Notities bij boeken

Steven ANGELIDES
"What’s behind child sex panics? The Bill Henson scandal"
Lambda Nordica, 16 (2011), p.102-127.

Dit artikel van Angelides — hij is medewerker aan de School of Political and Social Inquiry van de Monash University in Australië — gaat in op de morele paniek rondom een expositie van fotograaf Bill Henson in Australië waarin hij foto's toonde van blote tieners, uiteraard met toestemming van de ouders van die tieners en van de tieners zelf. De uitnodiging voor de opening van de expositie alleen al — met een enkele foto van een naakt meisje — riep allerlei emotionele reacties op onder journalisten en zo meer.

"For Devine, the photograph is exemplary of the abhorrent depths of a culture out of control in its sexualization of children."(101)

"In a matter of hours after Devine’s article was released, the Henson exhibition was being debated on radio talk shows, the views of politicians were being canvassed, journalists and television news crews were in pursuit of the gallery, and complaints were being made to the NSW State police. Abusive phone calls began flooding in to the gallery."(102)

[Het waren meestal reacties van mensen die de tentoonstelling niet eens gezien hadden.]

"The following day the media and political heavyweights entered the fray. NSW State Opposition Leader declared that the “sexualisation of children under the guise of art is totally unacceptable.” Hetty Johnson, one of the most high profile Australian child protection advocates, was calling for Henson’s arrest. “The police should prosecute and the last time I checked it was a crime to photograph children sexually…There is a classification of porn and this falls under it” (qtd in Masters & Valleyo 2008:4)."(102)

[Waarmee ze naaktheid meteen op een lijn zet met seksualiteit.]

"So began what journalist David Marr (2008:59) describes in his book on the case as “the biggest story in the country” that year. Nothing short of a media feeding frenzy ensued. Literally hundreds and hundreds of reports of the unfolding scandal were to be aired and published in Australia, and around the world, in the weeks and months that followed."(103)

"Hetty Johnson was equally enraged. “We are just handing our children on a bloody plate to paedophiles,” she spat. “This is a disgrace for this country, absolutely shameful” (qtd in Marr 2008:127). The distribution of the image on the Internet was itself enough, many argued, to encourage and normalize pedophilia, and thus lead to abuse of children." [mijn nadruk] (104)

[Weer het pedofilie-gezeur.]

"Inciting the desire of pedophiles was far from the only problem. For one thing, the extent to which the images themselves sexualized this so-called innocence of childhood was at the centre of the issue of legality.(...) Prosecutions and the national Classification Board. The Board concluded that the image in question “is mild and justified by context…and is not sexualised to any degree” (qtd in Iggulden 2008)."(104)

"Henson’s comments only fuelled the ire of his opponents, whose claims about child exploitation were themselves based squarely on notions of the vulnerability of children. Even so-called normal adults were presumed to be complicit unwittingly, it seems, in exploiting and harming vulnerable children merely by viewing the images." [mijn nadruk] (105)

[Ook een bekende: de zogenaamde kwetsbaarheid van kinderen.]

"The standard refrain of anti-Henson and child protectionist commentary is that the naked models have had their privacy taken from them, and thus also, according to this argument, their innocence."(105)

"Concerns about vulnerability and privacy were less about images of child nudes per se, than about the adult gaze – paedophilic or otherwise – witnessing the exposure of the child nude. A principal worry is that the repeated circulation and public display of the images might come back to bite unsuspecting and unaware children, resulting in future embarrassment, shame, and trauma. The presumption being made is that N is not of sufficient emotional and intellectual capacity yet to appreciate the fact that she has participated in an inappropriate form of social self-revelation that some day she might come to regret. N is assumed to have acted, in other words, as any innocent child might, without sufficient adult capacity for shame when it comes to public nudity. Not unlike a child parading with her clothes off on her family’s home movies, she has innocently and shamelessly bared all in front of a much more invasive camera – or so the logic of some of these claims would suggest."(106)

"With this idea in mind, perhaps it is not so much the nudity of the Henson image of N by itself that so scandalized, but the facial display of adolescent shame in the context of nudity."(110)

[Angelides besteedt heel wat woorden aan die schaamte, ook van de tiener zelf.]

"Indeed, especially (although not only) for girls, puberty is often overdetermined with shame. Menstruation, breast development, and sexual objectification by others are often the source of shyness, embarrassment, vulnerability, and a newly emerging self-consciousness about their internally sexualizing, not just culturally sexualized, bodies (Martin 1996)." [mijn nadruk] (110)

[Maar verlegenheid is nog geen schaamte. Er wordt door Angelides veel te gemakkelijk geïnterpreteerd. Hij maakt zelfs een uitstapje naar Freud.]

"The revelation of child sexuality is so troubling that it is scarcely articulable in the current climate of paedophile and child sexual abuse panic."(112)

"The underlying assumption of the anti-Henson and child protection camp is that adults ought to avert their gaze because, as Coulter puts it, “images of nude girls might normalise the idea of children as sexual objects.”"(113)

"We have heard a great deal about children as sexual objects, but what about the fact of children as sexual subjects? If we are to accept the consensus among commentators that the sexual objectification of children is wrong, then the “sexual awakening of children” being cited and simultaneously skirted in the public debate refers not to children as sexual objects, but in fact to children as sexual subjects. However, there has been virtually no discussion about the sexual subjectivities of children. Indeed, the figure of the child-as-sexual-subject appears to be the elephant in the corner (or centre?) of the Henson scandal and Western culture generally." [mijn nadruk] (113)

"My perhaps somewhat counterintuitive claim is that child sex panics, such as this one, often seem to be at their most histrionic less in cases of forced, violent, or horrific sexual exploitation and abuse, than when children’s sexual curiosities, desires, pleasures, agency – in short, their active and affirmative subjectivities – are brought into the social frame. Herein lies one of the major bugbears, as I see it, of this scandal (and other child sex scandals like it): What to do with the fact that the sexual child, such as N, is not the passive recipient of the adult gaze or adult sexuality. Often she looks back, speaks back, touches back, and indeed initiates and colludes with adults, not to mention often strips for them or has sex with them voluntarily (with or without parental consent)." [mijn nadruk] (115)

" Buried beneath the palpable fear of child sexualization and abuse by adults is an underlying and perhaps more primary fear of the sexualities of children. If the anxiety about the protection of children from abuse by adults is the public face of sex panic discourses, the fear of the corruptive, disruptive, and seductive – even shameful – effects of child sexual subjectivity and agency is its troublesome underside."