Nymphet Fantasies: Child Beauty Pageants and the Politics of Innocence

Author(s): Henry A. Giroux

Source: Social Text , Winter, 1998, No. 57 (Winter, 1998), pp. 31-53
Published by: Duke University Press

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 Nymphet Fantasies
CHILD BEAUTY PAGEANTS AND THE POLITICS OF INNOCENCE

Henry
Only in a climate of denial could hysteria over satanic A. Giroux
rituals at daycare ce
ters coexist with a failure to grasp the full extent of child abuse. (More th
8.5 million women and men are survivors.) Only in a culture that represses
the evidence of the senses could child pageantry grow into a $5 billion doll
industry without anyone noticing. Only in a nation of promiscuous puritan
could it be a good career move to equip a six-year-old with bedroom eye
-Richard Goldstein, Village Voice, 24 June 1997

The Disappearing Child and the Politics of Innocence

The notion of the disappearing child and the myth of childhood inno-
cence often mirror and support each other. Within the myth of inno-
cence, children are often portrayed as inhabiting a world that is untainted,
magical, and utterly protected from the harshness of adult life. Innocence
in this scenario not only erases the complexities of childhood and the
range of experiences different children encounter, but it also offers an
excuse for adults to evade responsibility for how children are firmly con-
nected to and shaped by the social and cultural institutions run largely by
adults. Innocence in this instance makes children invisible except as pro-
jections of adult fantasies-fantasies that allow adults to believe that chil-
dren do not suffer from their greed, recklessness, perversions of will and
spirit, and that they are, in the final analysis, unaccountable.1
If innocence provides the moral ethos that distinguishes children from
adults, the discourse of the disappearing child signals that childhood is
being threatened by forces that tend to collapse that distinction. For exam-
ple, in cultural critic Neil Postman's thoroughly modernist view of the
world, the electronic media, especially television, presents a threat to the
existence of children and the civilized culture bequeathed to the West by
the Enlightenment.2 Not only does the very character of television-its
fast-paced format, sound-byte worldview, information overload, and nar-
rative organization-undermine the very possibility for children to engage
in critical thinking, but its content works to expel images of the child
from its programming by both "adultifying" the child and promoting the
rise of the "childfied" adult.3 But Postman is quick to extend his thesis to
other spheres, noting, for example, the disappearance of children's cloth-

Social Text 57, Vol. 16, No. 4, Winter 1998. Copyright C 1998 by Duke University Press.

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 ing and children's games, the entry of children into professional sports,
and the increasing willingness of the criminal justice system to treat chil-
dren as miniature adults. Postman's lament represents less a concern with
preserving childhood innocence than with bemoaning the passing of a
world in which high culture is threatened by popular culture, and the cul-
ture of print loses its hold on a restricted notion of literacy and citizenship
training. The loss of childhood innocence in this scenario registers the
passing of a historical and political juncture in which children could be
contained and socialized under the watchful tutelage of dominant regula-
tory institutions such as the family, school, and church.
The specter of the child as an endangered species has also been
appropriated by many politicians eager to establish themselves as protec-
tors of childhood innocence. In their rush to implement new social and
economic policies, numerous politicians, including President Clinton, hold
up children as both the inspiration for and prime beneficiaries of their
reforms. Lacking opportunities to vote, mobilize, or register their opin-
ions, young children become an easy target and referent in the discourse
of moral uplift and social legitimation. They also become pawns and vic-
tims. Far from benefiting children, many of the programs and government
reforms enacted by Clinton and the Republican-led Congress represent
what Senator Edward Kennedy has called "legislative child abuse."4 Pro-
tecting the innocence of children in this case has a direct connection with
the disappearing child, though not in the sense predicted by Neil Post-
man. The draconian cuts in welfare reform enacted in the 1996 Personal

Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act are having a

devastating effect on a great number of poor families and their children.
While welfare roles have declined since 1996, a report released by the
National Conference of State Legislatures indicates that 40 to 60 percent
of the poor people who leave welfare obtain employment, but often at
below poverty-level wages. Moreover, substantial numbers of children
with disabilities have had their assistance terminated. Meanwhile, thou-
sands of families are losing welfare aid because of penalties for noncom-
pliance with new welfare reform rules, and the majority who lose benefits
do not find work. Harsh compliance measures, substandard work, inade-
quate child care, marginal employment, low wages, and lack of adequate
transportation for poor families all combine to make a mockery of welfare
reform.5 In this instance, children are indeed disappearing-right into the
hole of poverty, suffering, and despair.6 In short, the discourse of inno-
cence suggests a concern for all children but often ignores or disparages
the conditions under which many children are forced to live, especially
children marginalized by class or race who, in effect, are generally
excluded from the privileging and protective invocation of innocence.
Removed from its original concern with the welfare of all children,

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politicians have little interest in the welfare of kids who are poor and non-
white. Under these circumstances, innocence emerges less as a trope to
highlight the disappearance of kids than as a metaphor for advancing a
conservative political agenda based on so-called family values, in which
middle-class white children are viewed as more valued and deserving of
the material resources and cultural goods of the larger society than are
those who are poor and nonwhite.7 In this selective appropriation, inno-
cence turns with a vengeance on its humanitarian impulse: the everyday
experience of childhood is held hostage to the realities of power and the
disingenuous rhetoric of political pragmatism.
As the rhetoric of child welfare heats up in the public consciousness,
innocence is increasingly being redeployed to rearticulate which specific
children are deserving of entitlements and adult protection and what
forces pose a threat to such children. Shot through with political and ide-
ological values, innocence is not merely selective about which children are
endangered and need to be protected; it also is used to signal who and
what constitutes a threat to children.

As the child is increasingly used as a moral yardstick by politicians,

the popular press, and the media, it becomes more difficult for adults to
elide responsibility for what they do to kids. Consequently, childhood
innocence appears both threatened and threatening. According to popular
wisdom, the enemies of children are not to be found in the halls of Con-
gress, in the poisonous advertisements that commodify and sexualize
young children, or even in the endless media bashing that blames children
for all of society's ills.8 On the contrary, the biggest threat to children is to
be found in the child molesters, pedophiles, abductors, and others who
prey on children in the most obscene ways imaginable. In this instance,
the discourse of childhood innocence does more than produce the rhetoric
of political opportunism; it also provides the basis for moral panic. Both
conservatives and liberals have fed off the frenzy of fear associated with a
decade of revelations of alleged child abuse. Starting with the 1987
McMartin preschool case, a wave of fear-inspired legislation has swept the
nation in order to protect children from pedophiles, child molesters,
predatory priests and teachers, and anyone else who might be labeled as a
sexual deviant posing a threat to the innocence of children.9 Child abuse
in this scenario is reduced to the individual pathology of the molester and
pedophile; the fear and anger it arouses are so great that the Supreme
Court is willing to suspend certain constitutional liberties in order to keep
sexual predators locked up even after they finish serving their sentences.10
But the issue of widespread child abuse has done more than inspire a
national fear of child molesters. It points beyond the language of individ-
ual pathology to the more threatening issue of how society treats its chil-
dren, exposing the degree to which society has failed to provide children

