Drawing on historical and contemporary reform narratives, we highlight the implications of and problems with the discourse of protection and its conceptualization of childhood sexuality. Within the reform materials discussed, the child's sexuality is constructed as the result of a dangerous and socially unacceptable outside stimulus, and as a result, any realization of subjective sexual expression is rendered abhorrent and in need of adult intervention. It is our contention that sexual agency is unthinkable and ultimately unattainable within this model. Drawing on the recent work of Judith Butler we forward her theory of recognition as a framework for rethinking the sexuality of children. We argue that foregrounding recognition will help us create a cultural context that fosters sexual agency and in so doing promotes the sexual citizenship of children.
This article explores issues of space, surveillance and social control in an exotic dance club in the New England area. Exotic dancers are subject to social control mechanisms by the owner of the club and enforced by the management via surveillance technologies and club "rules." Although these rules can be repressive for dancers, the women who work in the club nd ways to subvert and resist social control through strategies of evasion and enlisting the complicity of regular customers. The ndings emerge from eighteen months of participant observation and ethnographic research and are theoretically informed by poststructural theory. **
Drawing on primary materials from the United States, England and Australia, we explore the complex and contradictory manner in which the sexual child and innocence was constructed and made intelligible within social purity discourses in the mid 19 th to early 20 th century. The sexuality of the child was paradoxically conceptualized as a ubiquitous and boundless erotic force and as a pliable site for pedagogical intervention. We contend that the discursive production of the corrupt sexual companion, within purity literature, was an attempt to disentangle purity reformers' ambivalent construction of childhood sexuality as well as larger cultural anxieties about modern urban living. The sexual child validated social purity narratives because it was the category against which innocence was defined and made possible. 1
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