Minor eruptions: lesbian accused of promoting Pedophilia (1).

I've been teaching long enough to have been called a lot of names (COMMIE DYKE, for one, CASTRATING BITCH, for another, of course), but I am grateful to have survived the age of reproduction and achieved the exalted state of tenured full professor before anyone added PEDOPHILE to the list. My accuser was a student in an undergraduate class called Feminism and Visual Representation, a class I have taught in many incarnations over the years, and a class I seek to teach because of its radicalizing potential and because it attracts non-artists as well as advanced undergraduates. Like many such classes in many progressive art departments, mine attempted to bridge "theory" (i.e., words about gender, women, power, oppression, resistance and so on) and "practice" (i.e., visual works touching perhaps more lightly and certainly more succinctly on the same issues).

My accuser s name was Mary, or rather it wasn't. Mary was the pseudonym I knew it would be wise to invent early in 1998 at the University of California, Irvine, when I walked into the art department's annual undergraduate exhibition and beheld upon the wall the wreckage of a collision between theory and practice engendered by my teaching. It looked like this: a black and white image of a pudgy young white girl in a dress, banner red text, all caps, on the diagonal across her flat little chest: SEX QUEEN? Underneath was a text in a smaller font, black and white, that accused faculty in the Department of Studio Art of promoting pedophilia. As Mary's art work had been produced in a foundation class that emphasized visual communication, the poster was not unsophisticated. It kept text to a minimum and consigned the lengthy allegations to a stack of brochures placed on the floor beneath the poster.

Mary identified herself as an incest survivor and a liberal feminist. "In November of 1997," she explained, "my professor in Issues in Feminism and Visual Representation chose to present slides of the paintings described below. I was not forewarned of their content. If I had been, I would have declined to view them." She went on to describe the paintings to which she objected.

* One child is standing in front of a giraffe. Another child is hanging strangled from the neck of another giraffe. (The giraffe grew up--the child didn't.)

* A little girl standing with her hand up the front of a woman's dress.

* Depicts a leering toddler flanked by two women. The toddler has a hand plunged into the exposed vaginas of each woman.

* A red eyed woman with her tongue out is poised to lick the face of a newborn baby. The babies [sic] eyes are glowing.

* A little girl with leering blood covered face, entitled, Pussy Eater.

Mary said that the viewing of these images was a "terrible personal violation." She complained that no open discussion of the work had taken place, and that in the absence of such discussion, she had been left to consider these images in the context of an essay by Gayle Rubin, from which she extracted passages that she construed to promote the criminal activities of pedophiles: " Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boy-lovers (and girl lovers) ...are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them." "Girl lovers" is, by the way, Mary's addition to Rubin's text. Her "respected feminist professor", said Mary,

had offered no materials or discussion opposing Rubin's viewpoint or information on sexual abuse. The showing of these images of children in conjunction with the reading by Rubin sends a message that repells [sic] me. The exercise of Academic Freedom should be tempered with sensitivity, responsibility and good judgment. The choice to use these images in the classroom was irresponsible and insensitive--possibly even criminal.... Their use in the classroom has triggered alternate waves of depression, anxiety and rage for me.... Why should we give free reign [sic] to those who would legalize a crime which often causes more misery than a swift death? Please challenge academic propaganda supporting pedophilia or cross generational sex.

Mary called the student newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, and the Orange County Register. Everyone called back. Everyone called UC Irvine. Mary had not provided the name of the professor. I was, however, the only faculty member teaching Feminism and Visual Representation that quarter. My department chair called me. "Are you ready for CNN?," he asked cheerily. "We're about ten minutes away.

At this point, I want to make it clear that I am not telling a victim story. If, like some of my peers, I had been financially and professionally destroyed by baseless allegations, I couldn't afford to tell this story. No matter how painful the accusations, no matter how horrifying the possibility of defending myself against criminal prosecution, I suffered no tangible repercussions. I got off because of certain mitigating circumstances: one of the offending artists had recently received a Guggenheim; I had an excellent relationship with the university ombudsman; and bureaucrats whom I had never met and who never bother to speak to me turned their considerable public relations skills to the cause. There was also a good measure of blind luck. I was not persecuted by the university administration, if only because, at the most cynical possible level, damage control was in the university's best interests: UCI had just incurred considerable financial liability due to a couple of medical school faculty who fled the country after selling human eggs to make money on the side. Also in the blind luck column, Mary did not turn out to be a pawn of the Christian right. Picketers did not march outside my classroom. Only one Orange County paper ran the story. CNN had other things to do.

