Abstract
Across the Western world, a great deal of effort is being put into regulating and constituting laws against adults’ possession and use of images of nude and half-nude prepubescent children.1 In parallel, research on children, sexuality and visuality mainly focuses on how children are sexualized in images (e.g. Higonnet, 1998, cf. Sparrman, 2013b). Less research has been conducted on children’s looking at images of nude or half nude bodies beyond the moral panics concerning their surmised distorted identification with celebrities, which tends to pathologize child sexuality (for an exception, see Sparrman, 2002a, 2002b, 2013a, 2014; Buckingham and Bragg, 2004; Egan 2013, Ringrose and Coleman 2013; Egan & Hawkes, 2008). This chapter explores the close connection between visuality, sexuality, children and adults. The focus is on how children look at images of nude and half-dressed adults and how this raises questions about how child and adult bodies, child and adult gazes, and child and adult sexualities connect with and also enact one another. The theoretical emphasis is on sexuality as enactments.
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Sparrman, A. (2015). Seeing (with) the ‘Sexy’ Body: Young Children’s Visual Enactment of Sexuality. In: Renold, E., Ringrose, J., Egan, R.D. (eds) Children, Sexuality and Sexualization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353399_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353399_8
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