ABSTRACT

This paper draws on an Irish government-commissioned study of parents’ views about the sexualisation and commercialisation of children. We examine how parents understand ‘sexualisation’ qualitatively, through their evoking of past, present and future images of childhood. The data underlines how sexualisation becomes rationalised as something to protect against and control, not least through the restrictive surveillance of girls’ development. But we use the concept of duration to analyse various, differing ways images childhood endure in parents’ experience. This leads us to argue parents’ relations to images of childhood complicate, rather than solely reproduce, discursive understandings of sexualisation as a unitary phenomenon threatening ‘normal’ child development. We contend that further mapping of the ways images of childhood endure in parents’ experience may help refuse their impossible positioning as guardians of child innocence, and generate more complex forms of attention to sexualisation, which challenge gendered and heteronormative societal assumptions about children’s development.

摘要

本文借鉴了爱尔兰政府委托研究的父母对孩子的性化和商业化观点的观点。我们通过唤起过去，现在和将来的童年形象，检验父母如何定性地理解“性化”。数据强调了性化如何成为合理的东西，可以预防和控制，尤其是通过对女孩发育的严格监控。但是，我们使用持续时间的概念来分析图像在父母的经历中所经历的各种不同方式。这导致我们争论父母与童年形象的关系是复杂的，而不是仅仅复制对性化的威胁性理解，这是一种威胁“正常”儿童发育的统一现象。