Thus, I continue to teach the same material. Mary remained in the department and got her degree.

If you are not reading a victim story, neither are you reading a story of heroism. The complete misreading of my teaching was an unnerving and humbling experience. My competence was placed in doubt. Though I oppose capital punishment, sexual assault sorely tests my conviction. Nonetheless, I was shaken by Mary's accusation. I felt utterly slimed by the projections caused by her unresolved rage. My skin was not thick enough to turn the scandal into a "teachable moment." Irvine is a legendarily conservative town. The year before Mary and I met, for example, an Irvine photo lab turned my teaching assistant in to the police for photographing her son lifting, in play, the skirt he was wearing to reveal his penis. Discretion was clearly the better part of valor.

The class in which Mary and I met was listed by the departments of studio art, women's studies, and art history. With about fifteen or sixteen students, it was a high energy mix of disciplines, ethnicities, sexualities and ages--one of the best groups of students I've ever encountered. Or so I remember it. I am invested in the classroom as a site of resistance and transformation, as a politicized space in which formations of knowledge and power are up for reinvention. The classroom is my own private utopia. Without faith in the possibility of its existence, I wouldn't have the nerve to listen to my own voice. Every utopia, however, contains exactly that which it was designed to resist. Every utopia is at once empowered and impaired by the reasons it needed to be invented in the first place. In other words, every classroom has a problem student, the student who derails the locomotive of narrative--by excess or withholding, by silence or by speech, by apathy or by aggression.

Mary was a white Orange County resident in her early forties returning to school to finish her undergraduate degree. Recently divorced, a single mother and a working woman, she seemed determined to make up for lost time and fulfill herself, so much so that in her eagerness she tended to drown out the younger students, to speak only from personal experience, and to speak for women of other races. ("Some of my best friends are Asian and they think....") Mary was needy, aggressive, and clueless. She was not a popular member of the class. Nonetheless, I often found myself protecting a space in which Mary could speak, thus inadvertently (at least at first) giving the rest of the class more time to marshal their arguments against her.

Which is to suggest how quickly one steps right into the droppings of transference and counter transference. I suspect that Mary identified with me as a woman in a position of authority, as a successful and outspoken feminist. My capacity to outrage was exactly what attracted her to my class: she wanted to have it for herself. She engaged in a kind of unconscious seduction: standing close to me, waiting to catch my eye, speaking directly to me rather than to her peers. Such undercurrents are familiar to anyone who teaches. They are not obstacles to teaching, but the material of teaching. Trusting the undercurrents is what guides us, or at least me, to find the routes around and under a student's resistance to change.

There's also, however, the small matter of counter transference. I didn't much like Mary. I was impatient with her politics and repulsed by her unevolved narcissism. She grated. I wasn't available to her, intellectually or emotionally. I felt obligated to sympathy--an unerotic combination of words-with a working woman raising her daughter on her own. Yes, she reminded me of my mother.

Disregarding these pulls of ideology and eros, I plowed on with my narrative of feminist progress, moving from visual art of the 1960s and 1970s to more recent work by artists, most but not all women, who tangle gender with race and class, sexuality and age. I thus showed paintings and photographs of work by Lorraine O' Grady, Kara Walker, Linn Underhill, Monica Majoli, Janine Antoni, Catherine Opie, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Deborah Bright. I included work by Carrie Moyer and Nicole Eisenman, whose paintings some readers may, conceivably, recognize in Mary's descriptions. I emphasized the category "woman" as a construction, and gender itself as a queer sort of performance. I assigned excerpts from queer theorists such as Sue-Ellen Case, Monique Wittig, Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam, all of whom, roughly speaking, have argued for a redefinition of ideas of gender and for the understanding of gender as a social performance rather than an expression of biologically determined truth. I assigned complementary texts by artist/writers such as Lorraine O'Grady and Yvonne Rainer. In order to suggest the contributions of an earlier feminist decade, I asked students to read Gayle Rubin's groundbreaking 1984 essay, "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in which she analyzes the imposition of moral hierarchies upon sexual practices, pointing out that procreative, monogamous, prop-free heterosexual sex occupies the inner, charmed circle, while categories such as homosexual, public, and promiscuous are relegated to "the outer limits."