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 with the security and resources necessary to insure their safety and well-
being. The most disturbing threat to innocence may be child abuse, but it
is not a form of abuse that can only be assessed through the horrible
behavior of sexual predators. Such abuse needs to be situated within a
broader set of political, economic, and social considerations, considera-
tions that probe deeply into the cultural formations that not only make
children visible markers of humanity and public responsibility but also see
children as a menacing enemy, or as merely a market to be exploited.
The social investment in children's innocence may be at the center of
political rhetoric in the halls of Congress, but there are other forces in
American society that aggressively breed a hatred and disregard for chil-
dren, especially those who are marginalized because of their class, race,
gender, or status as non-U.S. citizens.
In what follows, I argue that the central threat to childhood inno-
cence lies not in the figure of the pedophile or sexual predator but in the
diminishing public spheres available for children to experience themselves
as critical agents. That is, they must be able to develop their capacities for
individual and social development free from the debilitating burdens of
hunger, poor health care, and dilapidated schools, while simultaneously
being provided with fundamental social services such as state protection
from abusive parents. As cities become increasingly ghettoized because of
the ravaging effects of deindustrialization, loss of revenue, and white
flight, children are left with fewer services to fulfill their needs and desires.
As the public schools are abandoned or surrendered to the dictates of the
market, children increasingly find themselves isolated and removed from
the discourses of community and compassion. As the state is hollowed out
and only the most brutal state apparatuses remain intact, children have
fewer opportunities to protect themselves from an adult world that offers
them dwindling resources, dead-end jobs, and diminished hopes for the
future.11 At the same time, children are increasingly subjected to social
and economic forces that exploit them through the dynamics of sexual-
ization, commodification, and commercialization throughout vast seg-
ments of the culture.12

JonBenet Ramsey, Race, and the Perils of Home

While the concept of innocence may incite adults to publicly proclaim

their support for future generations, it more often than not protects them
from the reality of society and the influence they have in contributing to
the ever increasing impoverishment of children's lives. Of course, there are
often flash points in a society that signal that children are in danger and
that certain elements in the culture pose a threat to their innocence. Con-

34 Henry A. Giroux

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servatives, for example, have focused on the dangers to children presented JonBenet's
by rap music, cinematic violence, and drugs to launch an attack on Hol-
lywood films, the fashion world, single teen moms, and what it calls the murder jolts the
cultural elite. But rarely do conservatives and the dominant press focus on
social practices that locate the ongoing threats to children at the center of public because it
dominant economic, political, and cultural institutions. Poverty, racism,
shatters the
sexism, and the dismantling of the welfare state do great harm to children,
but most of the stories exemplifying the effects of these social conditions
assumption that
either do not get reported in the press or if they do prompt little public
discussion or self-examination.
the primary
One recent exception can be found in the case of JonBenet Ramsey,
the six-year-old who was found strangled in her wealthy parents' Boulder, threat to
Colorado, home the day after Christmas in 1996. Throughout the first
innocence lies
half of 1997, the case became a fixation in the press. Major media net-
works, newspapers, and tabloids besieged the public with photographs
outside the family
and television footage of JonBenet, dubbed as the slain little beauty queen,
posing coquettishly in a tight dress, wearing bright red lipstick, her hair a
bleached blonde. The JonBenet Ramsey case revealed once again that the in the image
media gravitate toward victims that fit the dominant culture's image of
of the sexual
itself. Children who are white, blonde, middle class are not only invested
with more humanity but become emblematic of a social order that ban-
pervert.
ishes from consciousness any recognition of abused children who "don't
fit the image of purity defiled."13
Consider the case of a nine-year-old African American child, labeled
in the press as Girl X. Girl X was raped, beaten, blinded, and dumped in
a stairwell in the run-down Cabrini Green Housing Project in Chicago.
The brutal murder aroused a great deal of publicity in Chicago but was
virtually ignored by the national media. Race and poverty relegated the
case of Girl X to a nonentity. But there is something equally disturbing
about the JonBenet case. Innocence is primarily applied to children who
are white and middle class, often tucked away in urban townhouses and
the safe sanctuaries of segregated suburban America. Innocence also mys-
tifies the sexualization and commodification of young girls who are being
taught to identify themselves through the pleasures and desires of the
adult gaze. The child becomes the principle incitement to adult desire, but
the pedagogical and commercial practices at work in such a construction
remain unexamined because they take place within acceptable cultural
forms such as children's beauty pageants. JonBenet's murder jolts the
public because it shatters the assumption that the primary threat to inno-
cence lies outside the family in the image of the sexual pervert. This mur-
der also challenges the assumption that privileged families are immune to
accusations of child abuse or neglect. The death of the young beauty
queen raises serious questions about those forces at work in the cultural

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 practices and institutions of everyday life that organize children's lives,
often in ways that undermine the possibility for children to enter adult-
hood free of violence, intimidation, and abuse along the way.
I will argue that the beauty pageant is an exemplary site for examining
critically how the discourse of innocence mystifies the appropriation of
children's bodies in a society that increasingly sexualizes and commodifies
them. In pursuing this argument, I will examine how the culture of child
beauty pageants functions as a pedagogical site where children learn about
pleasure, desire, and the roles they might assume in an adult society. I also
will examine how such pageants are rationalized, how they are upheld by
commercial and ideological structures within the broader society, and how
they are reproduced, reinforced, and sustained in related spheres such as
advertising and fashion photography-spheres that also play an important
role in marketing children as objects of pleasure, desire, and sexuality.
Underlying this project is the attempt to challenge such rituals as inno-
cent, to reconsider the role they play as part of a broader cultural practice
in which children are reified and objectified. This is not meant to suggest
that all child beauty pageants engage in a form of child abuse. Pageants
vary in both the way they are constructed and how they interact with
local and national audiences. Moreover, their outcomes are variable and
contingent. But as sites of representation, identity formation, consump-
tion, and regulation, the dominant and assigned meanings attached to
these events have to be understood in terms of how they articulate and
resonate with other cultural sites engaged in the production and regulation
of youth, the packaging of desire, and the sexualized body.

Beauty Pageants and the Shock of the Real

The Ramsey case challenges and disrupts ideological conventions that

typically apply to narratives of childhood innocence. This seems to have
been the case during the blitz of media coverage following the brutal mur-
der of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. On one level, JonBenet's case
attracted national attention because it fed into the frenzy and moral panic
Americans are experiencing over the threat of child abuse-fueled by hor-
rific crimes like the kidnap and murder of Polly Klaas in California. Sim-
ilarly, it resonated with the highly charged public campaigns by various
legislators and citizen groups calling for the death penalty for sex offend-
ers such as Jesse Timmendequas, the child molester who killed seven-
year-old Megan Kanka. On another level, it opened to public scrutiny
another high-profile example of a child succeeding at the make-believe
game of becoming an adult. Not unlike Jessica Dubroff, the seven-year-
old would-be Amelia Earhart who, while attempting to be the youngest

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pilot to cross the United States, died tragically in a plane crash, JonBenet
Ramsey also projected the aura of a child with the uncanny ability to pre-
sent herself as an adult. But if the boundary between innocence and
impurity, child and adult, became blurred in both cases, JonBenet's noto-
riety as an object of public fascination revealed a dark and seamy element
in the culture.

