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June 9, 2008
The Bill Henson affair witnessed the transference of the conservative's concern over the sexualization of teenagers in consumer culture onto art, and this raises some interesting issues about conservative culture, teenage sexuality and human sexuality. In a paper entitled Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics and the Pedagogy of Display Henry A. Giroux says:
Representations of youth in popular culture have a long and complex history and habitually serve as signposts through which American society registers its own crisis of meaning, vision, and community. Youth as a complex, shifting, and contradictory category is rarely narrated in the dominant public sphere through the diverse voices of the young. Prohibited from speaking as moral and political agents, youth become an empty category inhabited by the desires, fantasies, and interests of the adult world. This is not to suggest that youth don't speak, they are simply restricted from speaking in those spheres where public conversation shapes social policy and refused the power to make knowledge consequential with respect to their own individual and collective needs
He adds that while pushed to the margins of political power within society, youth nonetheless become a central focus of adult fascination, desire, and authority. Increasingly denied opportunities for self-definition and political interaction, youth are transfigured by discourses and practices that subordinate and contain the language of individual freedom, social power, and critical agency.
When the models who have worked for Henson have spoken they have been ignored by conservatives, who proceed to go on about their fears and anxieties as if youth had not spoken. What the models had to say was deemed to be of no consequence and they were ignored.
Strangely those conservatives who rally around the sanctity of family values while attempting to enact anti-pornography legislation, rarely said anything about the way that advertising and fashion privilege market values over human value:--- in the sense that human needs are subordinated to the laws of the free market with its endless drive to accumulate profit.
They were also silent about the way that young models are presented in advertising to sell jeans and clothes in various stages of undress, poised to offer both sensual pleasure and the phantasy of sexual availability.
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An interesting article in the light of the concern about protecting kids from sickos who prey on them. All the fuss is made over Henson's images:
I cannot help but feel that Henson was a scapegoat to attack progressive liberal values and art in a campaign that played on dominant fears about the loss of moral authority.
What disturbed me was the kids are not allowed to have control over their own bodies. They are rendered silent in the talk about teen sexuality.