Perhaps I should have predicted that trouble lay ahead when Mary began to make reference to the anti-pornography crusader Andrea Dworkin, whom I had chosen not to put on my syllabus. Perhaps I should have spent more time in class mapping out the implications of Rubin's notion of sex hierarchies. Perhaps I should have reiterated more frequently the differences between social construction and essentialism. Perhaps I should have taken care to problematize the subjectivity Mary assumed to be stable and from which she loudly spoke. Perhaps I should have discussed Mary with a colleague.

To imagine, however, a pedagogical detour made around a list of sentences beginning with the word "perhaps," is to concede that quiet restraint is appropriate behavior in the classroom. It is to sacrifice the liberatory power of laughter and shock. It is to ignore the power of reckless improvisation in intellectual discussion. It sacrifices the exuberance of those teaching moments in which women, for we were mainly women, see the possibility of ourselves seeing the world in an utterly different way. There were moments in that classroom when I could have chosen a more prudent route in what I showed and what I said and how I said it, but I didn't become a feminist out of prudence. I censored neither my students nor myself, which has something to do with stubbornness and something to do with a kind of obtuseness born of the privilege of tenure.

My intention in showing work by Carrie Moyer and Nicole Eisenmann was to suggest a late 1990s lesbian revision of traditional narratives of childhood innocence. Not only did I aim to unravel ideas of female purity, I wanted to present the trope of the sexualized child as a specifically queer strategy for Empowerment and social change. It is significant that both artists use the sort of shock tactics lauded in their male comtemporaries. Both deploy the figure of a little girl rich in intellectual and sexual agency. Eisenmann's little girl arranges her own fantastically intricate celebrations of male castration. Moyer's little girl already knows that a cigar is not a cigar. She dreams of superwomen and strap ons. She proposes, in short, to cut off her father's dick and fuck her mother, or both her mothers. This little girl is a powerful twist on the stereotype of the predatory lesbian. This little girl knows how to horrify. If there is a gay gene, she has at least two, and by flaunting them she makes ludicrous the very notion of biological determinism.

I adore this little girl. I adore her capacity for outrage. I find her smart, honest, and heady. She didn't exist ten years ago. She was invented by dykes intent on transmuting the sexual pleasures of fags. She is no relation to the nubile objects stalked by many heterosexual photographers, say Sally Mann or Jock Sturges. (The latter's books, in the winter of 1998, were the object of a protest led by the anti-abortion fanatic Randall Terry against Barnes and Noble, who refused to remove the books from their shelves.) This little girl, in another century, would have mowed down Lewis Carroll. It's embarrassing to be so transparent about one's desires, but of course I want to BE this little girl, or if I can't, I want at least to watch and relish the spectacle of this tough little liberty leading an army of queers.

Whatever I wished backfired in my face, setting off a series of explosions in the space between two distinctly different theologies of liberation: the classroom as a politicized site of knowledge formation versus the individual as authority on her oppression, the contested knowledges of nineties feminism versus the testimonial pragmatics of seventies feminism, the deconstruction of authority versus the construction of political agency, pro-sex feminism versus anti-porn feminism, complicit pleasures versus the innocence of the downtrodden.

Here is the chain of events:

* In the assignment that followed the class on lesbian artists, Mary described her distress. I wrote in her margins, expressing concern about the pain I had inadvertently caused, explaining that she was entirely misreading the intentions of the artists, and inviting her to come to my office to talk. She didn't show.

* After I had turned in grades, Mary complained to my department chair. "Academic freedom," he said. "Metaphor." He sent her away. Mary tried to see my dean, who was too busy to accommodate her.

* Mary installed SEX QUEEN? in the university gallery.

* The New University, the student newspaper, published a front-page article, which featured, more or less verbatim, Mary's charges. The distinction between painting and photography evaporated. Any figurative representation was taken to mean that the events depicted--no matter how fantastical, no matter how anatomically inconceivable, no matter how bleakly satirical--had actually occurred. Any vestigial remainders of concepts such as ambiguity, paradox and contradiction withered and vanished. A sentence recounting the apparent figurative content of the image became both that image and the meaning of that image. My class was retitled, "Aesthetics of Child Pornography." The student newspaper did not attempt to contact me to secure my version of events, or my interpretation of the images. Nonetheless, it declared that I had refused to return phone calls.

