thinks about beauty pageants as they are portrayed on the show, “everyone should agree that sexualizing a 3-year-old little girl is wrong”; the “greedy entertainment industry” is just interested in making a buck off “sexed up toddlers” (Henson 2011). Her critique relies on what she contends is the normative interpretation of the children in these pageants—“everyone” should read a child beauty pageant participant as sexual, and “everyone should agree” on what that means. Implicit in her critique is that “sexualizing a 3-year-old little girl is wrong because a 3-year-old little girl is not sexual.” Absent from her critique is naming who exactly is doing this alleged sexualizing—is it viewers, parents, or some unnamed other? Are all pageant viewers complicit in sexualizing these girls, are participants’ parents responsible, or is there an agreed understanding that someone, somewhere (else) will sexualize these girls? Is viewing itself sexualization, and if not, what exactly constitutes sexualizing? The American Psychological Association (APA) shares a similar ambiguous view. In 2004, they assembled a Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls; in their 2007 report on the task force’s findings, they state, “Parents can also contribute to the sexualization of their daughters in very direct and concrete ways—for example, by entering their 5-year-old daughter in a beauty pageant” (2007, 15). They acknowledge that while “relatively few girls actually participate in such pageants” (15), the recent proliferation of media coverage on child beauty pageants is making “the participation of a few . . . contribute to the sexualization of many” (15). Fascinatingly, this so-called Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls has little to no data on girls to back up its claims; in the report’s introduction, the authors write that “much of the research reviewed in this report concerns the sexualization of women (college age and older) rather than girls” (3) because of lack of empirical research on childhood sexuality. They quickly argue that since girls grow into college-aged women, these findings are reliable and generalizable. That their report makes claims about the sexualization of girlhood without actually studying sexuality as it is experienced, perceived, and interpreted by girls reveals that institutions invested with authority are susceptible to—or perhaps even reliant upon—passing off cultural narratives as reality. In both Henson and the APA’s reading, the child’s voice is notably silent—or silenced. Furthermore, both critiques hinge on an assumption that participation in pageant culture sexualizes girls, a passive construction that leaves unnamed who is doing the sexualizing, for whom, and for what purpose—if sexualization is even occurring in the first place.
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This essay departs from the common critique that Toddlers & Tiaras and the existence of child beauty pageants are part of larger cultural projects to hypersexualize girls from a young age, induct young girls into the commodification of girlhood/womanhood, and indoctrinate girls with limited definitions of how to do gender.1 I want to resist the immediate urge to dismiss the show on these grounds and instead dwell on what else it might be about this show that disturbs so many viewers, simultaneously garnering damning denunciations while inciting a morbid curiosity that keeps the program on air.2 Is there something else besides or beyond sexualization at play? I posit the reason that this show makes us uncomfortable—and makes it impossible to look away—is because these children subvert accepted truths held by adults upon which gender and sexuality pivot: that (a) children are supposed to be asexual and that (b) age, gender, and sexuality are inextricably linked and follow a conjoined, synchronized narrative. The child beauty pageant participant’s performance of womanhood betrays the disseminated belief that age, sexuality, and gender performance are intertwined. The girls’ performances are a live example that demonstrate how age structures our understanding of how and at what time gender should happen, revealing the temporal assumptions that guide our beliefs about gender identity, gender performance, and sexuality at any age. Pageant participants destabilize the when of gender. I call this destabilization “age drag.” I propose that children’s performances that subvert these truths about the temporality of gender and sexuality are examples of age drag, a concept that grapples with Elizabeth Freeman’s provocative question in Time Binds: “What is the time of queer performativity?” (2010, 62) and takes Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity as its initial point of departure to examine how performing an age other than one’s own holds subversive potential. I argue that because of the cultural belief that sexuality must unfold according to a particular time line and align with a particular gender identity and performance, we are unable to look at children in beauty pageants without imposing a sexualized narrative onto them—their out-of-time gender performance wreaks havoc on the status and stability of the child’s (a)sexuality. Age drag forces us to reconsider our understanding of age as it is linked with sexuality precisely because there is no sexual element to the child’s performance, despite the urge to read the performance as sexual. In the following sections, I expand on this concept of age drag, consider it in the context of
