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Virtual Pedophilia: Sex Offender Profiling and U.S. Security Culture
In Virtual Pedophilia Gillian Harkins traces how by the end of the twentieth century the pedophile as a social outcast evolved into its contemporary appearance as a virtually normal white male. The pedophile's alleged racial and gender normativity was treated as an exception to dominant racialized modes of criminal or diagnostic profiling. The pedophile was instead profiled as a virtual figure, a potential threat made visible only when information was transformed into predictive image. The virtual pedophile was everywhere and nowhere, slipping through day-to-day life undetected until people learned how to arm themselves with the right combination of visually predictive information. Drawing on television, movies, and documentaries such as Law and Order: SVU, To Catch a Predator, Mystic River, and Capturing the Friedmans, Harkins shows how diverse U.S. audiences have been conscripted and trained to be lay detectives who should always be on the lookout for the pedophile as virtual predator. In this way, the perceived threat of the pedophile legitimated increased surveillance and ramped-up legal strictures that expanded the security apparatus of the carceral state.
288 pages, Paperback
Published April 10, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 31, 2023
Worth the read. Theoretically dense in some places, but massively informative in how a racist, sexist and classist society constructs the “virtual pedophile” in ways that do more harm than good.
April 12, 2022
This work was really interesting right up until the very end when it randomly decided to pivot and declare that sex offenders were queer and tried to equate pedophilia with my existence as a gay trans non-binary person.
As I quote from the closing of this work:
"In summarizing this scholarship, Fischel has suggested that 'sex offenders are the new queers' to the degree that they enable 'demonizing projection' while disentangling the sex offender from historical homophobia. But is all demonizing projection a mode of queering? How are demonizing systems related to the subjectives they target? Kadji Amin has observed that queer studies as a field 'Tends to extract theoretical and political value from the most transgressive objects of study' from its own historical vantage point originating in the United States of the 11990's. Cathy Cohen's exploration of 'the radical potential of queer politics' remains relevant: presumptions about relations among gender, sexuality, race, and territory delimit what appears 'transgressive' and how value is valorized across theory and politics. At stake is what kinds of sensational surplus are appropriated by emerging figurations of 'queer.' The films I have studied here remind us that demonization and valorization are closely entwined, and discerning the queer among the heteronormalizations may require new theoretical and political frameworks. To move beyond these films' proposed figures of respectability, abnormality, and queerness, we may need to turn to an alternative movement-based paradigms that move beyond SORN-era cultural mediation and its critical apparatus I treat in the conclusion."
Those that victimize others are not queer. Those that sexualy expolit children, women, and other vulnerable populations are not queer. They are rapists. I cannot and will not accept my identity as a queer person be found to be equivalent to the status of someone who sexually assaulted me. Queer people are not to be weaponized for any issue you want us attached to. I am frankly, disgusted at the suggestion.
As I quote from the closing of this work:
"In summarizing this scholarship, Fischel has suggested that 'sex offenders are the new queers' to the degree that they enable 'demonizing projection' while disentangling the sex offender from historical homophobia. But is all demonizing projection a mode of queering? How are demonizing systems related to the subjectives they target? Kadji Amin has observed that queer studies as a field 'Tends to extract theoretical and political value from the most transgressive objects of study' from its own historical vantage point originating in the United States of the 11990's. Cathy Cohen's exploration of 'the radical potential of queer politics' remains relevant: presumptions about relations among gender, sexuality, race, and territory delimit what appears 'transgressive' and how value is valorized across theory and politics. At stake is what kinds of sensational surplus are appropriated by emerging figurations of 'queer.' The films I have studied here remind us that demonization and valorization are closely entwined, and discerning the queer among the heteronormalizations may require new theoretical and political frameworks. To move beyond these films' proposed figures of respectability, abnormality, and queerness, we may need to turn to an alternative movement-based paradigms that move beyond SORN-era cultural mediation and its critical apparatus I treat in the conclusion."
Those that victimize others are not queer. Those that sexualy expolit children, women, and other vulnerable populations are not queer. They are rapists. I cannot and will not accept my identity as a queer person be found to be equivalent to the status of someone who sexually assaulted me. Queer people are not to be weaponized for any issue you want us attached to. I am frankly, disgusted at the suggestion.
December 10, 2022
Intriguing but overly dense read
By turns crystal clear and almost incomprehensible for non-academic audiences, this book nonetheless presents some intriguing questions and food for thought. There is some troubling language e.g. "adult-child sex" that isn't clearly enough defined [the author made a note early on that I missed regarding "value neutral language," not that this helps the squickiness], as well as an equally troubling implication that child "pornography" could be somehow overblown, as if the author doesn't realize the conditions under which so much of it is produced. Additionally, the book needs a content warning for depictions of media that could be triggering to some survivors.I
Most of all the book does raise a lot of points and questions that encourage the reader -- however concerned, squicked out, or even enraged -- to question the way we structure society and the inherent power and control dynamics that inform our approaches to children, victims, suspects and suspicious people, race, and class. In that regard the book does its job.
By turns crystal clear and almost incomprehensible for non-academic audiences, this book nonetheless presents some intriguing questions and food for thought. There is some troubling language e.g. "adult-child sex" that isn't clearly enough defined [the author made a note early on that I missed regarding "value neutral language," not that this helps the squickiness], as well as an equally troubling implication that child "pornography" could be somehow overblown, as if the author doesn't realize the conditions under which so much of it is produced. Additionally, the book needs a content warning for depictions of media that could be triggering to some survivors.I
Most of all the book does raise a lot of points and questions that encourage the reader -- however concerned, squicked out, or even enraged -- to question the way we structure society and the inherent power and control dynamics that inform our approaches to children, victims, suspects and suspicious people, race, and class. In that regard the book does its job.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews