The doll and pedagogic mediation: teaching children to fear the ‘other’

Abstract

The present paper explores the ways in which non‐heteronormative sexual identities are represented and made to appear ‘other’ and potentially abject within North‐American and British pedagogic cultures, and how this regime of representation affects the development and construction of sexualities in the young. Taking Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and bodily hexis as structural starting points, I draw on Butler's theoretical work to examine how gender is represented and regulated through performative relations but how these also offer a site for resistance. I discuss Winnicott's theory of the ‘transitional object’ and the ‘potential space’ of play that it affords, to discuss one such site, a space in which gender divisions are not yet understood (in infancy) and where they can be questioned (in childhood and adulthood). To help me navigate a complex terrain I refer to a large, photographic piece by Jeff Wall, ‘A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947’. Using this work as an interlocutor, I investigate a domestic situation in which normalcy is overturned by the ‘uncanniness’ of the performance, a phenomenon that undermines the pedagogic agenda to offer an equivocal space for fantasy.