Papers by Steven Angelides
History on the Edge, 1997
Critique of gay gene research
Lust and Loathing across Time and Space, 2009
Women's History Review, 2012
ABSTRACT
Are paedophiles a proliferating threat? Have we been ignorant in the past to the numbers of paedo... more Are paedophiles a proliferating threat? Have we been ignorant in the past to the numbers of paedophiles in our populations and to the depth and breadth of paedophile activity? Or are our criteria expanding, such that many more behaviours are being pulled into the definitional fields of child sexual abuse and paedophilia? Are we inventing more and more paedophiles? Is it even possible to define the paedophile? This article is not concerned with adjudicating the question of whether or not the cultural incidence of paedophilia has increased. It aims instead to interrogate the conceptual ground upon which recent efforts to identify the paedophile and paedophilic activity have pivoted. The hegemonic domain for the propagation of paedophilia research has been the field of psychopathology. I argue that this field has profoundly 'misrecognised' paedophilia. In outlining this, I propose that the study of abnormal psychology must engage psychoanalytic, feminist, and deconstructive critiques of identity, and that it must resist the temptation to affix an ontological essence to the 'paedophile'. I conclude with the suggestion that only when research methodologies take seriously the question of the prevalence of intergenerational sexual desire in the general population can we even begin to understand paedophilia.
This article explores the cultural and historical conditions structuring the emergence of the cat... more This article explores the cultural and historical conditions structuring the emergence of the category of the ‘paedophile’ in Western discourse in the latter part of the twentieth century. It argues not only that the ‘paedophile’ was an outgrowth of social and political power struggles around questions of normative masculinity and male sexuality, but also that homophobia played a central role in its formation. In addition to regulating social and intimate relations between men, women and children, the category of the ‘paedophile’ was homosexualised in order to demarcate ‘normal’ from ‘pathological’ masculinities.
This article offers a reading of a recent Australian teacher-student sex scandal in order to inte... more This article offers a reading of a recent Australian teacher-student sex scandal in order to interrogate the relationship between gendered subjectivity and cultural codes of gender. The questions of whether gender ought to make a difference to how we understand instances of so-called " intergenerational sex " and whether cultural codes accurately reflect sexual subjectivity are posed. It is argued that while cultural codes are not external or equivalent to subjectivity, this does not mean that they are not expressive of elements of subjectivity. The article concludes with the suggestion that the failure to attend to the nexus of the social and the psychical not only serves to strengthen a very recent and particular set of historical, political, and ideological forces but also risks creating foundations for misreadings of the history of male adolescent subjectivities.
In 2004 a controversy erupted in Australia over the issue of gender bias in the judicial treatmen... more In 2004 a controversy erupted in Australia over the issue of gender bias in the judicial treatment of sexual offenders and victims. It was sparked by the sentencing of Karen Ellis, a then 37-year-old physical education teacher, who pleaded guilty to the ‘sexual penetration of a child under the age of 16 years’. The ‘child’, one of her students—Ben Dunbar—was three months shy of his sixteenth birthday and the general age of consent at the time of the offences. Ellis, initially receiving a wholly suspended sentence, was immediately compared to Gavin Hopper, the tennis coach who, only three months earlier, had been sentenced to a prison term for a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old student in the mid-1980s. Ellis’s sentence aroused public outrage from victims of crimes groups, as well as parents and child abuse support groups, among others. Indeed, the case has been held up as an example of the judicial system’s more lenient treatment of female offenders, and thus of the need for gender-neutral interpretations of sexual offences. In the context of a purported rise in sex offending female teachers in the West, similar consternation around judicial gender bias has also emerged in the US, Canada, and the UK. This article examines the Ellis case in order to pose the question of the extent to which gender, in shaping sexual offences of this kind, ought to be a factor in sentencing. It argues not that the Ellis case is indicative of the need for rigid adherence to the principle of gender-neutrality, but the opposite: a paradigmatic example of when to insist on the recognition of gender difference.
This article takes popular media scandals surrounding cases of female secondary school teachers c... more This article takes popular media scandals surrounding cases of female secondary school teachers charged with sexual offences against male students as its point of inquiry. Using the infamous story of former American schoolteacher Debra Lafave as a case study, it examines the over-determined dynamics of fascination, eroticisation and anxiety structuring the representation and reception of this case and others like it. The article argues that the 'sex panic' over female teacher sex offenders is often less about the women than it is about male adolescent sexuality.
