Notities bij boeken

Steven ANGELIDES
"Historicizing affect, psychoanalyzing history - Pedophilia and the discourse of child sexuality"
in: Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 46(1/2) 2003

[Naar aanleiding van zijn boek The Fear of Child Sexuality - Young People, Sex, and Agency:]

Editorial

"It is therefore very brave of Steven Angelides, an academic at La Trobe University in Australia, to tackle the topic. He is very clear about his ethical stance: he opposes all attempts to normalise paedophilia. He is also not primarily interested in the eroticisation of children in advertising and the mass media: that story has already been told by scholars such as James Kincaid in Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (1998). Rather, he is mainly concerned with the sexual agency of teenagers themselves: they are not always passive recipients of the adult sexualised gaze, he observes, but can “look back”.

Angelides wants readers to start having serious discussions about the harms that can result from denying the complex sexual desires of young people. He contends that the refusal to openly discuss the issue leaves us incapable of addressing urgent social problems, including child sexual abuse, inadequate and ineffective sex education, sexting and moral panics – such as those surrounding teacher-pupil relationships." [mijn nadruk]

[Dat is in ieder geval duidelijk.]

Abstract

"Within the last two decades in Australia, Britain, and the United States, we have seen a veritable explosion of cultural panic regarding the problem of pedophilia. Scarcely a day passes without some mention in the media of predatory pedophiles or organized pedophile networks. Many social constructionist historians and sociologists have described this incitement to discourse as indicative of a moral panic. The question that concerns me in this article is: If this incitement to discourse is indicative of a moral panic, to what does the panic refer?"(79)

[Een 'morele paniek' is - aldus de Wikipedia - "een buitenproportionele, vijandige en gemediatiseerde reactie op een situatie of technologie, een persoon of groep, die waarden en normen lijken te bedreigen. Het begrip verklaart maatschappelijke angstreacties die niet in verhouding staan tot de ernst, het risico, de schade of de dreiging." Zo'n morele paniek lijkt er dus te zijn over 'pedofilie'. Maar waarover gaat die morele paniek nu eigenlijk, zo vraagt Angelides zich af. En is die angst terecht?]

Het artikel

"To even raise the question of an irrational fear of pedophilia is abhorrent to many."(80)

"Pedophilia has become a highly explosive and emotive key cultural term."(81)

"Together, Young and Cohen described moral panics as the escalating effects created by the mobilization of the media, public opinion, and various agents of social control around a perceived social problem."(81)

[In dit geval worden 'pedofielen' dus als een bedreiging gezien van bepaalde maatschappeljke waarden en belangen. Welke zijn dat? Waarom wordt dat zo ervaren?]

"Short of some tacit moral presumption, we are left with no explanation of exactly why anxiety, panic, and hysteria emerge around the issue of pedophilia." [mijn nadruk] (82)

"What remains to be determined is precisely why certain groups and individuals react with anxiety and panic and others do not. Nothing in the theory of moral panic enables us to understand the relationship between social, material and discursive change and the psychology of affect, or emotion. The reason for this is that many social constructionist theorists frequently assume, wittingly or otherwise, that individual and group psychology is the one-way effect of material and discursive conditions. (...) The contemporary ‘crisis’ surrounding pedophilia, in my opinion, provides an instructive, indeed exemplary, case study for interrogating the theory of moral panics and for historicizing and theorizing the place of affect in social and discursive relations." [mijn nadruk] (83)

"It would be impossible, therefore, to explain why certain interest groups are in fact able to “strike a chord” among various publics and what this chord is. Identifying changing material and sociopolitical conditions is not sufficient to answer this question, as these tell us nothing about the dynamics of human psychology. Nor is there any uniform subjective response to these phenomena; not everyone exhibits panic responses."(85)

"In order to understand the relationship between changing social trends and anxiety, it is necessary to analyze how anxiety is working at the level of the individual and the group. The unmistakably high level of affect or emotion associated with almost any pedophilia discussion, in my view, clearly points to the work of powerful unconscious forces." [mijn nadruk] (87)

[Tja, als je in onbewuste krachten gelooft. Is Angelides psychoanalyticus? Nee, maar hij gebruikt de theorie en plaatst praten over pedofilie en de reacties daarbij in een neurotische context, wat dat ook moge zijn.]

