Sex, Popular Beliefs and Culture: Discourses on the Sexual Child

We cannot discuss childhood sexuality without beginning with a discussion of childhood: the child and the sexual child became the focus of examination and discussion at roughly the same historical moment. As in accounts of adult sexuality, and especially adult female sexuality, embedded characterizations of one infuse assumptions of the other. Thus, what the child is assumed to be (for example, innocent, corruptible) reflects qualities inherent in perceptions of childhood. Until relatively recently, childhood was inhabited by a passive entity, an ontological space constructed with reference to the adult world. This point has been critically explored by the second generation of social constructionists of childhood. For these later theorists, childhood must be understood as more contextual and reflexive, the child within it less passive and more agentic. Of late, scholars have developed this notion of agency in the context of some more uncomfortable aspects of the adult-child distinction - the fascination and erotic attraction enveloped in this relationship, and the witting or unwitting complicity of the adult world with this. The sensuous, the sexual (as opposed to sexualized), and the knowing child are illuminated in these studies - the genie had been let out of the bottle! The theoretical frameworks offered by nearly fifty years of scholarship confirm our choice to discuss childhood sexuality as a series of interlocking and historically contingent discourses. The terms under which the child was distinguished as a specific entity set boundaries around and a foundation for characterizations of childhood sexuality from the beginning. A key feature of this distinctiveness was its status of being in transition, of essential incompleteness. Seeing the child as the unformed but "to-be-adult" ensured that its sexuality would be in some way derived from, and referential to, that of the adult. Yet in what follows it will become evident that since the development of the concept of childhood, the child was never just an incomplete adult. Across the range of discourses that make up this chapter it will be apparent that behind the child seen as the "developing adult" were characteristics and potentialities that offered grounds for anxiety. Specifically (and this was evident first in the more benign articulations of the eighteenth-century exponents of pedagogy), the child was understood as closer to nature. While this was seen as a positive, even romantic, association, this connection also rendered both the mind and body of the child a fertile terrain for observation, classification, and concern.