ABSTRACT
No issue reveals the contradictions within the politics of childhood as starkly as that of sexuality, its definitions and regulation. As ‘non-adults’ children are assumed to be asexual. While they are socialized into gender-appropriate roles from birth, a universal feature of patriarchal societies, they are expected to retain a sexual naïvety. Yet the images which surround them, implicit and explicit, of hegemonic/dominant masculinity and emphasized/subordinate femininity are allpervasive and all persuasive. The daily experiences of children and young people are contextualized by constructions of masculinity and femininity which are both gendered and sexualized. They are binary opposites whose binding attraction is generalized and homogenized on the basis of compulsory heterosexuality. The close association between the biology and politics of reproduction, albeit diverse in its specific cultural manifestations, normalizes and underwrites heterosexual relations. Just as gender implies relations of dominance and subordination, common throughout patriarchal societies, so heterosexuality reflects such relations. Historically, the material, social, cultural, political and physical oppression of women as gendered beings has been matched by the physical repression of women as sexualized beings. Any diversion from the social and cultural determining values has been interpreted and represented as a perversion. Beyond the context of ‘servicing men’, both economic and sexual, women’s sexuality has no legitimacy-it is defined as abnormal or unnatural. As children develop they are expected to deal not only with their changing physicality and mixed emotions but also with the confused and confusing messages which govern their knowledge and understanding of the body, its ‘normality’ and its potential.
