Patters, N’Jai-An Elizabeth, & Ipce; An Interesting Disseration: Deviance and Dissidents
N’Jai-An Elizabeth Patters has written an interesting dissertation:
Deviants and Dissidents: Children’s Sexuality and the Limits of Liberation.
A Dissertation to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, 2010.
Quotes from this book are published here in Ipce's Library 4 at
< https://www.ipce.info/library/book/deviants-and-dissidents >.
The full text can be read in the attached PDF file, which includes the long list of References.
Of special interest might be the chapters 3 and 4:
Chapter 3 describes the history of NAMBLA, the North America Man-Boy Love Association.
Chapter 4 describes the important transition around the year 1980 from NAMBLA's 'The child has to be liberated' onto Societal's 'The child as a victim'.
The author describes the Child Abuse Panic in the USA since about 1980, especially the McMartin Preschool trial, seven years, including hundreds of accusations and extreme convictions, but ending in acquittance.
An important topic in this trial have been the way children had been interrogated, not by certificated therapists, but by fanatic zealots, who did not believe the children ... ...
Patters, N’Jai-An Elizabeth; Deviants and Dissidents; 184 pp
My dissertation takes the child as its focus to understand both liberation politics and social conservative movements in the postwar United States. I reveal that, even as leftist social movements viewed children as possessing “sexuality” and argued for the liberation of children’s sexual expression, they simultaneously invoked the child as a vulnerable figure who must be protected from sexual abuse and violence in a dangerous postwar culture.

Ultimately, the protectionist rhetoric about children’s sexuality proved more powerful and influential than the libratory rhetoric, in large part because it shared features with the burgeoning rhetoric of the religious right, who found political power in a broad call to “save the children.”

My analysis of these competing rhetorical frameworks reveals the ways in which the child came to structure late-20th-century political discourse by marking the limits of liberation. Using children’s sexuality as a point of entry into postwar political activism, my dissertation sheds light on the evolution of political identities. Ultimately, my work highlights the shrinking of progressive political possibilities and the emergence of a consolidated conservative political discourse.