* My dean found time for Mary. The dean called the university ombudsman. The university ombudsman called me. I denied Mary's charges that I had prohibited discussion of the work, and suggested he review the class evaluations, which praised the atmosphere of open discussion. The ombudsman asked me to show him the five paintings. I agreed, with the proviso that he would view them in the context of all the work shown in class on that day. The ombudsman inquired further as to whether I would be willing to have a statement printed in the UCI course catalogue that indicated my courses might be controversial and/or offensive to some students. I wasn't.

* The Orange County Weekly picked up the story. The Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times let it drop.

* The slide librarian called to ask whether I would like her to misfile the offending slides. I said yes.

* I called a first amendment lawyer. He advised me to be forthright, to cooperate with requests from the university administration, and to document every single thing that happened to me. Then he went off to defend an English professor in another Southern California university accused of promoting cannibalism because he had asked his students to read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal."

* I forewarned Carrie Moyer, Nicole Eisenmann's gallery, Gayle Rubin, and my mother, in that order.

* The ombudsman called me to report that Mary wanted all classes at UC Irvine, graduate and undergraduate, in any discipline, using "sexual" images of children to carry an advisory and to include material describing the dangers of child abuse. The ombudsman told Mary that he could not support this request. He suggested, with the utmost circumspection, that I would do well to watch out for the dean.

* The faculty union, various colleagues, and many students--including some who identified themselves as conservative and Christian-- offered me support. They sent letters to the student newspaper rebuking them for sensationalism and pointing out that by not contacting me the New University had actually abridged my freedom of speech. A few of these letters were published.

* E-mails from various states arrived in various administrative offices calling for disciplinary measures that stopped just short of chemical castration.

* The ultra conservative California Association of Scholars invited me to their upcoming conference to defend academic freedom in relation to the use of sexually explicit material in the classroom. I declined.

* The dean went on medical leave.

* I invited colleagues from art history and from women's studies, along with my department chair and the acting dean, to attend a meeting at which I showed a tray of slides by lesbian artists to the ombudsman and one of his colleagues. The job of an ombudsman is to resolve disputes before they reach the point of lawyers, liability, public record, counter suits, and so forth. ("You do not want this to go to the stage of a formal grievance," the ombudsman told me. "It will not be worth it to clear yourself by those means.") Our meeting, then, was an informal conversation, a non-hearing on a nongrievance. With the exception of the ombudsman's assistant, an ex-priest, who tried at the last minute to sabotage the nonverdict, the shadow court that I had myself helped to invent absolved me, concluding that what I had taught was fully within the academic mission of a public university. (This is not equivalent to the removal of slime from one's skin.) "Someone should write an official statement on this," it was said, "in case there are future repercussions for Catherine." The job was delegated to the acting dean. Despite repeated requests, he never actually managed to get around to committing the opinion of the non-court to letterhead.

* The student newspaper, still unable to make up its mind, published editorials on both sides of the issue, as well as a letter criticizing the university administration for "banding together" to protect me. The editorials surrounded a cartoon depicting a woman driving a bulldozer that flew a banner reading DRAMA QUEEN.

I like to think it was the bulldozer that settled the question of when I stopped beating my wife, although the settlement merely provoked another set of questions involving lesbian visibility. After all, Catherine Lord, an admitted lesbian, is as yet legally forbidden to marry the woman whom she might have stopped beating. Once accused of pedophilia, the only response anyone can truly hear is a confession. Be it speech or silence, anything else constitutes denial or obfuscation, which is to segue into the sound of the particular silences produced when one queers the inevitable erotics of the classroom. The first and greatest of these silences involves, of course, the matter of naming the sexuality in question.

The paintings in dispute were made by two young lesbian artists and shown by an out lesbian professor in a feminist class with a syllabus featuring a section on lesbian artists. Nonetheless, homosexuality was neither named by Mary in her brochure nor sensationalized afterwards. "Respected feminist professor," I think, served as code sufficient: what other kind of feminist would show her students not just any old child pornography but lesbian child pornography? The silence about homosexuality, however, made it impossible for me to name the specific panic that had erupted around me. Neither would it have been productive to attempt to clear myself by accusing a victim of child abuse of homophobia and racism. (Tellingly, Mary's protective instincts were not aroused by the African-American artist Kara Walker's satirical installations that depict with glee the sport made of African-American children in the ante-bellum South.) Likewise, it would have been insane for me to counter the charge of promoting pedophilia w ith the explanation that I was merely showing representations of childhood by lesbian artists. With the exception of private conversations with queer colleagues, therefore, in public I felt obliged to use the lowest common denominator-- academic freedom--to rally support. In so doing I had to undermine and underestimate the specific rights threatened by invoking the spectacle of a pedophile in the first place.

