Figure . Shirley Temple and Jack Haley in a Publicity Still for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Dir

Figure . Shirley Temple and Jack Haley in a publicity still for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (dir. Allan Dwan, US, ) Discipline and Pleasure: Shirley Temple and the Spectacle of Child Loving Kristen Hatch Contemporary viewers are likely to nd the image of Shirley Tem- ple riding Jack Haley perverse (g. ). Haley is on his hands and knees, straddled by the child, who swishes a riding crop against his backside and loosely holds a leather strap around his neck.1 Temple’s famous dimples and curls frame a face that seems too knowing for such a young girl. Her half- closed eyes look down slyly at the man, while her lips turn up into a disconcerting grin. How could we not see in this a pedophilic fantasy of domination and submission? And yet it is impossible to believe that Twentieth Century-Fox would deliberately stage its highest- grossing star in such a disturbing photograph. In The Structure of Scientic Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn draws upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of the gestalt shift produced by a duck- rabbit — an image that appears as a duck or a rabbit depending on where one’s focus falls (g. ) — to describe the effects of a paradigm shift in scientic thinking. Practicing in different worlds, [the proponents of competing paradigms] see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything Camera Obscura , Volume , Number ./- © by Camera Obscura Published by Duke University Press • Camera Obscura they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of Figure . Duck- rabbit. When focus falls to the left of the image, it appears scientists may occasionally seem 2 to be a duck. When focus falls to the intuitively obvious to another. right, it appears as a rabbit. Joseph Jastrow, “The Mind’s Eye,” Popular In other words, two groups Science Monthly () on opposite sides of a paradigm will look at the same image and see two completely different things. Each view is equally true because our paradigms are the frameworks through which we evaluate the veracity of a claim. For the same reason, it can be difcult to see the truths produced within paradigms we do not share or to see beyond the truths produced by our own paradigms. The photograph of Temple riding Haley operates like the duck- rabbit, producing two entirely different sets of meanings, because our culture has undergone a paradigm shift regarding childhood. Whereas we now understand children to be imperiled by adult male sexuality, childhood innocence once seemed invio- lable. Just as it is very difcult for us to see anything other than pedophilia in this photograph, it would have been equally difcult for early twentieth- century audiences to see the same image as anything but benign. The man in the photo is white, well-dressed, and apparently middle class, with clean white cuffs held together neatly by cufinks, his curly hair tamed by a generous helping of pomade. He wears a suit, the uniform of the ofce rather than the home, and the two are posed as though caught in the act of play- ing horsey, a game in which the man submits his powerful body to the demands of the tiny child. It is a game that Temple played with adult male costars in several lms, in which this play signied the man’s capitulation to the child’s charms. For early twentieth- century audiences, the image is likely to have represented child loving rather than pedophilia.3 And while audiences might have seen Discipline and Pleasure • submission in the image, this submission would not have conjured sexualized images of bondage and domination but rather would have suggested the man’s self-discipline. Given the prominent role that adult men played in Tem- ple’s lms and publicity, it is difcult not to read her as a “post– Production Code sex kitten” or the “Lolita of repressed Depression audiences.”4 However, this reading rests on an understanding of childhood and adult male sexuality that was not widely available to Depression- era audiences; Temple’s stardom relied on a refusal to recognize the possibility that white men might be aroused by the young girl. Certainly, an unwillingness to acknowledge white men’s capacity to sexually abuse children is dangerous. However, the discourse of pedophilia is also dangerous. The endangered child is at the center of what Lauren Berlant identies as a discourse of “infantile citizenship” and what Lee Edelman polemically decries as the tyranny of futurity.5 The imperative to protect children from sexual danger, both real and imagined, has been the driving force behind a range of laws that work to limit sexual expression and curtail the rights of adults, particularly gay men, more than they do to protect children.6 Indeed, the numerous parallels in the devel- opment of legal and scientic discourses about homosexuality and pedophilia throughout the twentieth century should make us deeply suspicious of the idea of pedophilia that dominates political and popular discourse today. At the same time, the gure of the sexually endangered child forecloses the child’s own subjectivity, particularly with regard to sexuality. It is, therefore, important to denaturalize the gure of the imperiled, innocent child in order to drain it of its iconic power. One means of denaturalizing the iconic imperiled child is to situate this gure as the product of a paradigm that emerged at a specic historical moment rather than imagine it to be the expression of a timeless truth. In fact, Shirley Temple’s stardom stood at the juncture of two paradigms. It was built upon a fairly stable idea of adult male affection that had dominated publicity about girl stars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, it risked being undone by an emergent discourse of pedophilia and child endangerment, a discourse that Temple’s studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, actively worked to suppress. • Camera Obscura In this essay, I demonstrate that Temple’s stardom closely conformed to a model that had been developed in relation to girl stars during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a model in which male fandom prominently gured. Men played a central role in the publicity for these girl stars because men’s love for little girls was imagined to be socially productive rather than perverse; men’s child loving signaled their willingness to indulge in sentimental pleasures rather than sexual ones. Whereas mass culture was often accused of appealing to men’s libidinous desires, male fandom for child stars offered the promise that men were eager to indulge in a worshipful adoration of the child. In this sense, the girl star was imagined to serve a disciplinary function; stories abounded of men reformed by virtue of their love of little girls. Indeed, the fantasy of men enthralled by Shirley Temple was particularly appealing during the Depression. However, even as Shirley Temple was celebrated for her ability to lure men to the movie theater, a new paradigm was beginning to emerge, one that regured her sentimental appeal as sexual. A Very Healthy Sort of Worship When Shirley Temple initially emerged as one of Hollywood’s most popular stars, an adult man who did not adore Shirley Temple was perceived as somewhat aberrant. In , one newspaper columnist went in search of the rare man who was not a Temple fan. When he nally found one at the ofces of the New York Times, readers were assured, “He’s normal otherwise, he just doesn’t like Shirley Temple.”7 In fact, far from trying to obscure the elements of her films that seem perverse to contemporary audiences — her kissing and cuddling adult costars, crooning love songs to them, rubbing her dimpled cheeks against their grizzled ones — Twentieth Century-Fox deliberately marketed Temple’s lms as love stories between the girl and middle- aged men, going so far as to portray her as a little seductress who captures the hearts of her adult male coworkers as well as the men in the audi- ence. Newspaper ads for The Little Colonel (dir. David Butler, US, ) use photographs of Temple and Lionel Barrymore looking lovingly into one another’s eyes along with tag lines that describe Discipline and Pleasure • the pair as though they were star- crossed lovers: “She’s a child of the gallant South. He’s a crusty silver- haired veteran. Love tears them apart — then brings them together again!”8 The press- book offers advertisements that suggest romance as much as they do familial love: “He responds to her and gradually comes to love her, before he learns that she is his grandchild.” Likewise, Dimples (dir. William A. Seiter, US, ) was advertised as a love story between Temple and her costar, Frank Morgan: “A new somebody for her to love . and what fun he is! She’s an irresistible minstrel! He’s an incorrigible scamp! And even the rowdy Bowery can’t part these sweethearts.”9 Men’s adoration of Temple was not inciden- tal to her publicity but rather a central element of her stardom. It is worth examining why male fandom gured so prominently in Temple’s star discourse and what men’s pleasure in images of young girls signied to audiences who did not perceive it as a sign of pedophilic desire.

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