Night after night the major television networks aired videotapes of lit-
tle JonBenet Ramsey wearing tight, off-the-shoulder dresses, bright red
lipstick, and curled, teased, and bleached blond hair pulling a feathered
Mardi Gras mask almost seductively across her eyes as she sashayed down
a runway. Playing the role of an alluring sex kitten, JonBenet seemed to
belie the assumption that the voyeuristic fascination with the sexualized
child was confined to the margins of society, inhabited largely by freaks
and psychopaths.
The JonBenet Ramsey case revealed not only how regressive notions
of femininity and beauty are redeployed in this conservative era to fashion
the fragile identities of young girls, but also how easily adults will project
their own fantasies onto children, even if it means selling them on the
beauty block. The JonBenet case offered the public a spectacle in which it
became both a voyeur and a witness to its refusal to address the broader
conditions that contribute to the sexualization and commodification of

kids in the larger culture. With the recent attention generated by celebri-
ties such as Roseanne Barr and Oprah Winfrey, the general public has
come to recognize that child abuse often takes place at home and that the
image of the child molester as strictly an outsider has become less credi-
ble. The image of the home as a safe space for children was also prob-
lematized as it became clear that the Ramseys imposed their own strange
fantasies on their daughter and in doing so denied her an identity suitable
for a six-year-old. Instead, they positioned her within a child beauty
pageant culture that stripped her of her innocence by blurring the bound-
ary between child and adult. Not allowed to be a child, JonBenet was
given the unfortunate job of projecting herself through a degrading
aesthetic that sexualized and commodified her. Collapsing the (hardly
clear-cut) boundaries between the protective parental gaze and the more
objectified adult gaze, JonBenet's parents appear to have stripped their
daughter of any sense of agency in order to remake her in the image of
their own desires and pleasures. Parental "care" in this case appears to
have been waged tyrannically to prevent JonBenet from experiencing
childhood pleasures and needs outside the commodifying gaze of
pleasure-seeking, narcissistic adults.
Images of six-year-olds cosmetically transformed into sultry, Lolita-
like waifs are difficult to watch. Such images strike at the heart of a culture
beset by a deep disturbance in its alleged respect for children and decency.

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 Whereas the blame for the often violent consequences associated with
this eroticized costuming is usually placed on young women, the JonBenet
Ramsey affair makes it difficult to blame kids for this type of objectifica-
tion and commodification. The usual demonization and attack on kids in

the public mind suggesting they are responsible for society's ills breaks
down in this case as it becomes more difficult for adults to elide responsi-
bility for what they do to children-their own and others.14 JonBenet's
image violently transgresses a sacred responsibility associated with pro-
tecting the innocence of children. Writ large across the media coverage of
the JonBenet case was the disturbing implication and recognition that
childhood innocence is assaulted when children can no longer expect
from adults "protection ... consistency and some sort of dignity."15
The JonBenet Ramsey case prompted an unusual debate in the media
and national press. Lacking the theoretical tools or political will to analyze
the institutional and ideological forces in the culture that generate such
disregard for children, the media focused on what was often termed "the
strange subculture of child beauty pageants" and more often than not
suggested that the abuse children suffered in such pageants was due to
overbearing mothers trying to control their daughters' lives. It seems that
if young girls are unavailable for scapegoating, their mothers make up for
the loss. Rarely did the media raise the larger issue of how young girls are
being educated to function within a limited notion of public life or how
such a regressive education for young girls was more often than not the
norm rather than the exception.
The traditional moral guardians of children's culture who would cen-
sor rap lyrics, remove "dangerous" videos and CDs from public circula-
tion, boycott Disney for pro-gay and lesbian labor practices, and empty
school libraries of many classic texts have had little to say about the sexu-
alization of young children in a social form as American-as-apple-pie as
children's beauty pageants. Nor are they willing to acknowledge that such
pageants must be regarded within a broader set of competitive childhood
practices and formations such as youth sport events that appeal to work-
ing- and middle-class parents who seem willing to sacrifice their chil-
dren's welfare to the imperatives of success and celebrity. Amidst the
silence by conservatives and the family values crowd, liberal and progres-
sive reporters have begun to raise some important questions. For example,
CBS anchorman Dan Rather criticized the television networks for running
the JonBenet tapes on the air, claiming that they amounted to nothing less
than kiddy porn. Frank Rich wrote a courageous piece in the New York
Times in which he argued that the "strange world of kids' pageantry is not
a 'subculture'-it's our culture. But as long as we call it a subculture, it
can remain a problem for somebody else."16 Richard Goldstein followed
up Rich's insights with a three-part series in the Village Voice in which he

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argued that the marketing of the sexual child has a long history in the
United States and that the JonBenet case "brings to the surface both our
horror at how effectively a child can be constructed as a sexual being and
our guilt at the pleasure we take in such a sight.""17 For Goldstein, the Jon-
Benet case challenges the American public to confront the actual nature of
child abuse, which is all too often a part of family life and further legiti-
mated in the hateful practices of a culture willing to capitalize on children
as the new arena for the production of pleasure and commodification.
All of these critiques raise valid concerns about the role of child
beauty pageants and how they produce particular notions of beauty, plea-
sure, and femininity that are as culturally gender-specific as they are
degrading; such criticisms also prompt a debate about the nature of adult
needs and desires that push kids into pageants, and how such pageants
correspond with other social practices that "silently" reproduce roles for
children that undermine the notion of child innocence and reinforce par-
ticular forms of child abuse. In what follows, I examine these issues in
detail by focusing on the scope and popularity of children's beauty
pageants, what they attempt to teach young girls, and the broader com-
mercial forces that sustain them. I also locate the phenomenon of child
beauty pageants within a broader, related set of cultural practices, espe-
cially the world of high-fashion advertising and the rise of the teenage
model in the world of high fashion.

Beauty and the Beast:

A Genealogy of Child Beauty Pageants

Frank Rich insightfully argues that child beauty pageants represent more
than a subculture in American society. Ted Cohen, president of World
Pageants Inc., which publishes an international directory of pageants,
estimates that the pageantry industry represents a billion-dollar-a-year
industry, with sponsors such as Proctor and Gamble, Black Velvet, and
Hawaiian Tropics.18 It is estimated that more than three thousand pageants
a year are held in the United States in which more than one hundred
thousand children under the age of twelve compete.19 In some cases, chil-
dren as young as eight months are entered in pageants. California, Florida,
and New York hold the most pageants, and the number of pageants in the
United States appears to be growing, in spite of the fact that many con-
tests, especially at the national level, charge contestants between $250 to
$800 to enter.20 Most of the contestants who enter local pageants are from
working-class families driven by mobility fantasies and the lure of a small
cash prize. The larger and more expensive pageants appear to be domi-
nated by middle- and upper-class parents like the Ramseys, who have lots

