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Abstract:
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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 . 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 . |