The doll and pedagogic mediation: teaching children to fear the ‘other’

Abstract

The present paper explores the ways in which non‐heteronormative sexual identities are represented and made to appear ‘other’ and potentially abject within North‐American and British pedagogic cultures, and how this regime of representation affects the development and construction of sexualities in the young. Taking Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and bodily hexis as structural starting points, I draw on Butler's theoretical work to examine how gender is represented and regulated through performative relations but how these also offer a site for resistance. I discuss Winnicott's theory of the ‘transitional object’ and the ‘potential space’ of play that it affords, to discuss one such site, a space in which gender divisions are not yet understood (in infancy) and where they can be questioned (in childhood and adulthood). To help me navigate a complex terrain I refer to a large, photographic piece by Jeff Wall, ‘A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947’. Using this work as an interlocutor, I investigate a domestic situation in which normalcy is overturned by the ‘uncanniness’ of the performance, a phenomenon that undermines the pedagogic agenda to offer an equivocal space for fantasy.

Notes

1. It should be noted that Winnicott was a disciple and friend of Klein.

2. The potential space is an indeterminate one in which gender plays no part. It has something in common with Kristeva's semiotic, a pre‐Oedipal space of haptic reciprocity outside of language. But Kristeva's ‘semiotic’ differs from the potential space in that the latter is triggered by separation rather than sustained by the bond, which is the basis of Kristeva's theory.

3. During the year in which Wall's tableau is set, the most successful North American ventriloquist was Edgar John Bergen and it was on radio (surprisingly) that his work was most widely disseminated from 1937 until 1956. His most popular dummy, Charlie McCarthy, was a wood carving based on ‘a rascally Irish newspaperboy he knew’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Bergen [accessed 11 January 2007]). Apparently with this doll/boy dressed as an adult/toff (its image known to listeners through cinema and later television), Bergen was able to use sexual innuendo that was unacceptable from an adult performer under the broadcast standards of the day (indeed Mae West had been prosecuted for using similar language in 1937).