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 of money and resources to spend on costly voice and dance lessons,
pageant coaches, expensive costumes, and pageant entry fees.
Pageants are a lucrative business. Promoters market pleasure and rake
in big dividends, with some making as much as $100,000 on each event.
The popular In addition, child beauty pageants have produced a number of support
industries, including costume designers, grooming consultants, interview
literature that coaches, photographers, and publishers,21 not to mention the cosmetics,
weight reduction, and other "beauty-aid industries." Trade magazines
supports the such as Pageant Life, which has a circulation of sixty thousand, offer their
readers a range of images and advertisements celebrating ideals of femi-
pageant culture
ninity, glamour, and beauty, while marketing young girls in the image of

fails to
adult drives and desires. In some cases, parents invest big money for
makeup artists, hairstylists, and coaches to teach prepubescent kids par-
ticular modeling styles and tornado spins.22 A story that appeared in Life
acknowledge that
in 1994, featuring Blaire, an eleven-year-old seasoned beauty pageant
"sexualized performer, documented this trend. Blaire's fortunes at winning got better
when her mom and dad hired Tony, a voice coach and makeup artist who
images of little charges $40 an hour, to completely redesign her. When Blaire's father was
asked why he was so involved with entering Blaire in child beauty
girls may have pageants, he answered: "I am a plastic surgeon only from the neck up. I
enjoy the beauty of the face. No doubt that's why I am so involved with
dangerous Blaire." The article reports that "Bruce is captivated by his daughter's
beauty but prefers it enhanced: He apologizes to strangers when she is not
implications in a
wearing makeup. Some parents have accused Bruce of enhancing Blaire's
world where looks with surgery." Blaire indicates that she loves pageants, which are her
only interests. The article ends by pointing out that Blaire lacks a child's
450,000 spontaneity, and then conjectures that she "shows so little offstage emo-
tion because she's so busy editing herself with adults."23
American children Blaire's case may appear to some as a caricature of pageant life, nar-
rowly depicting parents who push their kids too hard and who impose
were reported their own interests and desires on children too young to decide whether
they actually want to participate in the pageants. But the popular literature
as victims of
on child beauty pageants is replete with such stories.24 Many of the par-
ents involved in these pageants do not seem concerned about the possible
sexual abuse
negative consequences of dressing their children in provocative clothing,
in 1993."
capping their teeth, putting fake eyelashes on them, and having them per-
form before audiences in a manner that suggests a sexuality well beyond
their years.
The popular literature that supports the child beauty pageant culture
fails to acknowledge that "sexualized images of little girls may have dan-
gerous implications in a world where 450,000 American children were
reported as victims of sexual abuse in 1993."25 Trade magazines such as
Pageant Life and Babette's Pageant and Talent Gazette are filled with ads
sponsored by companies such as Hawaiian Tropic in which toddlers strike

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suggestive poses. Full-page spreads of contest finalists depict contestants
ranging in age from two to twenty-four years. Despite this range, all of the
entrants are defined by the same aesthetic: the makeup, pose, smile, and
hairstyles of the six-year-olds are no different from those of the much
older contestants. Within the beauty pageant aesthetic, the line between
children and adults is blurred; all of the images depict the cool estrange-
ment of sexual allure that has become a trademark in the commodities

industry. In addition, the magazines are full of ads hawking pageant and
talent clothes from companies called, for example, "Hollywood Babe"
and "Little Starlet Fashions"-with many ads invoking the warning
"Don't Be Left Behind."26 One even gushes that contestants may enter a
particular pageant for the fee of only $1 per pound. Success stories for the
younger-age set (four- to eight-year-olds) consistently focus on the thrill
of competition, on winning titles, and on the successful modeling careers
of the pageant winners.
Parents and sponsors who participate in these pageants often respond
to public criticisms by arguing that the press overreacted to JonBenet
Ramsey's death by unfairly focusing on the beauty pageant as somehow
being implicated in her murder. Others legitimate the child beauty
pageant culture as a productive route to get their kids into lucrative
careers such as modeling, or to win college scholarships, financial awards,
and other prizes. The most frequently used rationale for defending
pageants is that they build self-esteem in children, "help them to over-
come shyness, and [teach them how] to grow up."27 One pageant director
in Murrieta, California, refuted the criticism that pageants are detrimen-
tal for young girls, arguing that "many young girls look at pageants as a
protracted game of dress up, something most young girls love."28 Another
pageant participant, Pam Griffin, whose daughter trained JonBenet Ram-
sey, remarked that "more girls are trying pageants after seeing how much
fun JonBenet had."29 Even Vogue reporter Ellen Mark concluded that most
kids who participate in beauty pageants end up as success stories. The
reason for their success, according to Mark, is that "pageants made them
feel special .... Little girls like to look pretty."30
Appropriating the discourse of liberal feminism, this argument is
often associated with attributes affirming self-direction, autonomy, and a
strong competitive spirit. But what is often missing from such critiques is
the recognition that self-esteem is being defined within a very narrow
standard of autonomy, one that appears impervious to how gender is con-
tinually made and remade on the body within a politics of appearance that
is often reduced to the level of a degrading spectacle. Self-esteem in this
context means embracing rather than critically challenging a gender code
that rewards little girls for their looks, submissiveness, and sex appeal.
Coupled with the ways in which the broader culture, through television,
music, magazines, and advertising, consistently bombards young girls

Nymphet Fantasies 41

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 with a sexualized ideal of femininity "from which all threatening elements
have been purged,"31 self-esteem often becomes a euphemism for self-
hatred, rigid gender roles, and powerlessness.
There is a certain irony in appropriating the language of self-esteem
to defend child beauty pageants, especially since the latter provide young
children with standards of beauty that one of forty thousand young
women will actually meet. Must we ask what's wrong with young girls
wanting to become fashion models who increasingly look as if they will
never grow up (e.g., Kate Moss), and for whom beauty is not only
defined by the male gaze but appears to be one of the few requisites to
enter "into the privileged male world"?32 Naomi Wolf is right in arguing
that the problem with linking standardized notions of sexualized beauty to
self-esteem is that it doesn't present young girls or adult woman with
many choices, especially when issues regarding sexual pleasure and self-
determination are held hostage to notions of femininity in which it
becomes difficult for women to grow up and express themselves in a vari-
ety of public spaces.33 Moreover, on the other side of the cheap glamor-
ization of the waif-child as the fashion icon of beauty is the reality of a
patriarchal society in which the nymphet fantasy reveals a "system by
which men impose their authority on women and children alike."34
In short, rarely do the defenders of child beauty pageants comment
critically about the consequences of stealing away a child's innocence by
portraying her in the suggestive pose of a sexualized nymphet. Once
again, little is said about what children are actually learning in pageants,
how a child might see herself and mediate her relationship to society when
her sense of self-worth is defined largely through a notion of beauty that is
one-dimensional and demeaning. Nor does there seem to be much self-
reflection on the part of parents and other pageant participators in allow-
ing children to be sponsored by corporations. The pedagogical message
that often informs such relations is that the identities of the young girls
who enter the pageants become meaningful only when tied to the logic of
the market. What a young girl learns in this case is that "in order to enter
[the] contest she must represent someone other than herself."35
Unlike pageants that took place ten or fifteen years ago, pageants,
especially the national ones, now offer bigger prizes and are backed by
corporate sponsors. Moreover, as the commercial interests and level of
investment in such pageants have risen, so have their competitive nature
along with the hype and glitz. V. J. LaCour, publisher of Pageant Life and
a firm supporter of child beauty pageants, thinks that many parents have
resorted to makeup and other "extreme" measures because they "are try-
ing to get a competitive edge."36 In some cases, parents resort to measures
that are mentally punitive and physically cruel to get their kids to perform
"properly." Lois Miller, owner of Star Talent Management in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, reports that she has "seen parents who have pinched their