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scholarship on childhood sexuality, then turn to an example from Toddlers & Tiaras to see it in action. Age Drag
Pageant participants enact age drag because they are children performing womanhood during the time and space of the pageant.3 Before the pageant, they are children; during the pageant, they are performing an excessive version of womanhood (thanks to the “beauty work” pageants demand: wigs, makeup, veneers, spray tans, etc.); after the pageant, they are children again and the drag women have disappeared, hidden away until the next pageant. This idea of age drag takes as its starting point Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity, which I will outline briefly. Butler explains that we view “anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance” (2006, 187) as inextricably linked; for example, female genitalia should correspond to identifying as a woman, which should correspond to performing rituals of womanhood. Butler points to drag as an example that reveals that these three features “are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence” (187). Sex, gender identity, and gender performance do not exist in some corresponding “unity” but rather have multiple configurations; the “natural . . . unity” among them is illusory. Thus, “we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity” (188). Butler, then, views drag as an example of parody that holds the potential to subvert dominant notions of gender and sexuality. I want to emphasize the implicit temporal assumption that undergirds these beliefs about gender performativity. We view “anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance” as unified, and I would add that temporality is a crucial feature of this unity. In the compulsory fiction, female genitalia on a young person should correspond to identifying as a girl, which should correspond to performing girlhood; on an older person, it should match with identifying as a woman and performing womanhood. Age, then, is a factor in determining which gender identity must be occupied and which gender performance deployed. I suggest if these three features are part of a “naturalized . . . regulatory fiction,” then temporality is another feature of that fiction open to “denatural[ization]” and subversion
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through performance. Thus, when children perform gender in a mode not in accordance with the gender ascribed to their age, they cause “age trouble,” similar to how drag generates “gender trouble.” This is not to say drag enacted by adults doesn’t also generate temporal trouble. Freeman reminds us that drag is always out of time, and in order to understand drag we need to see it as temporal: it is the “act of plastering the body with outdated rather than just cross-gendered accessories” (2010, xxi). Thinking specifically of persons in drag, Freeman asks, “Might some bodies, by registering on their very surface the co-presence of several historically contingent events, social movements, and or/collective pleasures, complicate or displace the centrality of gender-transitive drag . . . [and] might they articulate instead a kind of temporal transitivity?” (63). Freeman invites us to think about drag as not centrally about gender, but about time. While this inquiry is thinking about larger shared time that produces collectivities—“historically contingent events,” “social movements”—we might also think about a temporal transitivity scaled to the level of the individual and quotidian. What do we make of bodies whose performances aren’t outdated but perhaps future dated? What are other ways of being out of time but not oriented toward the past? Age drag queers time. While the anxiety over performances in child beauty pageants suggests a concern with the way it sexualizes the child, the real anxiety might be that these children reveal the illusory construction of gender—they jump from childhood to womanhood back to childhood, defying the linear time line according to which gender must unfold and extricating age from gender identity and performance. This defiance of linear time makes age drag performances queer performances. Freeman explains, “Queer temporalities, visible in the forms of interruption . . . are points of resistance to this temporal order that, in turn, propose other possibilities for living in relation to indeterminately past, present, and future others: that is, of living historically” (2010, xxii). The girls’ performance “interrupts” the pace of the forward-moving time line of girlhood; the girls inhabit a presumed future point on that time line only to return to the time of girlhood at the pageant’s end—their bodies become a site for present and potential future to coexist; queer temporality becomes material and “visible” in the technologies of age drag. In this way, queer temporality might enable the girls to have not new ways of “living historically” but perhaps multiple ways of “living futurally”—age drag invites the girls to inhabit modes that they may or may not reinhabit at another point in