The second loud silence, or perhaps it was just an amplification of the first, involved the climate of fear and longing around the matter of childhood innocence. We inhabit a culture of incendiary desire and chronic repression. I am cutting short a long discussion, but suffice it to say that we can neither avoid sexualized images of children (open any fashion magazine, visit any greeting card store, turn on any television....) nor speak about the desires aroused by what we see. We inhabit a culture that incites desire so as to incite it further by chronic repression. As James Kincaid has pointed out,

...as time went on, the idea of sexuality and the idea of "the child" became dominated by sexuality-- negative sexuality, of course, but sexuality all the same. Innocence was filed down to mean little more than virginity coupled with ignorance: the child was, therefore, that which was innocent: the species incapable of practicing or inciting sex. The irony is not hard to miss: defining something entirely as a negation brings irresistibly before us that which we're trying to banish. It's like the surefire alchemical recipe for turning lead into gold: just add water and don't think of the work rhinoceros. (2)

The third, and deafening, silence was caused by fear of litigation. (Coincidentally, the Mary affair followed a right-wing attack on SUNY New Platz for sponsoring a women's studies conference that included a panel titled "Safe, Sane and Consensual SM.") I proposed a one-off showing of the offending slide tray, or better, an exhibition focused on artists who use representations of childhood in their work. The university was not interested in a teachable moment. No one had the slightest interest--financial, intellectual, professional, or creative--in public and rational discussion. The department chair questioned the propriety of my proposal, pointing out that we were not operating in a rational climate. His professional plans for the next few years had not included a protracted defense of lesbian artists who revisit the idea of childhood, and neither had mine. The exhibition proposal died. Vagueness ruled at UC Irvine. A flu epidemic began. The voice mail system went on the blink. The only person with any inte rest in speech was Mary, and once she had opened her mouth, she couldn't stop. Caution descended like a suffocating cloud over the balkanized space of my classroom, as well as the classrooms of my colleagues. It is neither possible nor ethical to speculate on the homosexual panic of an identifiable and troubled individual student to her peers.

You may wonder why no one took the step of having Mary and I meet privately. Mary could have given voice to her violation. I could have attempted a remedial lesson in the difference between images that record the light reflected from a physical event and images that record the light created in the space between an artist's ears. The encounter could not be staged. Mary avoided speaking with me about her complaint until her story had reached the level of the university administration, at which point she insisted upon bringing her supporters to the meeting. I objected to her theatricalization, well aware of the ironies of using exactly the rationale used to block the tactics of my generation of protestors during the Vietnam War. At the exact moment I decided that I could seize the opportunity to explain to Mary, and her supporters, that she was solving her own problems by making me a victim (not to mention the fact that theatricalization was better than slime) she decided she wasn't, after all, interested.

"That does it," said my friends. "She's attracted to you."

"She doesn't know it," said my shrink "That's what unconscious means. That's what makes it dangerous."

I suspect Mary came to my feminist class to heal, not only from childhood abuse, but from her mother's blindness to that abuse. Mary needed witnesses and believed she would find them under the rubric of feminism. She saw as advertisements for pedophilia images I believed to represent a queer, volatile, and empowering reclamation of childhood. The class failed her, and she was forced to look for other witness. She didn't have far to go. At each rung of the bureaucratic ladder are people whose job description includes listening, particularly for financial liability Further, bureaucracies are designed to insure that their employees are not actually accountable for anything. Whether or not they all understood or believed in the implications of the concept, every bureaucrat Mary encountered raised the issue of academic freedom. Mary repeatedly denied the satisfaction of having someone punish me, turned to the press, perhaps believing that it might convey her story to more sympathetic, tax-paying ears.

It's difficult to make theory out of the speech distortions and gaps generated by homophobia and fear, but when I think about my week (or two) as a pedophile at the distance of several years, it's clear that as the homo in the middle of other people's panic, I was caught between the market constraints of the classroom, the culture that produces the apparition of the pedophile, and the disruption to the heterosexual body politic of the educational apparatus represented by the queer professor.

