Copyright by Casey Douglas Mckittrick 2005
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Copyright by Casey Douglas McKittrick 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Casey Douglas McKittrick certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Juvenile Desires: The Child as Subject, Object, and Mise-en-Scène In Contemporary American Culture Committee: _______________________________ Ann Cvetkovich, Supervisor _______________________________ Janet Staiger, Co-Supervisor ________________________________ Phillip Barrish ________________________________ Neville Hoad ________________________________ Lisa Moore Juvenile Desires: The Child as Subject, Object, and Mise-en-Scène in Contemporary American Culture by Casey Douglas McKittrick, B. A., M. A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August, 2005 For Sandra and Douglas McKittrick Acknowledgements I am indebted to many wonderful and inspiring people for the completion of this dissertation. My advising committee provided exceptional support, guidance, and food for thought. For their patient and vital direction, I thank Ann Cvetkovich, Janet Staiger, Neville Hoad, Lisa Moore, Phil Barrish, and Sabrina Barton. Many colleagues offered a much needed hand and ear at various stages of the project—too many, in fact, to mention here fully. However, I must express my appreciation and affection for my dissertation group, particularly Lee Rumbarger, as well as Alex Barron, Vimala Pasupathi, Eve Dunbar, Miriam Schacht, Colleen Hynes, George Waddington, Neelum Wadhwani, Doug Norman, Jane Park, and, of course, Charlie’s. v Juvenile Desires: The Child as Subject, Object, and Mise-en-Scène in Contemporary American Culture Publication No.____________ Casey Douglas McKittrick, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisors: Ann Cvetkovich and Janet Staiger Scholarship on the cultural status of the child in America has taken diverse and fruitful forms, yet there exists a significant ellipsis within theories of filmic spectatorship regarding cinematic children. This study engages the child figure’s relation to the cinematic apparatus and analyzes spectator responses to the child’s presentation as a desiring subject and desired object. Within contemporary American culture, the child figure generates at once a mise-en-scène of desire and a mise-en-abime of potential stigmatization, self-abjection and shame. The vexed relation to the image of the child that characterizes the contemporary adult citizen and, more pointedly, the adult spectator, is a symptom of the contradictory discourses of childhood at play in contemporary American media and within its political bodies. The Columbine shootings, the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, the Catholic Church scandals, many well- publicized child abductions, and countless occurrences over the past decade have produced a climate of moral panic over children’s endangerment. Yet, more than ever, the eroticization of children’s bodies has inundated cinematic and other media productions, generating anxieties within the adult spectator concerning the propriety of gazing at children. vi Juvenile Desires suggests that the dissonances produced by the contradictory signposts of moral panic and sexual objectification have too often given rise to a homophobically polarizing model of the adult spectator: one the one hand, the ostensibly heterosexual spectator whose relation to the child image is aesthetically distanced, moral, and nostalgic; and on the other, a perverse, likely homosexual spectator whose relation is libidinal, regressive, and genitally oriented. As a theoretical intervention and a reception study, this dissertation examines the term pedophilia as one both culturally over-determined and critically under-investigated. The deployment of the term pedophilia has the rhetorical effect of reducing the complex relations sustained among adult spectators and children to a space of inarticulate abjection or criminality. The dissertation proposes that a deconstructive queer theory can unsettle the recalcitrant association of pedophilia with homosexual pathology, and thereby afford a complex and nuanced account of the roles cinematic children play in generating visual and narrative pleasure across gendered and sexually oriented subject positions. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1 The Queerness of Child-Gazing………………………………………………….15 Chapter 2 The Child Who Knew Too Much: Childhood Alterity and the Case of Haley Joel Osment……………………………………………….57 Chapter 3 Shaping Pedophilic Discourse: American Beauty and Happiness……………….91 Chapter 4 Ambivalence, Anxiety, and the Spectacle of the Nymphet/Living Doll………….120 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..153 Vita………………………………………………………………………………….160 viii INTRODUCTION Henry Jenkins, in his prefatory remarks to his anthology The Children’s Culture Reader, teases out the two predominant rhetorical figures that mark politically partisan discussions of the child in America. Republican parlance, he says, tends to situate the child within a metaphorical fort always under attack. Within the ideology of family values, “the innocent child is most often figured in relation to the past, threatened by the prospect of unregulated change, endangered by modernity, and denied things previous generations took for granted.”1 He points out that the dominating metaphor of the Democratic agenda, delivered through Hillary Clinton’s appropriation of an Afrocentric pedagogical proverb, is that of the village. According to Jenkins, the village “with its evocation of the organic communities of small-town American life, depends upon the historic linkage of childhood innocence to pastoralism (an image that can be traced back to Rousseau and the Romantics).”2 A fort under siege, a disbanded village—these two images produce a sense of the child as currently displaced. For both political parties, American childhood is in the wrong place at the wrong time. The metaphors discussed here encapsulate so much of the sentiment surrounding the politicized situation of American children and the adult citizen-subject’s relation to them. Regardless of the conversation—be it drug abuse, childhood sexuality, eating disorders, teen violence—the consensus is that America is losing or has lost its children. 1 Indeed, the mid- to late-1990s saw American culture's precipitous fall into a tremendous moral panic around the issue of the nation's children. Not since the Anita Bryant "Save Our Children" campaign of the late seventies have the protection and preservation of America's youth been so consistently and ardently focused in the eye of the media, legislature, and the judicial system. The physical, emotional, and spiritual violation of the American child has risen to the fore of the cultural imaginary, and every institution in the nation has had its part in insisting on its alarming reality. Popular social scientific inquiries into the state of America's youth began emerging mid-decade with the widely received publication of Mary Pipher's 1994 Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. The study sought to account for the pressing and wide-spread epidemic of depression, low self-esteem, and eating disorders faced by so many pre-adolescent and teenage girls in America. Its primary claim is that popular culture and media forms are the source of girls' distorted self-image and that more intimate involvement with family could counteract the deleterious effects of toxic media representation. Two popular books about boys followed to join the dialogue about the condition of America's youth. William Pollack's 1998 Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood addresses the conflicting models of masculinity that boys confront daily and suggests that models of male stoicism, independence, and aggressiveness cultivated by scouting culture and other social institutions of the early twentieth century do not best serve boys in their quest for a comfortable and healthy masculinity. Daniel Kindlon and Michael Thompson's 1999 Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys barely preceded the barrage of child- 2 on-child school violence, occurring mainly among white middle-class youth. It hypothesizes that boys are forced too early to abandon close ties to their mothers, resulting in emotional atrophy, the denial of proper avenues for emotive self-expression, and consequently often aggressive and selfish behavior.3 Around the time of these publications came the onset of a series of school shootings, the sensational accounts of which littered national newspapers and television shows. The shootings elicited questions from the media not unlike those laid out in the aforementioned books. While instances of inner-city violence within schools and neighborhoods were hardly a new phenomenon at the moment of the Columbine High School massacre in April of 1997, the media identified it and the subsequent incidents in Arkansas, Georgia, and the like as a radically new social epidemic, ignoring the racial implications of their characterization—namely, the implication that only white children are valuable enough to have the loss of their lives register as a national incident. Also receiving a formidable amount of coverage in national media was the 1996 murder of six-year-old child beauty pageant star JonBenet Ramsey at her home in Boulder, Colorado. The affluent Ramsey family, who for the past nine years has been