what are constructed as) ‘online problematic situations for children’ (Smahel and Wright 2014)."(87-88)

(99) Chapter 5 - Children’s Encounters with Sexual Content: Different Readings of Cross-Country Empirical Evidence

"As I argued in the previous chapter, the EU Kids Online research follows the children-go-online mode of research, which focuses on children’s voices — via their responses to survey questionnaires, interviews and focus groups — and provides contextualized discussions of children’s reported experiences with sexual content (Tsaliki et al. 2014)."(99)

"In its classification of children’s experiences in terms of risks and opportunities along the lines of content, contact and conduct (Hasebrink et al. 2009), the EU Kids Online model considers encounters with sexual content as a potentially risky experience, with a concomitant probability of harm."(100)

"Only a small minority of children in Europe who have encountered sexual content online were bothered by the experience ..."(103)

"Having said that, adopting a mass communication approach means that EU Kids Online reads children’s voices within the dominant, hegemonic approach (as analysed in Chaps. 3 and 4), where children are seen facing a variety of risks."(106)

"Despite the above theorizing, what I believe is lacking from the EU Kids Online perspective in this report is a social constructionist-cum-cultural studies contextualization of childhood and children’s sexuality. This would have allowed for a more rounded and nuanced understanding of the social representation of children’s encounters and experiences with sexual content and communication than as ‘problematic online situations’. As it happens, the entire discussion about ‘proactive problem-preventing strategies’ — critical thinking, strategizing and suggesting (‘cognitive strategies’); seeking and providing information and support (‘communicative strategies’); ‘disengagement’ from talking about sexual content and communication (2014, 83–85) — relies on a(n established) notion of child sexuality as inherently problematic. To illustrate, when it comes to children’s reporting of ‘responsibility for sexting incidents’, accountability is placed on girls who take sexy pictures of themselves:" [mijn nadruk] (109)

"The social construction of childhood innocence (associated with shunning sex) is ubiquitous, across ages and national contexts."(111)

[In wat ik zo lees over al die onderzoeken zie ik heel veel antwoorden bij betrokken kinderen vanuit sociale wenselijkheid. Je leest - zoals Tsalikei ook aanduidt - de stemmen van de ouders, van andere volwassenen, en van de media.]

"Children are interpellated by the dominant popular discourse of the- child-at-risk, hence they give currency to the follow-up discourse, of the-child-in-need-of-protection and reiterate it though their performance of the ‘iconic’ child."(130)

(135) Chapter 6 - Revisiting the Sexualization-of-Young-Girls Debate, Case Study One: Discourses of Stardom and Femininity Among Greek Tween Girls

"Following the discussion of popular culture and moral panics (Chap. 3), and of the way the entertainment media are seen to promote the sexualization of young girls (Chap. 2), I wish to challenge the prevailing views and assumptions about the incendiary effects of sexualized and commercialized culture on young pre-teen girls. In that sense, I argue, young girls’ consumption of popular culture illustrates how the entertainment media, rather than being construed as risk-laden, ‘self-directed’ leisure (Chap. 3 ), can be used towards the management of an ethical self, and as part of a broader identity work where issues of self-governance, appropriateness, taste and aesthetics are raised."(135)

"The ‘tween’, on the other hand, is seen to occupy a wider age range — 7 or 8 to 13 or 14 — yet is the object of similar public anxieties about female sexuality and self-representation as the ‘subteen’"(137)

Beschrijving van de opzet van haar onderzoek.

"Out of a variety of themes that emerged during the focus group interviews, this chapter discusses the consumption of popular culture through pre-teen girls’ discursive accounts of stardom and identity work. By looking into how girls read and talk about popular culture, multiple subject positions, maps of meanings and interpretative repertoires emerge about body aesthetics, appropriateness, taste, media literacy, the ethical self, and the construction of an attractive and sexual self."(139)

"... this chapter has shown that young tweens exhibit a variety of diverse engagements with, and readings and practices of popular culture — contrary to prevailing moral panics about viral sexualization. And while I agree that the notion of agentic pre-teens needs to be applied with ‘a pinch of salt’ — for the social context of the interview, conducted by adults, at school (where tweens negotiate peer codes that echo normative heterosexuality), determines the kinds of answers children give (Buckingham 1993) — I argue that talking to pre-teen girls reveals a variety of interpretative repertoires and the intricate ways in which they make sense of stardom, discuss taste, fashion, body aesthetics and technologies of sexiness, and construct a notion of appropriateness and feminine selfhood, irrespective of age and social class. In that process, the role of stardom and celebrityhood is paramount, for celebrities and stars carry out their pedagogical task and teach tweens the narratives of sexual attractiveness, femininity and the ethical self (through their consumption of popular culture)." [mijn nadruk] (160)

(165) Chapter 7 - Revisiting the Sexualization-of-Young-Girls Debate, Case Study Two: Self-Presentation in Girls’ Dress-Up and Make-Over Online Gaming Practices in Greece

"In this chapter, however, I want to explore the maps of meanings and the interpretative repertoires regarding the child consumer as these derive from young tween girls’ online gaming practices. In other words, I want to use the girls’ consumption of popular culture (dress-up and make-over gaming sites, that is) in order to extrapolate about how they position themselves as consumers of fashion styles, and through that how they negotiate the presentation of their selves (Goffman 1959)."(166)

"In order to draw the wider picture, I will now turn to discuss the notion of ‘consumption’ before I proceed with the qualitative study of Greek tween girls’ dress-up and make-over gaming practices."(166)

"Here lies, I believe, one of the broader issues at work when discussing the sexualization of young children. We are caught up in a loop where we view sexualization as the result of certain consumption practices — fashion, stardom, music and their modes of representation (broadcast, print and online media). While we expect children to be part of consumer society, at the same time we treat consumption with suspicion; the fact that children (at least in the West) are no longer part of productive labour, means that the sphere of consumption is their only outlet for identity construction and expression. That may be so, yet there is the added risk that children (perceived as inherently innocent, naïve and lacking in experience) may make the wrong consumption choices, and as a result deviate and end up being marginalized. Hence, we view them as ‘flawed consumers’ not on the grounds of their lack of economic capital,3 but because we tend to pathologize their consumption as a matter of principle. In this sense, excessive participation in an ‘overtly sexualized’ popular culture (i.e. the fashion industry, advertising, video clips, pop idols and so on) may yield aesthetically impoverished—and socially reprimandable—results for those concerned." [mijn nadruk] (168)

"Despite the establishment of children’s citizenship and participation rights (Willow et al. 2004), it seems that active citizenship for children does not include consumption rights — particularly when consumption is linked with sexual knowledge or learning, or when it is seen to lead to unwarranted commercialization (through fashion or advertising for example)."(170)

(209) Chapter 8 - Conclusions

Eerst wordt een samenvatting per hoofdstuk gegeven.

[Ook hierna veel herhaling van eerdere standpunten en alles in dat typische wat abstracte taalgebruik.]

"In this way, the notion of childhood innocence is closely related to sexual ignorance and, by extension, to morality, and becomes an end in itself. This shows not only that ideas about children’s sexuality are culturally sanctioned, but also that the privileging of innocence as a central childhood tenet augurs a regression to Victorian times."(220)