In today's college classroom, the overgrown "innocent" enters the free market of knowledge, as consumer, menu surfer, and cash cow. Student evaluations serve not only as a means to offer useful feedback to instructors, but to measure and quantify any given instructor's contribution to consumer satisfaction. "Was your instructor available?" "Was your instructor informed about his or her subject?" "Did your instructor make you interested in the topic of the class?" "Did your instructor create a fair and supportive environment for all the students in the class?" Any complaints about being "offended" in the "comments" section of such evaluations are monitored to screen for liability.

Both family and school--the institutions that discipline the child into the adult--assert the fact of sexual "innocence" in such a way as to ensure the apparition of what it is they most fear: the pedophile. Indeed, the spectre of the pedophile, particularly the homosexual infiltrator as pedophile, is used to buttress the continued existence of these institutions. It is irrelevant that most sexual abuse occurs within the family that is supposed to protect the child. It is irrelevant that the abuse of children by economic means is endemic. It is irrelevant that misogyny, sexual harassment, heterosexual rape, and chronic racism--NOT pedophilia--are endemic on college campuses. Of course the institutions to which we entrust the physical, ideological and moral reproduction of the species are the same institutions that fascinate by their reiterative staging of the possibilities of improper sexual contact. The MacMartin school, Felicity and Dawson's Creek are, literally, on the same wavelength, as are the Catholic church and, say, the Sopranos. This is, emphatically, NOT to say that child molestation and other soul-destroying, corrosive, heinous forms of improper sexual conduct are myths, but to suggest that even in the case of the church the imaginary far exceeds the horrific reality. In accepting this imaginary, we fail spectacularly in addressing the real causes of systemic sexual abuse (e.g., the lack of oversight boards, cronyism, sexism, archaic gender roles, the legal system, etc.)

The queer professor is, in and of herself, a molestation of heterosexual safely, a disruption to the enjoyment of the majority of consumers, a wrench in the reinscribed patriarchal space that is the classroom. Of course we put disclaimers about sexually explicit material on our syllabi: we are aware that our very presence in a classroom is sexually explicit.

After the affair had ended, I talked with the assistant vice chancellor for communications about the university's handling of the incident. It wasn't a reassuring exchange. "I'll never understand," he said, "why Rush Limbaugh didn't pick it up. It had all the right ingredients." "I'd have felt differently," he added,

... if you'd forced her to look at those images, not that I've actually seen them, or if any professor forced a student to look at images that were too disturbing. But it was clear that you had given students the freedom to say no if they needed. [Italics mine]

What could be possibly meant by invoking a word like force in relation to turning on a slide projector? Visual rape? Rape by lesbian visuality? Rape by the vision of a lesbian in authority? What does it mean to define education as a process impeded by "disturbance"? Who draws the line between "disturbing" and "too disturbing"? How does one distinguish between a "no" that represents a refusal to consider entire bodies of significant social thought and a "no" that represents the decision to avoid images that trigger memories of sexual trauma? In the best of circumstances, there's no fast or easy way to sort this question out. Amidst the auditory distortion caused by homosexual panic reverberating through bureaucratic channels, the negotiation of meaning and the articulation of one's being as a queer professor become a staccato set of improvisations--partial, fragmentary, ineffective, ungovernable, and comic--a farce in danger of repeating itself as tragedy.

1. Catherine Lord retains the copyright for this tide.

2. James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence:

The Culture of Child Molesting, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 55. It is this dance of provocation and repression which accounts for the extraordinary fact that not one of the producers of the advertisements that use sexualized images of children granted Anne Higonnet reproduction rights for her recent book, Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of the Ideal Childhood (New York Thames & Hudson, 1998). "Permission to reproduce denied by [insert name of corporation]"is Higonnet's most frequent phrase.

CATHERINE LORD, a writer and artist who lives in Los Angeles, is professor of Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Afterimage, Documents, X-tra, GLQ, Art Journal, Whitewalls, and the New Art Examiner, as well as The Passionate Camera and Space, Site and Intervention. Her book, The Summer of Her Baldness, an experimental narrative about the involuntary performance engendered by a diagnosis of breast cancer, is forthcoming. She is currently working on an illustrated encyclopedia titled The Effect of Tropical Light on White Men.