42 Henry A. Giroux

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children for messing up their dress or not looking appropriate or not wig-
gling enough or not throwing kisses."37 Parents often respond to such
criticisms by claiming that their kids are doing exactly what they want to
do and that they enjoy being in the pageants. This argument appears
strained when parents enter into pageants children who are as young as
eight months, or when parents decide, as reported in Money, that their
four-year-old child needed a talent agent in order to insure that she made
the right connections outside of the beauty pageants.
Sixty Minutes, the television program highly acclaimed for its inves-
tigative reporting, aired a segment on child beauty pageants on 18 May
1997 in the aftermath of the JonBenet Ramsey controversy. The premise
of the program, announced by Morley Safer at the beginning of the seg-
ment, was to explore if "child beauty pageants exploit children to satisfy
ambitions of parents." In order to provide a historical perspective on such
pageants, Sixty Minutes aired cuts from child beauty pageants that had
been seen on the program in 1977, and then presented videotaped shots
of JonBenet and other children performing in a recent pageant. The con-
trast was both obscene and informative. The children in the 1977

pageants wore little-girl dresses and ribbons in their hair; they embodied a
child-like innocence in their appearance as they displayed their little-gir
talents-singing, tap dancing, and baton twirling. Not so with the more
recent pageant shots. The contestants did not look like little girls but
rather like coquettish young women whose talents were reduced to an
ability to move suggestively across the stage. Clearly, as Morley Safer
indicated, "By today's beauty pageant standards, innocence seems to hav
vanished." When he asked one of the stage mothers who had appeared in
the 1977 program what she thought of today's pageants, she responded
that she recently went to a child beauty pageant and "walked in the doo
and walked out. It was disgusting to see the beaded dresses and blown-up
hair on kids." Sixty Minutes's take on child beauty pageants was critical
yet it failed to consider the broader social practices, representations, an
relations of power that provide the context for such pageants to flourish in
the United States. Nor did it analyze the growing popularity of the
pageants as part of a growing backlash against feminism reproduced in
the media, culture, and fashion industries, as well as in a growing number
of conservative economic and political establishments.38 Morley Safer
was, however, clear about the assumption that the root of such abuse
toward children was to be placed squarely on the shoulders of overly
ambitious and exploitative mothers.
But the feminist backlash has not stopped more informed criticisms
from emerging. For example, some child psychologists argue that the
intense competition at pageants and the nomadic lifestyle of traveling
from one hotel to another when school is not in session make it difficult

for young children to make friends, putting them at risk for developing a

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The emergence number of problems in their social interactions with other children. Other
child specialists argue that it is as developmentally inappropriate to "teach
of cultural forms a six-year-old to pose like a twenty-year-old model as it is to allow her to
drive [and] drink alcohol."39 Of course, there is also the stress of compe-
such as the child
tition and the danger of undermining a child's self-confidence, especially
when she loses, if the message she receives is that how she looks is the
beauty pageant
most important aspect of who she is. Renowned psychologist David
makes clear the Elkind argues that parents used to be concerned with the ethical behavior
of kids. A decade ago, when kids got home from school their parents
degree to which asked them if they were good. Now, because of the new economic realities
of downsizing and deindustrialization, parents are fearful that their kids
viable public will be losers.40 Marly Harris writes that the "massive restructuring of the
economy creates a winner-take-all society in which parents believe that if
spheres are kids don't end up as one of the few winners they will join the ranks of the
many losers."41 The question kids get when they come home in the 1990s
diminishing for is no longer "Have you been good?" but "Did you win?" Another criti-
cism by Harris is that the money spent on child pageants by parents, up to
children....
$10,000 per child a year in some cases, could be invested in more pro-
ductive ways for kids, not the least of which could be a savings plan estab-
Young people
lished to help young people alleviate the cost of a college education. Not
find themselves only are kids objectified in this scenario, but the attributes accentuated in
defining their identities and self-esteem offer them limited opportunities to
in a society develop and express themselves.42
In spite of such criticisms, child beauty pageants are enormously pop-
in which ular in the United States, and their popularity is growing; moreover, they
have their defenders.43 In part, such popularity can be explained by their
there are very few potential to make money for promoters, but there is more to the story.
Children's beauty contests also represent places where the rituals of small-
decommodified
town America combine with the ideology of mass consumer culture.
Pageants with titles such as "Miss Catfish Queen," "Miss Baby Poultry
public spheres for
Princess," and "The Snake Charmer Queen Ritual Competition" suggest
that such rituals are easily adapted to "local meanings and familiar sym-
them to identify
bols, values, and aesthetics-those relevant to the producers, performers,
with and and consumers of the contest."44 Such rituals are easy to put on, are
advertised as a legitimate form of family entertainment, resonate power-
experience. fully with dominant Western models of femininity, beauty, and culture,
and play a crucial role at the local and national levels of reproducing par-
ticular notions of citizenship and national identity. As American as apple
pie, child beauty pageants are often embraced as simply good, clean enter-
tainment and defended for their civic value to the community. Moreover,
while adult beauty contests such as the annual Miss America pageant
have been the target of enormous amounts of feminist criticism,45 few
academics and cultural critics have focused on child beauty pageants as a
serious object of cultural analysis.46

44 Henry A. Giroux

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 Beyond the Politics of Child Abuse

Any attempt to challenge the sexist practices and abuses at work in chil-
dren's beauty pageants must begin with the recognition that pageants rep-
resent more than trivial entertainment. Valerie Walkerdine has rightly
argued that popular cultural forms such as the beauty pageant offer a
way for working-class girls to escape the limiting discourses and ideologies
found in schools and other regulating institutions. Popular culture
becomes a realm of fantasy offering the promise of escape, possibility, and
personal triumph. Desire in this instance gains expression through an
endless parade of highly sexualized images and narratives that not only
provide the promise of erotic fantasies that "belong to them," but also
constitute for these young girls an important strategy for survival.47
According to Walkerdine, popular cultural forms such as child beauty
pageants occupy a reputable public space in which preadolescent work-
ing-class girls are offered forms of identification that are appropriated as
survival practices in a society stacked against them. But what Walkerdine
ignores is that such fantasies are often founded on forms of identification
and hope that offer nothing more than the swindle of fulfillment, provid-
ing limited choices and options to young girls. Moreover, while such
strategies cannot be dismissed as politically incorrect but engaged within a
broader understanding of how desire is both mediated and acted upon,
the social costs for such identifications go far beyond the benefits they
provide as a buffer against hard times. In the long run, such investments
serve to limit, often exploit, and disrupt working-class lives. At the same
time, the emergence of cultural forms such as the child beauty pageant
makes clear the degree to which viable public spheres are diminishing for
children. As public funding decreases, support services dry up, and
extracurricular activities are eliminated from schools because of financial
shortages, young people find themselves in a society in which there are
very few decommodified public spheres for them to identify with and
experience. As market relations expand their control over public space,
corporations increasingly provide the public spheres for children to expe-
rience themselves as consuming subjects and commodities with limited
opportunities to learn how to develop their full range of intellectual and
emotional capacities to be critical citizens.
While many progressives are well aware that the struggle over culture
is tantamount to the struggle over meaning and identity, it is also impor-
tant to recognize that any viable cultural politics must also locate specific
cultural texts within wider semiotic, material, and social relations of
power that shape everyday life. Understood within a broader set of rela-
tions, child beauty pageants become an important object of critical analy-
sis for a number of reasons. First, the conservative and rigid gender roles
that are legitimated at many child beauty pageants must be analyzed both