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time (not all girls become or stay women; not all girls will perform womanhood the way their pageant-self performed womanhood). They also undermine what J. Jack Halberstam calls the “youth/adult binary” (2005, 176) by performing an adulthood unmired from “reproduction and the family” (176)—the girls perform womanhood without the heterosexual demands that accompany the temporality of womanhood; their womanhood is outside kinship and heterosexual partnership. Freeman describes “temporal drag” as “the pull of the past on the present” (62), but age drag, in the instance of the pageant, is also about the pull of an imagined, nonbinding future on the present. Age drag enacts resistance, then, to the dominant time line that dictates how girlhood should unfold by imagining and enabling alternative ways of performing gender. Diederik Janssen thinks about age drag in his larger conceptualization of “transmaturities” (2010, 394) and identifies “transmature scenarios” in children’s play as “erotically motivated play usually includ[ing] cross-generational plots, [such as children playing] ‘doctor’ . . . [and] various forms of ‘age play’ [such as in] avatar-based games” (394). His investigation is useful in considering how beauty pageants are not the only places where age drag occurs. Identifying other forms of age drag might create possibilities for further destabilizing norms regarding gender identity, performance, and sexuality. For example, what do we make of instances where adults perform childhood, such as in pathologized cases of paraphilic infantilism, or in pornography? Leerom Medovoi notes while categories such as gender, sexuality, race, and class have been common lenses through which to view literature, history, and culture, “systematic investigations of age as an organizing cultural category are still rare” (2010, 657). Taking age as the central category of analysis for this project opens up new ways to consider how time operates in the deployment of scripts regarding gender roles and gender performance. Sex: It’s All the R/Age
Age drag is concerned with the when of gender performativity but necessarily has implications for sexuality because in Western narratives, age and sexuality function together: one is supposed to be indicative of the other. Steven Angelides explains that the “prevalent discourse of sexuality is a linear and sequential model of age stratification premised on distinct chronological, spatial, and temporal stages of biological and psychological
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development” (2004, 163). According to this “prevalent discourse,” as one moves through time, normative physical and mental development parallel and are indeed linked with normative sexual development. These phases of development, “at their simplest, [are]: ‘childhood’ [which] is paired with gender identity formation; ‘adolescence’ with puberty, sexual fantasy, and emerging erotic identity; and ‘adulthood’ with fixed sexual identity” (163). These phases are held on to, in part, because they help keep the “categories of ‘child’ and ‘adult’ . . . distinct and at a safe epistemological distance” (142). These categories are markers of time—adolescence is a phase one is supposed to pass through before entering adulthood—as well as self-knowledge; according to this definition of childhood, one is getting to know their gender identity, while adulthood is a time to come to a “fixed” knowledge of one’s sexuality. Angelides explains that in this developmental trajectory, “adult heterosexuality . . . remains the idealized and fixed referent” (163)—appropriate development then, in this model, is acquiring a knowledge of one’s gender and (eventual) sexuality in a way that will lead to the “end product” (163) of adult heterosexuality. According to this model, the asexuality characteristic of childhood should never be present in adulthood, and the sexuality of adulthood should never intersect with childhood—age and sexual development remain firmly fixed together. And if they are fixed together, unfixing one would wreak havoc on the other. This desire for children to be asexual but on-the-way-to-heterosexuality structures the cultural anxiety regarding the possibility of childhood sexuality. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley explain how we believe “children . . . are (and should stay) innocent of sexual desires and intentions” (2004, ix) while simultaneously believing them to be “officially, tacitly, assumed to be heterosexual” (ix). This paradox of coexistent asexuality/ heterosexuality in the child suggests that the childhood sexuality that culture wishes to deny might very well be there, echoing a central tenet of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 1, where he examines eighteenth-century boarding schools to demonstrate how denial of childhood sexuality is usually paired with a preoccupation over its existence (1990, 26). Similarly, in the twenty-first century, the preoccupation with the sexualization of children before their time reveals an adult recognition that children are already or can be sexual beings, but their sexuality in the time of childhood must be constantly denied. Age drag produces anxiety in those who witness it, then, because while children are not supposed to
