Violent Boys and Precocious Girls: Regulating Childhood at the End of the Millennium

Abstract

This article explores the regulation of childhood at the end of the twentieth century by focusing on the figures of the proto-violent boy and the proto-sexual girl in relation to the figure of the dangerous and predatory male adult. These figures, who represent the Other to normal childhood, are explored with respect to popular culture, examining computer games on the one hand and popular song and dance on the other. It is argued that conceptions of childhood for the next century need to engage with the specificity of the sites in which subjectivities are constituted and to move away from the simple dichotomies of normality and pathology.