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

Developing this further, within much child sexual abuse discourse child sexual abuse is conceived to be the highest truth, it is in this sense an event that is beyond meaning, as its meaning is contained in its “truth.” As the construction of the past is a product of the present, narratives of child sexual abuse offer lenses and story lines to make sense of the past. But there is a paradox, again, if we accept the idea of “flashback,” when the adult survivor reexperiences the past trauma in the present. There is a moment of nonnarrative time in this experience. As Paul Ricoeur put it, “[T]ime becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence.”⁵⁴ Nonnarrative time, a tautology if ever there was one, is therefore concerned with the inhuman. Given the uncanny nature of flashbacks, they are always concerned with the supernatural, as well as the paranormal, and have a semblance of “possession” about them. This relates to the central idea we find repeatedly throughout this work: child sexual abuse being intimately connected to the notion of the uncanny and the supernatural.

For Kincaid, the early-twentieth-century cartoon Buster Brown, which emphasizes spanking, became an archetype, with “the big-eyed, kissy-lipped blonde figures” of Shirley Temple, Jay North, Tatum O’Neal, Ricky Schroeder, Jodie Foster, Drew Barrymore, River Phoenix, Macaulay Culkin, and others, “indistinguishable.”⁵⁵ He claims that every sitcom has this type of figure. “Long running displays of child erotica like The Brady Bunch cease attracting only when the youngest objects, Bobby and Cindy, pass out of paedophile range.”⁵⁶ America definitely has a problem with its child stars. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Judy Garland are just a few that have courted controversy. More recently, fifteen-year-old television star Miley Cyrus became the focus of intense media attention after posing for “sexy” photographs in Vanity Fair in 2008. Cyrus plays an ordinary girl with a secret life of a pop star, alongside her real father, the country music star Billy Ray Cyrus, in the Disney show Hannah Montana, and has cultivated an image of innocence, both on and off screen. But posing for photographs by Annie Leibovitz, draped in a satin sheet, with most of her back exposed, and