Meg barker

This paper explores the considerations of sexualisation, and of gender stereotyping, in the recent United Kingdom government report Letting Children be Children. This report, the Bailey Review, claimed to represent the views of parents. However, closer reading reveals that, whilst the parents who were consulted were concerned about both the sexualisation and the gender stereotyping of products aimed at children, the Bailey Review focuses only on the former, and dismisses the latter. ‘Sexualisation’ has four faces in the Bailey Review: it is treated as a process that increases 1) the visibility of sexual content in the public domain, 2) misogyny, 3) the sexuality of children, and 4) the mainstream position of ‘deviant’ sexual behaviours and lifestyles. Through this construction of ‘sexualisation’, gendered relations of power are not only hidden from view, but buttress a narrative in which young women are situated as children, and their sexuality and desire rendered pathological and morally unacceptable as judged by a conservative standard of decency. Comparison of the treatment of sexualisation and gender stereotyping in the review is revealing of the political motivations behind it, and of wider discourse in these areas.

In this presentation, we will try to frame the appearance of polyamory as an identity within the broader context of socio-cultural changes happening in Western contemporary culture. Through the theoretical framework of Nicholas Rose, Michel Foucault, Ulrich Beck, among others, we will attempt to demonstrate polyamory as a construct arising from three particular and distinctive aspects of western contemporary culture, as an individualized, sexualized and psychologized culture. Each aspect will be characterized and then linked back to the birth of polyamory as a concept; in turn, these links will be analyzed in their tensional characteristics between possible queer/non-normative life alternatives and a rehashing of neo-liberal/post-feminist discourse that can bring about an illusion of subjective empowerment. Of particular importance to this analysis is the role of Psychology, both as field of research into polyamory, and as a techno-social lens through which polyamory is enacted – and the ways through which such a framing might also align itself with neo-liberalism, or with a narrowing down of the political, sexual, social and philosophical implications of polyamory and other critical/consensual non-monogamies.