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June 9, 2008
In a paper entitled Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics and the Pedagogy of Display Henry A. Giroux says:
Traditionally, the body for youth has been one of the principal terrains for multiple forms of resistance and as a register of risk, pleasure, and sex. It has been through the body that youth displayed their own identities through oppositional subcultural styles, transgressive sexuality, and disruptive desires. The multiple representations and displays of the body in this context was generally central to developing a sense of agency, self-definition, and well-placed refusals. The body as a potent marker of youthful resistance served to set youth off from the adult world and suggested that the body was outside of the reach of dominant forms of moral regulation and sexual containment.
Within the new representational politics of youth, the body is increasingly being commodified and disciplined through a conservative cultural politics. Within the terrain of such a politics, the struggle over the body and sexuality as a sign becomes as important as the more traditional practices of containing and disciplining the body as a threat to the social order.
There is irony at work in a conservative discourse that defines its notion of family values, in part, on an image of the completely pure and sexually innocent child (read white and middle class) while it refuses to acknowledge the immense sexualization of children within consumer capitalism.
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The conservative discourse also looks elsewhere re the sexual abuse within traditional families.