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be sexual, adults are; girls performing as women, then, are feared to be performing as sexual beings. Adults are unable to see the category of “women” unbound from adult sexuality, even when it is the child performing womanhood; adults can see performances of womanhood as only sexual, so the child’s performance as a woman creates a crisis. The sexuality seen as a necessary feature of womanhood, combined with the fact that children aren’t actually asexual, amplifies the fear that childhood sexuality can make itself known in this particular performance. Because of this danger, adults recognize and work to control children’s sexuality, continually converting it into an asexuality. James Kincaid argues that “the construction of the modern ‘child’ is very largely an evacuation” (2004, 10); children must be “evacuated” of sexuality in the cultural narratives to which adults subscribe so that children can become “a vacancy at the center of [a] story . . . under [adults’] control” (4). Bruhm and Hurley explain that this “vacancy” gets filled with adult fantasy: the “child becomes a cipher into which adult desires and anxieties are poured” (2004, xiii). Childhood sexuality gets in the way of adult projections of and desire for “innocence” (Giroux 1998, 31) and a “preferred past” (Bruhm and Hurley 2004, xiii). In other words, adults deny childhood sexuality in part because of a desire for the child to have an innocence that they themselves do not have access to as sexual adults. This “pouring” of desire responds to a “nostalgi[c impulse] invoked by the figure of the child” (xiii)—the child’s presence conjures the idea of innocence, and so the adult must make the child innocent in order to fulfill adult desire. Adult control over childhood sexuality actually serves adults’ own needs about what the child can and cannot be for adults. Girls dressed as women are not fulfilling adult desires for innocence and asexuality; age drag fills the vacancy with excess and pleasure and caters to not an adult past but rather a child’s playing out of future. This slippage around the a/sexuality of children and especially adults’ relation to it is further complicated when we consider the construction and reception of instances of childhood sexuality in the cultural imaginary: there exists a “voyeuristic fascination with the sexualized child” (Giroux 1998, 37). We fixate on these children because they “make meanings for us. They tell adults what ‘the child’ is, and also what ‘the erotic’ is” (Kincaid 2004, 9). Kincaid points to frenetic media coverage of cases involving sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and intergenerational sex as evidence of our need for the sexual child (or the child sexualized by deviant adults in his or her life) to reinforce the bounded categories of “child,” “adult,”
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and “erotic.” Furthermore, the sexual child invokes those figures who participate in the sexualization of the child, especially the pedophile from whom the child must be protected.4 Richard Mohr explains that “society needs the pedophile: his existence allows everyone else to view sexy children innocently” (2004, 20). In other words, narratives about the asexuality of children depend on the belief that there are figures who see the child as sexual—adults can interpret a child as sexual but tell themselves they are not viewing the child sexually, since there are pedophiles somewhere occupying that role and viewing the child in that way. Kincaid’s and Mohr’s arguments suggest that at the same time adults are condemning childhood sexuality, they are also deploying and sustaining the existence of sexualized children. This seeming contradiction perhaps signals that we should spend time looking at moments in culture when the sexualization of children is lamented while simultaneously being sustained through continued fixation on it—this sustaining might actually be serving some other need that the rhetoric surrounding the issue masks. Thus, the controversy surrounding the sexualization of children in Toddlers & Tiaras might actually be indicative of other anxieties—and, as I’ve argued, temporal ones— beyond a vague concern of sexualization. Childhood sexuality then, occupies a complicated position in contemporary society. On the one hand, childhood is supposed to be a time of asexuality; on the other hand, instances of children who are sexual, sexualized, or both, destabilize this belief, revealing it to be a desire for children rather than a reality of children. Still, childhood sexuality remains as an “oxymoron” (Angelides 2004, 142), despite childhood sexuality bursting at the seams in every location where adults attempt to stitch it over with convictions of innocence and asexuality. Age drag is one example of how childhood is not strictly bound to desired temporal trajectories for how gender, and thus sexual development, unfold; age drag undoes the synchronicity between gender identity and sexual development, and this unhinging alters desired narratives for the temporality of childhood (a)sexuality. Little Women: Age Drag in Toddlers & Tiaras
In this section, I will interpret some moments from a 2012 episode of Toddlers & Tiaras featuring the pageant experience of Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson. I have chosen this particular episode, titled “Precious
