Upcoming book: Children, Sexuality and Visual Culture: Enacting the Pedophilic Gaze (Palgrave).
What do children know about sexuality? Do they know anything? What should they know? Recent research points out that even young children between six and twelve years old relate to the topic of sex and sexuality on an everyday basis. My interest in young children and sexuality concerns so-called "normal" sexuality. Theoretically, my research is part of Sexuality Studies, the research field which emphasizes social and cultural understandings of sexuality.
A key concept and research topic is pedophilication and the normalization of the pedophilic gaze. My key proposition is that the pedophilic gaze has become a norm, on the basis of which children’s and adults’ worlds are ordered and structured in practice. I focus on and unpack this topic in my forthcoming book: Children, Sexuality and Visual Culture: Enacting the Pedophilic Gaze (Palgrave).
Research articles
Sparrman, A. (2015). Seeing (with) the ‘sexy’ body: young children visual enactment of sexuality. In Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose and Danielle Egan (Eds.), Children sexuality and the ‘sexualization’ of culture, pp. UK: Palgrave.
Sparrman, Anna (2014). Access and gatekeeping in researching children’s sexuality: Mess in ethics and methods. Sexuality & Culture, 18(2): 291-309.