Sexuality and Visual Art: Article Review #1

Josephine Hicks
WGST 202
T/Th 12:30-1:45
Professor Currans
Blog Topic: Sexuality and Visual Art
Article Review #1

Catharine Lumby, "Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality" CLCWeb: Comparative
Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol12/iss4/5> Thematic Issue
Ambiguity in Culture and Literature. Ed. Paolo Bartoloni and Anthony Stephens

In Catharine Lumby’s “Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality", she discusses the
representation of children in visual art and the sexualization of those representation. She questions the meaning of those representations sexualization and tries conceptualizing the way that sexualizing happens. Lumby argues that “anxieties about representations of children are always located in anxieties about the ambiguity of the boundaries between childhood and adulthood” (2), and that because of those anxieties, there developed a “need to protect children from predatory adults” (7). However, Lumby’s main argument is that, under the guise of this protection, adults risk promoting control of children through the objectification of them (8).

Lumby begins by examining the 1972 photographic album Victorian Children by Graham Ovenden and Robert Melville. In it, there are hundreds of photographs of mostly little girls. The children
are dressed and arranged in poses that make them look as though that are pleasantly lost in their own
thoughts. Lumby writes that the most disturbing images are the ones that are removed from the book.
The reader cannot even see them, but they “haunt the book” (2). Lumby draws a conclusion from this, saying that the absent images symbolize a broader truth about child pornography, that truth being that child pornography represents a whole category of texts whose content is “clear-cut”
and quickly imagined by the general public.

Afterwards, Lumby points out the oddness of the general public having this opinion when only a
significantly small group of people have ever even seen images of children performing sexual acts with adults. She notes that in Australia, only 1.8% of 1028 surveyed regular porn consumers had any interest in looking at child porn. This being said, she claims that child pornography is a largely amateur and rare form of media production. But, then also argues that “we are living through an era of enormous concern that children are everywhere being sexualized for the adult gaze” (2). Lumby concludes that this is about the boundaries between childhood and adulthood. She questions: “What draws [adults] to [images of children]? What disturbs [the adults]? What is at stake in the gaze of the child?” (2).

Lumby proposes that the shadow of the pedophile falls across the iconic and idealized space in
an Anglo-Australian beach where many children spend half their lives their in the summer half naked. She marks that the reader can be positive that there is something deeply rooted in the relationship between adults and children that is very troubling. That trouble may be related to how children are portrayed as naturally innocent of sexual urges of any kind, and brought to light when they are portrayed as unnaturally corruptible. It’s a paradox; popular discussions of child pornography depict it as something unthinkable and outside the bounds of civilization, but at the same time, even the  most okay photos of children risk sexualizing them (3).

Lumby continues by providing the reader with literary critic James Kincaid’s argument, “We
have made the child we are protecting from the sexual horrors into a being defined exclusively by sexual images and terms: the child is defined as the sexual lure, the one in danger, the one capable of attracting nothing but sexual thoughts” (4). She also provides the reader with a description of a nude photo of a girl taken by Dodgson. The girl is in a classical fine art nude pose, however her gaze isn’t. The girl looks directly at the viewer. Lumby believes that the girl’s gaze is “one that evades the authority of both the photographer and the viewer” (5). Lumby ultimately leaves her reader to think about how the photographer frames the child but how the child returns the adult gaze. She believes that the meaning of a photograph may arise out of a range of possible interactions: between the photographer and the subject, between the subject and the photographer, and between the image and the viewer. She concludes with, “If we insist that our children can only ever be objects of the adult gaze, then we ignore their subjecthood and, under the guise of protection, risk promoting discourses that privilege control” (8).

Lumby’s article very easily relates to sexuality and visual art. She describes the sexulization of
children through images. The topic of this article is similar to Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege:
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” in a sense that having a person learn about how they may be
privileged can change that person’s view of a situation. In McIntosh’s writing, the reader learns that
whites are unknowingly privileged by being the racial majority, and that the advantages whites acquire unknowingly encourage inequality towards other racial minorities.In Lumby’s article, adults are unknowingly privileged by being the societal norm for them to be caretakers/protectors of children. However, because of this privilege, when adults try protecting their children, they risk assuming control over children’s subjecthood. They inevitably force children to be objects of the adult gaze. All in all, I would recommend reading “Ambiguity, Children, Representation, and Sexuality”, as it had definitely opened me up to thinking about child pornography and understanding it.