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 in terms of the specific ideologies they construct for children and how
these ideologies find expression in other parts of the culture. This sug-
gests that the values and dominant motifs that shape beauty pageants
gain their meaning and appeal precisely because they find expression in
related cultural spheres throughout American society. For instance, by
examining how the ideologies at work in beauty pageants circulate in
advertising campaigns such as those used by Calvin Klein or in the
increasing use of advertising that depicts the ideal modern American
female as young, extremely thin, sexually alluring, and available, it
becomes clear that the processes at work in the sexualization and com-
modification of young children are not altogether different from the social
relations that take place in other sites in which the bodies and body parts
of young girls are used to market desire and sell commodities. What often
makes such connections untenable in the public eye is that innocence as a
trope for doing what is best for children is appropriated by beauty
pageants in the name of dominant family values even though it is pre-
cisely in its name that practices that might be seen in other contexts as
abusive to children are defined within the dominant culture as simply
good, clean, family entertainment.
In advertisements for Calvin Klein's Obsession and in his more recent

jean ads, innocence becomes a fractured sign, used unapologetically to

foreground children as the objects of desire and adults as voyeurs. Inno-
cence in this instance feeds into enticing images of child-like purity as it
simultaneously sexualizes and commodifies them. Sexualizing children
may be the final frontier in the fashion world, exemplified by the rise of
models such as Kate Moss who portray women as waifs-stick-like,
expressionless, and blank-eyed.48 Or it simply makes celebrities out of
teenage models and film stars such as Ivanka Trump and Liv Tyler, who
are left wondering in their waning teen years if they are too old to have a
career in those culture industries that reduce a woman's talents to elusive

and short-lived standards of desire, sexuality, and beauty. What connects

the beauty pageants to the world of advertising and fashion modeling is
that young girls are being taught to become little women, while in the
adult society women are being taught to assume the identities of power-
less, child-like waifs. In this instance, Lolita grows up only to retreat into
her youth as a model for what it means to be a woman.49 In these exam-
ples, innocence reveals a dark quality, suggesting not only that youth are
being assaulted across a variety of public spaces but that their identities,
especially those of young women, are being appropriated in different ways
in diverse public sites for the high pleasure quotient they evoke in satisfy-
ing adult desires and needs.
As an ethical referent, innocence humanizes the child and makes a
claim on adults to provide them with security and protection. But inno-

46 Henry A. Giroux

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cence gains its meaning from a complex set of semiotic, material, and
social registers. And the reality of what is happening to children in cultural
spheres as seemingly unrelated as child beauty pageants and the world of
advertising and fashion modeling suggests how vulnerable children actu-
ally are to learning the worst social dimensions of our society: misogyny,
sexism, racism, and violence. Innocence needs to be understood dialecti-
cally as a metaphor that is subject to diverse appropriations and whose
effects can be both positive and devastating for children. If innocence is to
become a useful category for social analysis, the term must be treated as
an ideological practice that can only be understood politically and ethically
through the ways in which it is represented and used within everyday life
as it is shaped in the intersection of language, representations, and the
technologies of power. Central to such a task is the need to address why,
how, and under what conditions the marketing of children's bodies
increasingly permeates diverse elements of society. Similarly, the answer to
such a task demands uncovering not only the political and ideological
interests and relations of power at work in such processes but also the
actual ways in which cultural practices influence how children and adults
learn about themselves and their relationship to others.
Innocence becomes both a mystifying ideology and a vehicle for com-
mercial profit. In the first instance, innocence is a highly charged term for
promoting moral panics in the popular imagination by pointing to
pedophiles and sexual perverts as the most visible threat to children in our
society. Such a restricted notion of innocence fails to understand how
child abuse connects to and works its way through the most seemingly
benign of cultural spheres such as the beauty pageant. Under such cir-
cumstances, the beauty pageant is not only ignored as a serious object of
social analysis but is dismissed as simply a subculture. Innocence in this
case protects a particular notion of family values that is class specific and
racially coded. In a society in which working-class youths and youths of
color are represented as a threat and menace to public order, innocence
becomes an ideological trope that defines itself against children con-
structed as "other," while reinforcing a politics of innocence that legiti-
mates the cultural capital of children who are largely white, middle-class,
and privileged. Moreover, the discourse of innocence offers little under-
standing of how the conditions under which children learn in specific
sites such as the beauty pageant resonate and gain legitimacy through
their connection to other cultural sites.

In the second instance, innocence falls prey to the logic of the market
and the successful pedagogical operations of consumerism. The myth of
innocence is increasingly appropriated through a transgressive aesthetics
in which children provide the sexualized bait that creates images and rep-
resentations that tread close to the border of pornography. In this sce-

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 nario, children's sense of play and social development are transformed
through marketing strategies and forms of consumer education that define
the limits of their imaginations, identities, and sense of possibility while
simultaneously providing through the electronic media a "kind of enter-
tainment that subtly influence [s] the way we see [children], ourselves, and
our communities."50

Concerned educators, parents, and activists must begin to challenge

and counter such representations, ideologies, and social practices as part
of a cultural politics that makes issues of pedagogy and power central to
its project. This means taking seriously how beauty pageants and other
popular cultural sites position children in terms of how they are taught to
think of themselves through the images, values, and discourses offered to
them.51 It also means expanding our understanding of how pedagogy is
played out on the bodies of young children in pageants and how this
pedagogical practice resonates with what children are taught in other cul-
tural spheres. Central to such a challenge is the political necessity for
educators and other cultural workers to pressure schools and other edu-
cational sites to treat popular culture as a serious object of analysis in the
curriculum so kids and adults can learn how to both demystify such
images and learn the knowledge and skills that enable them to be cultural
producers capable of creating public spheres informed by representa-
tions that honor and critically engage their traditions and experiences. In
ideological terms, it is crucial that forms of cultural pedagogy be devel-
oped that provide students and others with texts, resources, and perfor-
mative strategies that provide a complex range of subject positions they
can address, inhabit, mediate, and experiment with. Developing peda-
gogical practices and theoretical discourses that address how the opera-
tions of power work in sites such as beauty pageants also suggests teach-
ing students and adults how to organize social movements at the local and
national levels to pressure and boycott companies that engage in abusive
practices toward children. Underlying this merging of the political and the
pedagogical is the overt political goal of "enabling people to act more
strategically in ways that may change their context for the better"52 and
the pedagogical goal of finding ways for diverse groups of children and
adults to work together to transform popular public spheres into educa-
tional sites that address social problems by way of democratic, rather
than merely market, considerations.53
In short, the socialization of children must be addressed within a
larger discourse about citizenship and democracy, one that resists what
Adorno calls the "obscene merger of aesthetics and reality."54 What
Adorno means here is precisely the refutation of those ideologies and
social practices that attempt to subordinate, if not eliminate, forms of
identity fundamental to public life to an economy of bodies and pleasures