A History of Bisexuality combines history and queer deconstructive theory in order to rethink our... more A History of Bisexuality combines history and queer deconstructive theory in order to rethink our understanding of sexuality in the West. Complicating recent historical and theoretical accounts, it begins with the assumption that any understanding of sexuality’s historical and epistemological construction is impoverished without an analysis of bisexuality. The book argues that any definition of homosexuality or heterosexuality necessarily entails a definition of bisexuality, such that each of these terms requires the other two for its self-definition. A History of Bisexuality demonstrates this by retracing the history of modern sexuality through sexology, psychoanalysis, gay liberation, social constructionism, queer theory, and the science of molecular biology and genetics.
It reveals that, in order to sustain our culture’s pigeonholing of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, the history of sexuality has been one of repeated attempts to deny the existence of bisexuality. A History of Bisexuality traces the historical forces responsible for this cultural myth, and in the process reveals sexuality, and its accompanying terms hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality, all to be arbitrary designations whose boundaries overlap and merge inevitably and imperceptibly into one another.
One of the principal aims of queer theory has been to challenge heteronormative constructions of ... more One of the principal aims of queer theory has been to challenge heteronormative constructions of sexuality and to work the hetero/homosexual structure to the point of critical collapse. Despite an epistemic location within this very structure, however, the category of
This essay considers sexual offence legislation that automatically
criminalizes sexual relationsh... more This essay considers sexual offence legislation that automatically
criminalizes sexual relationships between teachers and students where the latter are over the general age of consent. Examining an Australian criminal case, it critiques the model of sovereign power informing such legislation, suggesting that it forecloses critical questions of subjectivity and intersubjective dynamics. Far from innocuous, the essay argues that this model of power and its foreclosures misrecognize the teacher–student relationships under scrutiny and often create far greater harm than do the sexual relationships themselves. An alternative model of multi-dimensional inter/subjective power relations is proposed as a way of analysing interpersonal relationships, giving due weight to adolescent agency, encouraging responsible sexual citizenship and preventing unnecessary prosecutions and collateral damage.
The last several years in Anglophone societies have seen an explosion of anxiety about teenage ‘s... more The last several years in Anglophone societies have seen an explosion of anxiety about teenage ‘sexting’. Legislators are racing to have laws designed that can keep pace with new technologies and the exchange of sexually explicit material. However, in the absence of laws crafted with sexting in mind, police, parents, and prosecutors in many jurisdictions are sometimes responding by charging some teenagers with child pornography, sexual harassment, and indecency offences. Some of these felonies, even when involving the consensual exchange of self-images to a sexual partner, have resulted in adolescents being mandated to register as sex offenders. This article considers the stakes of current socio-legal and pedagogical responses to the practice of consensual teenage sexting. It argues that, beyond an expression of concern with child protection from harm, a ‘sexting panic’ is being generated in part as a way of displacing the question
of teenage sexual agency.
Lambda Nordica 2-3, 2011, pp.102-125
When a nation-wide scandal erupted over Australian artist Bill Henson’s 2008 exhibition incorpora... more When a nation-wide scandal erupted over Australian artist Bill Henson’s 2008 exhibition incorporating photographs of teenage nudes, public debate centred on the following kinds of questions. Are the images art or pornography? Are the ‘child’ models sexualized? Can the public circulation of the images result in a potentially harmful exploitation of childhood ‘innocence’? Can child models consent to being photographed nude? Rather than adjudicate these debates, this article interrogates that which they evade. It argues that the overt concern about protecting children from sexualization, exploitation, and abuse has been masking and obscuring a latent and equally (if not often more) palpable anxiety that Western societies are having extreme difficulty grappling with, let alone adequately acknowledging at this historical juncture: children’s agentive sexual subjectivities. The article concludes by proposing that child sex panics are often at their most histrionic not so much because of the exposure of horrific exploitation and abuse at the hands of adults, but instead because of the exposure of palpable forms of children’s sexual agency.
