Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

my primary focus is mainstream culture that deals with taboo topics, particularly violence and abuse. While I do make conclusions that encompass many of these debates in terms of theory, I have attempted to be multifarious, agreeing with Deleuze that a “good theory does not totalize, it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself.”⁹ I examine some of the key issues of our time, including celebrity, observational culture, technology, memory, and our culture of death. After examining the phenomenon of celebrity and the mass media, particularly in relation to Michael Jackson and Oprah Winfrey, Chapter 3 assesses Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal novel Lolita (1955) and the two film adaptations, where we discover that American culture, at the forefront of neo-capitalism, globalization, and consumerization, is deemed the cause of child sexual abuse. The construction of the monstrous is a means by which the dominant ideology is affirmed through violent annihilation of its difference. Because vampirism concerns sadomasochistic sex, this depiction, unsurprisingly, dominates media culture’s myths of child sexual abuse. Etymologically, the vampire and the werewolf correlate. Karl Marx described the capitalist as a werewolf, replacing living labor with dead labor, human beings with machines.¹⁰ Throughout this book, I expose how the arms of capitalism engender child sexual abuse, with the pedophile constructed in media culture as the monstrous machine. This construction is a dangerous mythologizing, in that resistance to this supposedly all-powerful dominant technology of the pedophile-machine therefore becomes futile. There is a creation of an ideology that knows no resistance.

Following Chapter 3’s elucidation of Lolita, Chapters 4 to 13 examine fathers who sexually abuse or pursue friends of their children; fathers who sexually abuse daughters; sons who are abused by their mothers or whose mothers are obsessive about their sons; sexual abuse in an African American context; traces of abuse, with parents being sexually abused by their children; the impact of child sexual abuse on adults surfacing; children sexually abusing other children; and films where male paranoia over concerns of child sexual abuse and pedophilia dominate. Men direct all of these films and, despite some being