Imagining intergenerationality: Representation and rhetoric in the pedophile movie

GLQ

Volumn 13, Issue 2-3, 2007, Pages 369-385

  Davies, Jon ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248561813     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2006-038     Document Type: Review

References (24)

1. "What's the worst thing you ever did?"
2. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.
3. Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 29.
4. Beyond the references cited in this essay, see Steven Angelides, "Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Child Sexuality," GLQ 10 (2004):141-77; Lauren Berlant, The. Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds., Curiouaer: On the Queerness of Children (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Stan Persky and John Dixon, On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech, and the Robin Sharpe Case (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2001); and Matthew Rottnek, ed., Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Non-conformity and Homosexual Childhood (New York: New York University Press, 1999). See also John Greyson's groundbreaking art video documentary After the Bath (1995), which exposed the "kiddie porn ring" engineered by the police in London, Ontario, to crack down on teenage male prostitution and consensual gay sex. It is available through Vtape at www.vtape.org.
5. Kevin Ohi, "Molestation 101: Child Abuse, Homophobia, and The Boys of St. Vincent," GLQ 6 (2000): 195-248. Hereafter cited in the text.
6. On July 20, 2005, Bill C-2 received Royal Assent, strengthening Canada's stringent child pornography laws, which already criminalize the sexual depictions of people who seem to be under eighteen as well as covering nonindexical works of the imagination such as writing. The new law further broadens, abstracts, and mystifies the definition of child pornography, putting the onus on accused producers to defend the "legitimacy" of their work's value (to science, medicine, education, and, most fickle of all, art) and to prove that it does not cause "undue risk of harm" to children.
7. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously ended his concurring opinion in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio by stating that when it comes to hardcore pornography, "I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that." See "Stewart, J., Concurring Opinion, Jacobellis v. Ohio" Legal Information Institute: Supreme Court Collection, Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/ USSC_CR_0378_0184_ZCl.html (accessed July 23, 2006).
8. WiredSafety, "Child Exploitation Division," WiredSafety, www.wiredsafety.org/divisions/child_ex.html (accessed July 31, 2005).
9. Richard D. Mohr, "The Pedophilia of Everyday Life," in Bruhm and Hurley, Curiouser, 21.
10. Maggie Farley, "Sifting Clues to an Unsmiling Girl," L.A. Times, April 27, 2005, www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg- photo27apr27.story (accessed July 10, 2005). In 2005 Toronto police widely disseminated doctored child pornography through the mass media to publicize the setting in which the photographed sexual abuse of a young girl took place so as to help lead to her rescue. Ingeniously, the police digitally removed the girl from her surroundings, leaving only bare rooms, which were identified by members of the public - within an hour of their publication, apparently - as belonging to a hotel owned by that most beloved of childhood dreamlands, Disney World in Orlando.
11. Linda Williams, "Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction," in Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4-5.
12. Mohr, "Pedophilia," 17.
13. They follow on the heels of other recent pedophile movies such as Sleepers (dir. Barry Levinson, USA; 1996), the groundbreaking Happiness (dir. Todd Solondz, USA; 1998), The Jaundiced Eye (dir. Nonny de la Peña, USA; 1999), LIE. (dir. Michael Cuesta, USA; 2001), Capturing the Friedmans (dir. Andrew Jarecki, USA; 2003), and Mystic River (dir. Clint Eastwood, USA; 2003).
14. The quotations and motivations attributed to Kassell are from her commentary on The Woodsman DVD (Alliance, 2005).
15. Elizabeth Freeman pointed out to me during the editing of this piece that this scene also lets slip "the presence of child molestation in supposedly healthy, heterosexual sports culture."
16. Directors of pedophile movies often anxiously invoke their valiant efforts to protect the child actors involved, under the presumption that simply reenacting a fictional intergenerational sexual experience could have the same effects as actually undergoing it. These defenses seriously underestimate the agency and coping skills of young people who are in all likelihood already well schooled in our culture's primary sexual obsession.
17. JT LeRoy, that hero of the marginalized, enigmatic, and industrious force for opening up the discourse around childhood sexuality, was revealed to be a fictional character himself in late 2005. For more details, see Stephen Beachy, "Who Is the Real JT LeRoy? A Search for the True Identity of a Great Literary Hustler," New York Magazine, October 17, 2005, www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/14718/ (accessed April 11, 2006).
18. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), 194.
19. Edelman, No Future, 4.
20. Lauren Berlant, "Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material)," in Bruhm and Hurley, Curiouser, 67.
21. Henry A. Giroux says this about the real-world effects of this phenomenon: "In an endless array of mass media advertisements, innocence is reduced to an aesthetic or a psychological trope that prompts adults to find their 'inner child,' adopt teen fashions, and buy a range of services designed to make them look younger. This type of adult infantilization enables them to identify with youth while it simultaneously empties adulthood of its political, economic, and social responsibilities and educative functions. Too many adults rely on the commercial language of self-help and character formation to further their own self-obsession while ignoring the social problems they create for kids, especially for those who are disadvantaged by virtue of their class, gender, or race. Such indifference allows adults to impose on young people the demands and responsibilities they themselves have abandoned" (Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture [New York: St. Martin's, 2000], 18).
22. Edelman, No Future, 21.
23. Kincaid, Child-Loving, 15.
24. I am referring, of course, to the evocative title of Bruhm and Hurley's groundbreaking 2004 anthology, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.