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Moments Pageant,” because Alana occupies a fascinating space in the beauty pageant world and beyond—she is a blonde, white child from a working-class family in rural Georgia who has been a particular target of critique and curiosity because of her successful Toddlers & Tiaras spinoff, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. Alana’s experience and narrative of beauty pageants circulate more than others in the cultural arena, and so I look at her episode on the show as one that might offer more traction because of her popularity in the media—from being spoofed on Saturday Night Live to getting shout-outs from the 30 Rock staff, Alana’s portrayal of girlhood and pageantry intrigues. Alana is not an exception, however; in her episode and participation in the pageant world she is akin to her peers on other episodes (with one major difference being that Mama June saves money for pageants by “extreme couponing,” a practice that has inspired its own hit reality show). I take a literary approach to this episode and closely read Alana’s attitude to the competition and the “beauty work” in which it requires her to engage; my analysis shows that Alana’s participation in the pageant is definitively not sexual, and thus urges us to reconsider the critiques of the show that condemn pageants for sexualization. This line of investigation takes seriously the voice of the child. Because children are so often “evacuated” (Kincaid 2004, 4) of agency and left out of these conversations about them, I privilege it here to acknowledge the child’s subjectivity. The relation between voice and drag is one I still need to work out; I don’t want to confuse voice for intention, nor do I want to oversimplify the relationship between gender identity and agency. Rather, I want to see the child’s voice as an important resource to keep in mind when we view and interpret her performance. The pageant director opens the episode explaining, “We allow our girls to do whatever they see necessary to take home that crown.” Her description emphasizes the competitive aspect of the show, and when we meet Alana, we learn that that is her main concern with pageants: “I like to win because I want to win money!” Alana confidently saunters through the episode, making exuberant claims such as “I’m a superstar because I do pageants” and “I like to get my hair and makeup done because I like to win the biggest trophy with money.” For Alana, pageant participation is a chance to acquire rewards in the form of a trophy and money. Being in a pageant is equated with feeling like a “superstar” and with competition— it’s an activity guided by goals for some achievement that necessitates a
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particular look without Alana being hung up on maintaining that look beyond the performance; age drag is just a rule in a game she enjoys. When she has to compete in the beauty portion of the competition, Alana sighs, “Beauty is so boring,” referring to having to walk in a stiff manner and strike particular poses while making faces at the judge. The beauty portion for Alana is akin to having to go through a routinized obligation in order to achieve a larger goal; while performing gender norms is a necessary part of this routine, Alana does not internalize the gendered script that she performs when she is offstage. A particularly telling moment that reveals that the gendered script is just a script and not a training manual for Alana comes when she is doing an interview and says, “This is what I show the judges,” and grabs her belly and pulls, plays with, and jiggles it while the camera fixates on her. Alana’s literal embrace of her body suggests an unawareness of or disregard for cultural attitudes toward female bodies; the body type that pageants might be critiqued for promoting is not a concern of hers. At the end of the episode, she again points to her belly and says, “Look at this big thing. [The judges] don’t know a good thing when they see it.” Alana doesn’t see her body as the reason for her not winning; rather, she sees it as an asset in winning future competitions, as it is a sure “good thing.” Alana’s performance of womanhood is undeniable during the space of the actual pageant—she does all the “beauty work” necessary to present as an adult woman and be a contender in this age drag competition. However, her attitude toward the pageant, her motives for competing, the fact that her gendered performance does not extend off stage, and her seemingly typical six-year-old affect and antics suggest an alternative view of the pageants. While many critique Alana as one of many girls sexualized by TLC, the pageant coordinators, her parents, or us the viewers, I propose we take seriously the child’s perspective. Instead of rendering the child “mute [and] under our control” (Kincaid 2004, 4), we should take into consideration the utterances regarding participation in pageants, since they reveal that children themselves do not see themselves as sexualized. Adults interpret the signs and rituals of gender in which the children engage as entwined with sexuality. For the adult reading the child, womanhood always indicates sexualization. But for the child performing womanhood, does sexualization have to be a part of the picture? Is sexuality imposed because adults are unable to see performances of adult gender in any other way?
