“A Visible/Invisible Binary”: Visuality and Sexuality in the Discursive Figuration of the Child

Abstract

ABSTRACT Juxtaposing scholarly studies of flogging and anti-flogging treatises with a study of educational reform in eighteenth century Europe, I offer a conceptual montage in which the discursive formation of the “child” becomes splintered, disclosing, I suggest, degraded forms of desire in adult fears of caretakers' seduction of children. “Study” provided sites of sexualized rites of passage in which adult caretakers' vigilance seemed to stimulate what it was intended to prevent. Conscious of this visible/invisible binary in the discursive formation of the “child,” might caretakers be less likely to perform the disavowed desire they are supposed to suppress?