When a nation-wide scandal erupted over Australian artist Bill Henson’s 2008 exhibition incorpora... more When a nation-wide scandal erupted over Australian artist Bill Henson’s 2008 exhibition incorporating photographs of teenage nudes, public debate centred on the following kinds of questions. Are the images art or pornography? Are the ‘child’ models sexualized? Can the public circulation of the images result in a potentially harmful exploitation of childhood ‘innocence’? Can child models consent to being photographed nude? Rather than adjudicate these debates, this chapter attempts to diagnose some of the anxieties behind this scandal (and child sex scandals like it) by reading Freud’s theory of the uncanny through Silvan Tomkins’ shame theory. It suggests that the overt concern about protecting children from sexualization, exploitation, and abuse often masks a concern about children’s agentive sexual subjectivities. It concludes by arguing that adults are ashamed of the sexualities of children and adolescents as much, sometimes more, than we are fearful of adult perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
This article argues that the discourse of child sexual abuse has expanded at the expense of a dis... more This article argues that the discourse of child sexual abuse has expanded at the expense of a discourse of child sexuality. Rigorous attempts to expose the reality and dynamics of child sexual abuse have been aided, if not in part made possible, by equally rigorous attempts to conceal, repress, or ignore the reality and dynamics of child sexuality. This placing of child sexuality under erasure has had deleterious consequences at both the level of everyday practice and at the level of theory. First, the desexualization of childhood has damaging psychological and psychotherapeutic consequences for child victi s of sexual abuse. Second, with “child sexuality” figured only as an oxymoron in the feminist discourse of child sexual abuse, its erasure ensures that the categories of “child” and “adult” are kept distinct and at a safe epistemological distance. For queer theorists trained to unpack the mutual imbrication and constitution of binary oppositions, this is highly problematic. As will be shown, not only does queer theory have much to offer theorizations of the relationship between analytic axes of “sexuality” and “age,” but there may be an instructive methodological lesson for queer theory to glean from failed feminist attempts to hierarchize sexuality by way of a linear and sequential logic of age stratification.
This essay deconstructs the order/disorder binary. Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, it repla... more This essay deconstructs the order/disorder binary. Drawing on the work of Henri Bergson, it replaces the idea of disorder with the concept of two positive orders. The essay concludes with a philosophical example of how we might reconceive the biomedical opposition of normality/pathology without relying on the idea of disorder.
Journal of Homosexuality, 2004
Journal of Homosexuality, 2006
One of the principal aims of queer theory has been to challenge heteronormative constructions of ... more One of the principal aims of queer theory has been to challenge heteronormative constructions of sexuality and to work the hetero/homosexual structure to the point of critical collapse. Despite an epistemic location within this very structure, however, the category of
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Papers by Steven Angelides
It reveals that, in order to sustain our culture’s pigeonholing of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, the history of sexuality has been one of repeated attempts to deny the existence of bisexuality. A History of Bisexuality traces the historical forces responsible for this cultural myth, and in the process reveals sexuality, and its accompanying terms hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality, all to be arbitrary designations whose boundaries overlap and merge inevitably and imperceptibly into one another.
criminalizes sexual relationships between teachers and students where the latter are over the general age of consent. Examining an Australian criminal case, it critiques the model of sovereign power informing such legislation, suggesting that it forecloses critical questions of subjectivity and intersubjective dynamics. Far from innocuous, the essay argues that this model of power and its foreclosures misrecognize the teacher–student relationships under scrutiny and often create far greater harm than do the sexual relationships themselves. An alternative model of multi-dimensional inter/subjective power relations is proposed as a way of analysing interpersonal relationships, giving due weight to adolescent agency, encouraging responsible sexual citizenship and preventing unnecessary prosecutions and collateral damage.
of teenage sexual agency.
It reveals that, in order to sustain our culture’s pigeonholing of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, the history of sexuality has been one of repeated attempts to deny the existence of bisexuality. A History of Bisexuality traces the historical forces responsible for this cultural myth, and in the process reveals sexuality, and its accompanying terms hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality, all to be arbitrary designations whose boundaries overlap and merge inevitably and imperceptibly into one another.
criminalizes sexual relationships between teachers and students where the latter are over the general age of consent. Examining an Australian criminal case, it critiques the model of sovereign power informing such legislation, suggesting that it forecloses critical questions of subjectivity and intersubjective dynamics. Far from innocuous, the essay argues that this model of power and its foreclosures misrecognize the teacher–student relationships under scrutiny and often create far greater harm than do the sexual relationships themselves. An alternative model of multi-dimensional inter/subjective power relations is proposed as a way of analysing interpersonal relationships, giving due weight to adolescent agency, encouraging responsible sexual citizenship and preventing unnecessary prosecutions and collateral damage.
of teenage sexual agency.