Docile Child and Pedophilic Sentimentality: Sexual Implications in Shirley Temple’s Movies

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국외국어대학교 영미연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 영미연구 / 41권 / 161 ~ 180페이지
· 저자명 : 김명성

초록

This essay explores the “sentimental sexuality” of the child movie star Shirley Temple. The pedophilic child fetishism implicit in her movies, which stimulated a male fantasy of an obedient female during the Great Depression, was an outcome of a cultural dynamic where the U.S. film industry attempted to find a way to relive the patriarchal failure of the era in a female body. Assuring the male ownership of a female body, this essay argues, Shirley Temple’s sentimental sexuality satisfies a paternal white gaze and, more importantly, “functions both to expose the constraints and limitations that the capitalistic unclear family imposes on women and, at the same time, to ‘educate’ women to accept those constraints as ‘natural,’ inevitable-as ‘given’” (Kaplan 124). Released by the time the Production Code Administration began prohibiting sexually suggestive scenes, Shirley Temple’s movies use family drama as a basic platform to stabilize the potential perversity of a white adult male desire. Such a construction of female child images promised the emotional stability of the nation under the Great Depression, while simultaneously fulfilling a patriarchal fantasy that identified female sexuality with child immaturity.

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