#IRLEntertainerDesmondNapolesAKADesmondIsAmazing
Addendum I would be curious to know if this poster feels the same about child beauty pageants/contests (given their often over-sexualised nature). For example, this is how
#IRLScholarHenryGiroux understands them:
"I will argue that the beauty pageant is an exemplary site for examining critically how the discourse of innocence mystifies the appropriation of children's bodies in a society that increasingly sexualizes and commodifies them. In pursuing this argument, I will examine how the culture of child beauty pageants functions as a pedagogical site where children learn about pleasure, desire, and the roles they might assume in an adult society. I also will examine how such pageants are rationalized, how they are upheld by commercial and ideological structures within the broader society, and how they are reproduced, reinforced, and sustained in related spheres such as advertising and fashion photography-spheres that also play an important role in marketing children as objects of pleasure, desire, and sexuality. Underlying this project is the attempt to challenge such rituals as innocent, to reconsider the role they play as part of a broader cultural practice in which children are reified and objectified. This is not meant to suggest that all child beauty pageants engage in a form of child abuse. Pageants vary in both the way they are constructed and how they interact with local and national audiences. Moreover, their outcomes are variable and contingent. But as sites of representation, identity formation, consumption, and regulation, the dominant and assigned meanings attached to these events have to be understood in terms of how they articulate and resonate with other cultural sites engaged in the production and regulation of youth, the packaging of desire, and the sexualized body. (p.36) ...
All of these critiques raise valid concerns about the role of child beauty pageants and how they produce particular notions of beauty, pleasure, and femininity that are as culturally gender-specific as they are degrading; such criticisms also prompt a debate about the nature of adult needs and desires that push kids into pageants, and how such pageants correspond with other social practices that 'silently' reproduce roles for children that undermine the notion of child innocence and reinforce particular forms of child abuse" (p.39).
Giroux, Henry A. 'Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence.'
#JournalSocialText, no. 57, 1998, pp. 31-53. JSTOR,
[academic source]. Accessed 20 Sept. 2023.
#TheoryPoliticsOfInnocence
#PhenomnShowPageantBeautyChild
#PhenomnSexualityHypersexualization
#PoliticsCapitalismCommodification