"Espousing a concept of infantile sexuality is certainly not new. Various sociological, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and legal discourses have acknowledged this fact for a good part of the twentieth century. However, as I have argued elsewhere, with the advent of the feminist discourse of child sexual abuse in the 1980s, there has been a monumental historical shift in which there has been a steady repudiation of any substantive concept or discourse of child sexuality. The notion of childhood sexual innocence became paramount in the 1980s, in large part through the confluence of feminist anti-rape and anti-pornography movements and the New Right backlash against the sexual excesses of the sexual and gay revolutions." [mijn nadruk] (89)

"Feminists were also concerned to challenge notions that women and children subjected to rape and sexual abuse were somehow complicit in the crime (by “asking for it” or fabricating charges), or that child prostitutes and children in child pornography could willingly consent to commercial sex. Concepts of the innocent, blameless, and unconsenting “victim” and the “survivor” of rape and sexual abuse became key cultural terms. In earlier decades, it was easy to find representations of child sexuality and of sexually “seductive” and “flirtatious” children in a range of sociological, psychological, and legal discourses. Indeed, these ideas were commonplace in all earlier decades of the century, even during the height of the sex crime panics in the 1910s and 1940s. As late as the mid-1970s, psychiatric theories continued to cite evidence that young children are capable of seduction, and commonly do so. In canvassing psychiatric literature in his 1974 Guide to Psychiatry, Myre Sim found it “surprising” how “little promiscuous children are affected by their experiences [of sex with adults], and how most settle down to become demure housewives. It is of interest that Henriques lists two categories – the unaffected and the guilty – and that seems to put the matter in a nutshell.” Or consider this quotation from a 1970 sex education text, The Facts of Sex: There is the incontrovertible fact, very hard for some of us to accept, that in certain cases it is not the man who inaugurates the trouble. The novel Lolita . . . describes what may well happen. A girl of twelve or so, is already endowed with a good deal of sexual desire and also can take pride in her “conquests.” Perhaps, in all innocence, she is the temptress and not the man." [mijn nadruk] (90)

"In no way do I wish to imply that we should return to pre-1980s notions of sexually seductive and flirtatious children. I am merely registering the fact that, however problematic, the use of such concepts nonetheless served as an articulation of a signifier of child sexuality, and that along with the rejection of the notions of child seductiveness and flirtatiousness has been a rejection of almost any notion of child sexuality." [mijn nadruk] (90-91)

"Ours has become a culture of denial and silence with regard to child sexuality. (...) The time has come to reopen dialogue on the topic of repression and childhood sexuality."(91)

[Die opvattingen van feministes over verleidende kinderen waren dus normatief, empirisch was er gezien alle mogelijke bronnen geen twijfel over. Waarom zouden we het eens zijn met mensen die de feiten ontkennen of niet willen dat die feiten bestaan? Waarom doet Angelides hier zo voorzichtig?
Het wonderlijke is dat Angelides de hele tijd sociale verklaringen geeft voor bepaalde ontwikkelingen ondanks zijn kritiek erop en ondanks zijn pleidooi voor het bestuderen van hoe de zaken psychologisch liggen. Dat de cultuur de eigen seksualiteit van kinderen ontkent en verzwijgt is het gevolg van maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen als het toenmalige feminisme die hoe dan ook al samengingen met 'moral panic'. Het is een taboe geworden en het doorbreken van dat taboe maakt mensen boos omdat hun zekerheden aangetast worden, omdat hun geloof niet blijkt te kloppen en ze feiten niet echt kunnen ontkennen.]

[Hierna beschrijft Angelides de psychoanalytische ideeën over kinderlijke seksualiteit en zo en blijft daarbij even vaag als alle psychoanalytici. Zinloos verhaal, richt zich ook nog eens alleen op de gevoelens tussen ouders en kinderen. Dan krijg je dit:]

"As unfashionable as it may be to employ aspects of classical psychoanalysis, I argue that pedophilia stirs up reminders of the traumatic origins of sexuality (return of the repressed) and that the irrational social response to the threat pedophilia is seen to pose is in part an attempt to avoid confronting the production and prohibition of incestuous and pedophilic desires. In this way, the category of the pedophile might, in part, be seen as a convenient scapegoat that acts as a poison container for the restaging and projection of traumas. Social hysteria about pedophilia might also, in part, be seen as an attempt to express the very incestuous and pedophilic desires that are prohibited, as well as the displaced articulation of the erotics of childhood sexuality." [mijn nadruk] (95-96)

[Of zoals in de conclusie:]

"I have argued that the primal trauma of childhood sexuality and its intra-psychic repression are at the heart of our neurotic responses to pedophilia. My argument is that the intra-psychic repression of infantile sexuality (desire, loss, rage, guilt, shame, and grief) is reactivated by pedophilia, because the signifier of pedophilia is situated in such close proximity, associatively and metonymically, to the repressed elements of childhood sexuality. Pedophilia, in other words, is the closest reminder we have of the trauma of childhood sexuality."(99)