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Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. By James R. Kincaid. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 1998. xii, 352 pp. $24.95.
"Am I sounding like Humbert Humbert?" asks James Kincaid anxiously, yet also hopefully, in his Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. This engaging tour through the American obsession with sexually abused children argues, a la Foucault, that the "unspeakableness" of child molestation actually consists of an elaborate discursive regime. In Kincaid's analysis, the figure of the innocent, imperiled child simultaneously eroticizes prepubescent bodies, prohibits adults from admitting to even passing desires for young people, and makes it impossible to conceive of children as desiring subjects on their own terms. Kincaid offers a short history of the Romantic construction of the child as a critique of Enlightenment values and proceeds to...