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I am not arguing that children are not sexual. What I am saying is that pageants are not automatically instances of extant childhood sexuality. Pageants have become a flashpoint for lamenting the sexualization of children, but the age drag in pageants is about occupying an adult gender-performative role, not an adult sexual role. Gender and sexuality need not be conjoined in this temporal play. When a glitzed beauty pageant participant walks on stage, she is, according to a common narrative on the show, having “fun” and “want[ing] to win.” Both these tasks entail partaking in the “beauty work” that the competition demands—wearing heavy makeup, having extravagant hair, being tan, and wearing elaborate dresses. The adult viewing the child cannot comprehend gender performance extricated from its synced sexuality; but the child does not know gender performance as it is linked with sexuality. She will probably eventually learn it, but for now, she has yet to be fully educated on their inextricability. Adults impose sexuality on a situation where sexuality does not necessarily exist because they are unable to disentangle their ideas regarding how age, gender performance, and sexuality align. Conclusion
Butler argues that drag “establish[es] that ‘[gender] reality’ is not as fixed as we generally presume it to be” (2006, xxv). Likewise, the age drag operating in beauty pageants might “[un]fix” a “gender reality”—they reveal the illusory “fixity” of the category of “woman” and challenge our ideas regarding the necessary tethering of age, sexuality, and gender performance. However, Butler warns us to be careful in deciding which parodies of gender are “effectively disruptive” (113) of false realities and which merely “become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony” (113). While there are certainly ways to argue how the girls of Toddlers & Tiaras circulate white, heterosexual, classed notions of beauty and gender, these girls do subvert conventional expectations of gendered age performance. Angelides urges us to find more places to destabilize and “attend to the fluid and overlapping boundaries assumed to demarcate the categories of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood” (2004, 167). The more cultural narratives insist on the strict bounds of these categories, the closer we should pay attention to an underlying “fluid[ity].” Kincaid’s contemplation of what subversion to these categories of child and adult might look like starts small; he says, “The only way to rewrite the script,
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I think, is first to jar loose the present one, to drain its power by drawing it into the trap that scandal can set and then spring” (2004, 14). He convincingly explains how “we are drawn to scandal by a hope to trip up the cultural censors, by a dream of escaping culture or transforming it” (13). The girls of Toddlers & Tiaras might be a powerful way to begin revision of the “script”—digging into the scandal of the show opens up possibilities for refashioning the when of gender performativity and its unbound relationship to sexuality. Mary Zaborskis is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She works at the intersections of queer, indigenous, and childhood studies and is especially interested in issues regarding childhood sexuality.