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that is all surface and spectacle. Such a discourse not only calls into ques-
tion the conditions under which kids learn, what they learn, and how this
knowledge shapes their identities and behavior, it also raises questions
about the material and institutional relations of power that are fundamen-
tal for maintaining the integrity of public life-a condition that is essential
for all children to learn to be critical participants in the shaping of their
lives and the larger social order. Child abuse comes in many forms, and it
has become a disturbing feature of American society. The current assault
being waged on children through retrograde policy, the dismantling of
the welfare state, and the pervasive glut of images that cast children as the
principle incitements to adult desire suggest that democracy is in the
throes of a major crisis. Surely, if democracy is to carry us forward into
the next century, it will be based on a commitment to improving the lives
of children, but not within the degrading logic of a market that treats their
bodies like a commodity and their futures as a trade-off for capital accu-
mulation. On the contrary, critical educators and other progressives need
to create a cultural vision along with strategies of understanding, repre-
sentation, and transformation informed by "the rhetoric of political, civic,
and economic citizenship."55 The challenge to take up that commitment
has never been so strained and never so urgent to confront and carry out.

Notes

1. For an insightful analysis of the myth of innocence see Marina Warner,

Six Myths of Our Time (New York: Vintage, 1995), esp. chap. 3. Of course, the
concept of childhood innocence as a historical invention has been pointed out by
a number of theorists. See, for example, Philip Aries, Centuries of Childhood
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979); and Lloyd deMause, ed., The Evolution of
Childhood (New York: Psychohistory, 1974).
2. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1994).
3. Ibid., esp. chap. 8. The notion that television and popular culture repre-
sent the main threat to childhood innocence is central to the conservative call for
censorship, limiting sex education in the schools, restricting AIDS education,
redefining the home as the most important source of moral education, and the
"Gumping" of American history (in which the 1960s are often seen as the source
of the country's current social ills). The quintessential expression of this position
can be found in the speeches, press releases, and writings of former secretary of
education and "drug czar" William Bennett. It can also be found in legislation
supported by groups such as the Christian Coalition, especially the Parental
Rights and Responsibilities Act of 1995. Examples of the conservative position
on child abuse, the loss of innocence, and the "poisonous" effects of popular cul-
ture abound in the popular press. See, for example, Jeff Stryker, "The Age of
Innocence Isn't What It Once Was," New York Times, 13 July 1997, E3.
4. Cited in Peter Edelman, "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done,"
Atlantic Monthly, March 1997, 45.

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 5. All of these figures are taken from two articles found on the Children's
Defense Fund Website: "The New Welfare Law: One Year Later," 14 October
1997, 1-5; and "CDF, New Studies Look at Status of Former Welfare Recipi-
ents," 27 May 1998, 1-4. See also Jennifer Wolch, "America's New Urban Policy:
Welfare Reform and the Fate of American Cities," Journal of American Planning
Association 54 (winter 1998): 8-11.
6. For specific statistics on the state of youth in the United States see Chil-
dren's Defense Fund, The State of America's Children Yearbook 1997 (Washington,
D.C.: Children's Defense Fund, 1997); Ruth Sidel, Keeping Women and Children
Last (New York: Penguin, 1996).
7. For an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the right-wing family
values crusade see Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Val-
ues in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon, 1996).
8. For an analysis of the widespread assault currently being waged against
children see Henry A. Giroux, Channel Surfing: Race Talk and the Destruction of
Today's Youth (New York: St. Martin's, 1997); Mike A. Males, The Scapegoat
Generation: America's War on Adolescents (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage,
1996); Charles R. Acland, Youth, Murder, Spectacle: The Cultural Politics of 'Youth
in Crisis' (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1995); Holly Sklar, "Young and Guilty by
Stereotype," Z Magazine, July-August 1993, 52-61; Deena Weinstein, "Expend-
able Youth: The Rise and Fall of Youth Culture," in Adolescents and Their Music,
ed. Jonathan S. Epstein (New York: Garland, 1994), 67-83; and various articles
in Microphone Fiends, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge,
1994).
9. For a brilliant analysis of how the image of the sexual predator is used to
preclude from public discussion the wide range of social factors at work in caus-
ing child abuse see James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victo-
rian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992).
10. For an analysis of the Supreme Court's decision see Linda Greenhouse,
"Likely Repeaters May Stay Confined," New York Times, 24 June 1997, A19.
11. The concept of the hollow state comes from Stanley Aronowitz, The
Death and Birth of American Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1996).
12. The literature on advertising and the marketing of children's desires is
too extensive to cite, but one of the best examples is Stephen Kline, Out of the
Garden: Toys, TV, and Children's Culture in the Age of Marketing (London: Verso,
1993).
13. Richard Goldstein, "The Girl in the Fun Bubble: The Mystery of Jon-
Benet," Village Voice, 10 June 1997, 41.
14. For a sustained treatment of the current assault on kids, especially those
who are poor, nonwhite, and urban, see Henry A. Giroux, Fugitive Cultures (New
York: Routledge, 1996).
15. Annie Gottlieb, "First Person Sexual," Nation, 9 June 1997, 26.
16. Frank Rich, "Let Me Entertain You," New York Times, 18 January 1997, A23.
17. Richard Goldstein, "The Girl in the Fun Bubble: The Mystery of Jon-
Benet," Village Voice, 10 June 1997, 41.
18. Cited in Karen de Witt, "All Dolled Up," New York Times, 12 January
1997, D4.
19. While the statistics on children's beauty pageants vary, a number of
sources cite similar figures to the ones I cite here. See, for example, Rich, "Let
Me Entertain You"; Ellen Mark, "Pretty Babies," Vogue, June 1997, 240; Beverly

