Dr EM on Queer Theory as destroyer of boundaries:
Unnervingly, the reframing of child sexual abuse and liberating of paedophilia from the margins of society is a dominant idea within queer theory. Although it has attempted to cloak itself under the rainbow and harness the energy, good will and gains gay, lesbian and bisexual people have fought for over decades Queer theory is anything but progressive. Indeed, it is totally opposed to same sex attraction. As Professor Alassandra Tanesini outlines, a ‘characteristic trait of queer theory is its opposition to any view that treats sexual orientation as anything other than socially constructed’.[4]
It goes back to Foucault.
Foucault’s re-conceptualisation of the triad of discourse, power and knowledge entailed a re-thinking of resistance. Transgression of norms, and in particular sexual norms, became the only response to punishment and classification, which would, in Foucauldian thinking, challenge oppression and power. Although Foucault’s challenge to heteronormative dominance was a welcomed intervention, the extension of his idea that all norms are bad and freeing repressed deviant sexualities is good in and of itself poses serious problems.
Just a little.
Feminists have attempted to develop the cultural norm that rape is bad and that children cannot consent to sexual activity. These activities — rape and child sexual abuse — become reframed in postmodernism, and therefore queer theory, as repressed and a transgression of boundaries which is thus challenging power and helping to liberate the individual. For example, Foucault presented the prosecution of a child molester as a petty collective intolerance where the discourse constructs an offender and victim and enacts state power on an individual.
Well, yes, and that’s because people who think about it from a point of view other than “I want to fuck children” have concluded that preventing child molesters from doing their thing is the way to go, state power and all.
Foucault related how
One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded, employed here then there, depending on the season, living hand-to-mouth from a little charity or in exchange for the worst sort of labor, sleeping in barns and stables, was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called ‘curdled milk.’ So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration.[10]
Ahhhhhhh fuck that noise. It happens that I can speak to this one, because I have been that little girl. I grew up among fields and brooks, which I loved, and one afternoon I was out playing and a guy driving a tractor in the next field stopped and approached me and invited me to sit on his lap – which I was young and stupid enough to do. (I don’t remember what I was thinking. He seemed friendly and nice, and I don’t remember more than that) All he did was feel a (barely emergent) breast, and I must have jumped up and run away, but naturally it shocked and scared me. He didn’t “obtain a few caresses” from me, he copped a feel, and I hated and resented it (it introduced a very unwanted element into my bucolic paradise), and it was in no way an everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality. It was a nasty move by an adult on a child, it was far from routine, and there was nothing fun about it from my point of view. Foucault isn’t being “transgressive” and oh so cool there, he’s just being the usual dreary pathetic male who can’t see or even imagine the point of view of the female half of these “everyday occurrences in the life of village sexuality.” Ugh. That was my first sexual assault but not my last – like all women, I’ve experienced several.
Despite the supposed banality of adult sexual activity with children, Foucault remained concerned with age of consent legislation. In 1977 Foucault signed a petition to the French Parliament arguing for the abolition of all legislation regarding the age of consent, the effective legalisation of paedophilia.[13]
And so we get Peter Tatchell and MAP and NAMBLA and all the rest of it – and now the CBC promoting children doing drag.
A pox on all of it.