Notes
1. While I focus on only girls in this essay, beauty pageants for boys exist; Toddlers & Tiaras has featured several boys over the course of the series. While pageant criteria for boys are less stringent, boys participate in a version of competition alongside girls and also focus on appearance and performance. A future investigation might examine how pageants function for boys and what cultural narratives regarding boyhood and masculinity are being invoked, challenged, or expanded. In “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Eve Sedgwick notes the particular struggles that boys who deviate from gender norms experience because of “effeminophobia” (2004, 141). Pageants for boys, then, might function as a more recognizably subversive space because, as a presumed feminine activity, participation enables an enacting of that which society fears and tries to quite literally beat out of boys. 2. Critics have explored why we are drawn to reality shows that portray the extreme and disturbing. Joshua Gamson has suggested that the popularity of tabloid talk shows comes from an identificatory impulse, writing that while “embarrassingly conventional . . . I identify with the misfits, monsters, trash, and perverts” (1999, 4). Viewing these persons allows for a voyeurism that safely maintains distance between “them” and “us,” blurring but ultimately reasserting lines between normal and abnormal. Gamson’s argument might explain the proliferation of reality shows since his 1999 publication that focus on “freaks”—from hoarders to pageant babies, we are continually drawn to shows that portray the abject because they help to establish (illusory) distinctions between normal and outlier. 3. Rhetoric around childhood sexuality depends on language of protection and preservation of innocence. However, while this rhetoric appears to extend to
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the universal figure of the child, not all children are included in this call for protection. Henry Giroux states that “the discourse of innocence suggests a concern for all children but often ignores or disparages the conditions under which many children are forced to live, especially children marginalized by class or race who, in effect, are generally excluded from the privileging and protective invocation of innocence” (1998, 32); there is “little interest in the welfare of kids who are poor and non-white” (33). José Muñoz reiterates this point when he reminds us that “the future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids [and] queer kids are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (2009, 95). The majority of children depicted on Toddlers & Tiaras are white and presumably at least middle class, considering the disposable income necessary to participate in pageants. While beyond the scope of this essay, a future investigation might nuance childhood sexuality by considering how narratives differ when race, ethnicity, and class are taken into account. For example, would the explosive controversy surrounding Toddlers & Tiaras exist if the show depicted mostly working-class black girls? How do cultural beliefs regarding sexuality as it exists across race and class determine which children we protect from sexualization? 4. I am indebted to Sharrona Pearl for helping me generate the term “age drag” to describe this phenomenon. Diederik Janssen has previously employed this term in a larger discussion of what he terms transmaturities (2009); and in “Progressiveness, Camp, and Tremulous Delight,” David Eshelman makes a passing comment on age drag when he notes that a cast in a particular play is “not age-appropriate” (2010, 3), but he does not elaborate. Works Cited
American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. 2007. Report on the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. http://www.apa.org/pi/women/ programs/girls/report-full.pdf. Anderson, Susan. 2009. High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty. New York: powerHouse Books. Angelides, Steven. 2004. “Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse, and the Erasure of Childhood Sexuality.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10(2):141–77. Bruhm, Steven, and Natasha Hurley, eds. 2004. Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990. New York: Routledge.
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Eshelman, David. 2010. “Progressiveness, Camp, and Tremulous Delight: Vim and Vigor on the Arkansas Radio Theatre.” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 6(2):1–14. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. 1976. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Gamson, Joshua. 1999. Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. London: University of Chicago Press. Giroux, Henry. 1998. “Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence.” Social Text 57:31–53. Halberstam, J. Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: New York University Press. Henson, Melissa. 2011. “‘Toddlers and Tiaras’ and Sexualizing 3-Year-Olds.” CNN. September 13. http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/12/opinion/ henson-toddlers-tiaras. Janssen, Diederik. 2009. “Transmaturities: Gender Trouble as Tentative Analogue for Maturity Trouble.” Reconstruction 9(3):n.p. ———. 2010. “The Semiotic Predicament of Developmental Psychology.” Subjectivity 3(4):382–402. Kincaid, James R. 2004. “Producing Erotic Children,” Quoted in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 3–16. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kwan, S., and Trautner, M. N. 2009. “Beauty Work: Individual and Institutional Rewards, the Reproduction of Gender, and Questions of Agency.” Sociology Compass 3(1):49–71. Medovoi, Leerom. 2010. “Age Trouble: A Timely Subject in American Literary and Cultural Studies.” American Literary History 22(3):657–72. Mohr, Richard. 2004. “The Pedophilia of Everyday Life,” Quoted in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 17–30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. “Cruising the Toilet.” In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 83–96. New York: New York University Press. Parents Television Council. Accessed May 10, 2013. In “Frequently Asked Questions.” http://w2.parentstv.org/main/About/FAQ.aspx. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2004. “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Quoted in Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children, ed. Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, 139–50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.