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Stoeltje, "The Snake Charmer Queen Ritual Competition, and Signification in
American Festival," in Beauty Queens, ed. Colleen Ballerino, Richard Wilk, and
Beverly Stoeltje (New York: Routledge, 1996), 13.
20. Cited in Pat Jordan, "The Curious Childhood of an Eleven-Year-Old,"
Life, April 1994, 38.
21. Mark, "Pretty Babies," 240.
22. Linda Caillouet echoes a point made by many academics and journalists
across the country: "Pageants have changed over the past 30 years. Grade-
schoolers are wearing makeup, modeling swim wear and sashaying down run-
ways. . . . Today's little girls' parents often invest big money in coaches to teach
the children the pro-am modeling style and tornado spins. They pay for makeup
artists and hair stylists to accompany the children to pageants. Some of the kids
use tanning beds. Seven-year-olds have reportedly worn false teeth, false eye-
lashes, and colored contact lenses." See Linda Caillouet, "Slaying Has Child
Pageants on Defensive," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, 14 April 1997, 1A.
23. Jordan, "Curious Childhood," 62, 68.
24. See, especially, the Sixty Minutes segment on child beauty pageants that
aired on 18 May 1997. Also see the BBC documentary show Under the Sun,
which aired "Painted Babies" on 31 January 1996.
25. Michael F Jacobson and Laurie Ann Mazur, Marketing Madness (Boul-
der, Colo.: Westview, 1995), 79.
26. Cited in ad for "Debbrah's: Nation's Top Pageant Designers," Pageant
Life, winter 1996, 26.
27. Elliot Zaren, "Eyebrows Lift at Child Strutting in Sexy Dresses,
Makeup," Tampa Tribune, 14 January 1997, 4.
28. Cited in Jodi Duckett, "In the Eyes of the Beholder: Child Beauty
Pageants Get Mixed Reviews," Morning Call, 6 April 1997, El.
29. Duckett, "In the Eyes," El.
30. Ellen Mark, "Pretty Babies," Vogue, June 1997, 283.
31. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 162.
32. Ibid., 179.
33. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: Anchor, 1992).
34. Richard Goldstein, "Nymph Mania: Honoring Innocence in the
Breach," Village Voice, 17 June 1997, 71. This is not to suggest that women and
children don't mediate and resist such domination as much as to make clear the
determinate relations of power that lie behind the resurrection of the nymphet in
the culture.

35. Beverly Stoeltje, "The Snake Charmer Queen Ritual Competition," in

Beauty Queens, 23.
36. Cited in Linda Caillouet, "Slaying Has Child Pageants on Defensive," 1A.
37. Cited in Duckett, "In the Eyes," El.
38. See, for example, Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against
American Women (New York: Anchor, 1991).
39. This paragraph relies heavily on comments by pediatric psychologists
cited in Rebecca A. Eder, Ann Digirolamo, and Suzanne Thompson, "Is Win-
ning a Pageant Worth a Lost Childhood?" St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24 February
1997, 7B.
40. David Elkind, "The Family in the Postmodern World," National Forum
75 (summer 1995): 24-28.
41. Marly Harris, "Trophy Kids," Money, March 1997, 102.

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 42. As Annette Corrigan points out, "Young girls should have the freedom
to explore the unlimited possibilities of their humanity and to be valued, as men
are, for much more than how they look or their capacity to stimulate desire in the
opposite sex." See Annette Corrigan, "Fashion, Beauty, and Feminism," Meanjin
51:1 (1992): 108.
43. For an academic defense of beauty pageants as simply an acting out of
community standards see Michael T. Marsden, "Two Northwestern Ohio Beauty
Pageants: A Study in Middle America's Cultural Rituals," in The Cultures of Cel-
ebration, ed. Ray B. Browne and Michael T. Marsden (Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green State University Press, 1994), 171-80. Marsden is so intent on
seeing pageants as ritualistic performances that he doesn't notice how ideological
his own commentary is when focusing on some of the most sexist aspects of the
pageant practices. Hence, for Marsden, bathing suit competitions simply prove
that "beauty can be art." For a more complex analysis see Robert H. Lavender,
"'It's Not a Beauty Pageant!' Hybrid Ideology in Minnesota Community Queen
Pageants," in Ballerino et al., Beauty Queens, 31-46. See also Susan Orlean's
insipid defense of child beauty pageants as public rituals that offer mothers pride
when their daughters win and provide pageant contestants the comfort of a fam-
ily "in which everyone knows each other and watches out for each other"
("Beautiful Girls," New Yorker, 4 August 1997, 29-36).
44. Beverly Stoeltje, "The Snake Charmer Queen Ritual Competition," in
Ballerino et al., Beauty Queens, 13.
45. For a brilliant analysis of the different critical approaches to beauty and
the politics of appearance that feminists have taken since the appearance of the
first Miss American pageant in 1968 see Corrigan, "Fashion, Beauty, and Femi-
nism," 107-22. What is so interesting about this piece is that nothing is said
about child beauty pageants. This is especially relevant since many of the con-
ceptual approaches dealing with the politics of appearance simply don't apply to
six-year-olds. For instance, the notion that beauty can be appropriated as an act
of resistance and turned against the dominant culture seems a bit far-fetched
when talking about children who can barely read.
46. One exception can be found in the collection of essays in Ballerino et al.,
Beauty Queens.
47. Valerie Walkerdine, Daddy's Girl: Young Girls and Popular Culture (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 166.
48. While I haven't developed in this essay the implications such depictions
have for women, many feminists have provided some excellent analysis. See espe-
cially Bordo, Unbearable Weight. For a shameful defense of thinness as an aes-
thetic in the fashion industry see Rebecca Johnson, "The Body," Vogue, Septem-
ber 1997, 653-58. Johnson goes a long way to legitimate some of the most
misogynist aspects of the beauty industry, but really reaches into the bottom of
the barrel in claiming resentment is the primary reason that many women criti-
cize the image of waif-like models permeating the media. Claiming that thinness
is only an aesthetic and not a morality, Johnson seems to forget that within the
dominant invocation of thinness as a standard of beauty there is the suggestion
that overweight women are slovenly, older women are ugly, and nonwhite women
are not as beautiful as the ever-present blonde-haired waifs who populate the
media.
49. The classic on this issue is Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the
Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Ballantine, 1994). See also Nicole Peradotto,

52 Henry A. Giroux

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"Little Women: A New Generation of Girls Growing up before Their Time,"
Buffalo News, 26 January 1997, 1EF
50. Ballerino, Wilk, and Stoeltje, introduction to Beauty Queens, 10.
51. For a brilliant analysis of how young girls are represented in popular cul-
ture and what is learned by them see Walkerdine, Daddy's Girl.
52. Lawrence Grossberg, "Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural
Studies," in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. Cary Nelson and
Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (New York: Routledge, 1996), 143.
53. This suggests that adults not only take responsibility for how children's
identities are constructed within oppressive social relations but also that such
adults support groups such as Free Children, a youth group consisting of kids
between ten and sixteen years of age who are organizing at the national and inter-
national level "to help children being abused and exploited, but to also empower
young people to believe in themselves and to believe that they can play an active
role as citizens of this world." Craig Kielburger, "Children Can Be Active Citi-
zens of the World," Rethinking Schools (summer 1997): 19.
54. Adorno cited in Geoffrey Hartman, "Public Memory and Its Discon-
tents," Raritan 8 (spring 1994): 27.
55. Stanley Aronowitz, "A Different Perspective on Inequality," in Education
and Cultural Studies: Toward a Performative Practice, ed. Henry A. Giroux and
Patrick Shannon (New York: Routledge, 1998), 193.

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