Suchergebnisse

The covert regulatory content of medical practice has been well documented. This paper presents the tensions inherent in family planning practice through a deconstruction of the views of practitioners in the field. It argues that behind the untroubled clinical appearance of contemporary family planning clinics, and despite its acceptance by the medical profession, there persist many of the `old' concerns about the state-sanctioned provision of contraception. Examination of the views of family planning professionals reveals a persistent and striking regulatory content to their practice, which is directed, in particular, towards young women whose life-styles are deemed `irresponsible', and who are, therefore, considered illegitimate `family planners'.

This ground-breaking work provides the first history of ideas about the sexual child in modernity. Beginning with twenty-first century panics about sexualization, the authors address why the sexual child excites such powerful emotions in the Anglophone west

Abstract  Drawing on primary materials from the United States, England and Australia, we explore the complex and contradictory manner in which the sexual child and innocence was constructed and made intelligible within social purity discourses in the mid 19th to early 20th century. The sexuality of the child was paradoxically conceptualized as a ubiquitous and boundless erotic force and as a pliable site for pedagogical intervention. We contend that the discursive production of the corrupt sexual companion, within purity literature, was an attempt to disentangle purity reformers' ambivalent construction of childhood sexuality as well as larger cultural anxieties about modern urban living. The sexual child validated social purity narratives because it was the category against which innocence was defined and made possible.1

AbstractThe idea that a child should not have sexual interests and experiences is fast being supplanted by the knowledge that he does have them; that they are an expression of perfectly normal, healthy energies, and that while it is necessary to gain control over them, they should not be forcibly suppressed" (Renz & Renz 1935: 92).

AbstractThis article explores the dominant cultural constructions of the child and its sexuality that emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the Anglophone west. Examining how the child and its sexuality were constructed within reform and institutional discourse, we illuminate the social and political implications of frameworks of protection. We argue that discourses of protection foreclose the possibility of the sexual agency of children. The regulation, management and protection of childhood sexuality in various cultural contexts are key themes in the articles featured in this special issue on the history of sexuality of childhood and youth.