<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Media Regulation and the Imaginary of the Child: A Seminar with Gail Hawkes and Danielle Egan</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Apologies for cross-posting<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
<BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT SIZE="4"><FONT FACE="Arial Rounded MT Bold"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14pt'><B>Media Regulation and the Imaginary of the Child: A Seminar with Gail Hawkes and Danielle Egan<BR>
</B></SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'><BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><B>VENUE</B>: University of Wollongong, Bld 19: 1003<BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'><BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><B>DATE</B>: Friday 10th December 2010<BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'><BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><B>TIME</B>: 10.00 am. This seminar will be followed by a light lunch. <BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'><BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><B>RSVP:</B> Registration is free but please rsvp for catering purposes to Dr Robyn Morris before Friday 3 December <FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="robynm@uow.edu.au">robynm@uow.edu.au</a></U></FONT></SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"> <<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="mailto:robynm@uow.edu.au">mailto:robynm@uow.edu.au</a></U></FONT>> </FONT><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow"> .<BR>
<BR>
</FONT></SPAN><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'><BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT FACE="Arial Narrow"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'><I>Sexualization has emerged in the past decade as both an inexorable process and a naturalized outcome, especially in relation to girls. This term carries behind it a potent mix of traditional/naturalized assumptions and the demonization of contemporary social changes, especially those that threaten the normative boundaries of modernity. Specifically, we identify the dichotomous boundaries that accompanied the modernizing process in our work -between adult and child; female and male; between the body and rational control – even between the individual and society. In the discourse of sexualisation, fear replaces systematic examination and the desire for safeguarding trumps reason. Rapid response seems like the only acceptable course of action because protection must be secured and policies written to impede this catastrophe now and in the future. The ideological construction of sexualisation as a process is, we argue, one means by which these instabilities of a globalised social ordering of ideas and behaviours through the medium of social network sites and communities. Consequent demands for the protection of the young children from a range of axiomatic risk and dangers, serve, we will suggest, as a Trojan horse for conservative forces that seek to contain the democratizing potential of the dissolution of the regulatory social boundaries modernity. The concept of the sexualized child offers a potent domain through which to restore the boundaries of a past social order and it is this that our paper will address. We will use examples from past and present claims for consequences of sexualisation to suggest that this is an example of Barthes’exnomination - powerful precisely because it works to create an idea as completely natural and thus outside of history and human configuration. We will suggest that deconstructing the claimed phenomenon of sexualisation offers a powerful analytical tool with which to expose the dynamics of a new form of social control. <BR>
</I><B> <BR>
<BR>
R. Danielle Egan</B> is Professor and Chair of Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence University. She is the author of <I>Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships between Exotic Dancers and Their Regular Customers</I> (2006)<I> </I>and co-author, with Gail Hawkes, of <I>Theorizing the Sexual Child </I>(2010). In addition to her books she has co-edited anthologies, special issues and published in journals such as<I> Body and Society, Social History of Medicine, Australian Feminist Studies, Continuum and Historical Sociology. </I>In addition to her academic work, Dr. Egan is currently in psychoanalytic training at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. <I> <BR>
<BR>
</I><B>Gail Hawkes </B>is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW. She is the author of <I>A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality</I> (1996, 2003); <I>Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture</I> (2004) Co-editor of <I>Perspectives in Human Sexuality </I>(2005) and co-author of <I>Theorising the Sexual Child in Modernity</I> (2010). She continues her work with Professor Egan on childhood sexuality by co-authoring a critical analysis of the ‘sexualisation phenomenon’; for Polity Press in 2012. <BR>
</SPAN></FONT><FONT COLOR="#1F497D"><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'> <BR>
<BR>
</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Times New Roman"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12pt'> <BR>
<BR>
------ End of Forwarded Message<BR>
</SPAN></FONT>
</BODY>
</HTML>