Boundaries of Touch

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Preface................................................................................ixAcknowledgments........................................................................xiii1. To Touch or Not to Touch............................................................12. The Rise of the Expert, the Fall of the Mother......................................273. Breasts versus Bottles and the Sexual Mother........................................694. Babies in Bed: To Sleep or Not to Sleep (with Your Baby)............................1055. Violent Touch: Feminists, Conservatives, and Child Sexual Abuse.....................1316. Touching Problems...................................................................151Epilogue...............................................................................167Notes..................................................................................169References.............................................................................187Index..................................................................................195

Chapter One

While working on this book, I stayed overnight at a hospital for the first time. I came home exhausted, pale after massive blood loss, and very afraid. On top of all of that, someone came home with me. He was noisy, demanding, easily dissatisfied, constantly hungry, and apparently never tired, at least not at night. Where he came from and what I was to do with him seemed a complete mystery. I thought my life was over. And it was. At least my life as I knew it.

In all the conflicting advice I got, whether and how to touch my son seemed to be one of the biggest issues.

"Put him down and let him cry it out. That's his exercise." "Never leave a baby to cry alone. Pick him up, hold him, and comfort him." "Feed him whenever he wants." "Make him learn to wait. Don't feed him every time he cries; you'll spoil him." "Keeping him in the bed with you is very dangerous. You could roll over on him and crush him. And besides, if you let him stay in your bed now, you will never get him out." "Of course he doesn't sleep well. He's in a crib. He needs to be with you in your bed at night. No one likes to sleep alone."

This study explores such conflicting child-rearing advice and the ideologies that underlie prescriptions about when, where, and how to touch children. Using self-help books on child rearing, popular scientific thought, media representations, and political discourse, I examine the ambiguities of ideologies of adult-child touch and the ways in which these ideologies are bound up with larger cultural issues. By "ideologies of touch," I mean ways of thinking about adult-child physical contact and when this is interpreted as good or bad, helpful or harmful to children. Here, the term "ideology" refers to taken-for-granted practices and normalizing belief systems.

I shed light on why touch is sometimes understood to be fundamentally necessary to human well-being and, at other times, potentially deeply harmful. I argue that ideologies of adult-child touch are part of larger patterns of social "power" that reveal and reproduce mainstream conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. In other words, these ways of thinking are normative; they expose social power "in action." And social power happens through them.

In thinking about power this way, I clearly reveal my debt to Michel Foucault. Foucault shows us how power operates to form choice in various networks that normalize. Normalization is the process through which people come to demand of themselves, as the larger society demands of them, that they reproduce "normal" standards of action-that is, standards upheld by their larger social and historical context as normal-and shun that which is considered "abnormal." Foucault writes, "The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in a society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator judge, the 'social worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects it to his body, his gestures, his behaviour, his aptitudes, his achievements."

Foucault argues that networks of power operate to support this normalization. By networks of power, Foucault means how power flows through society, and how human beings are both acted upon by power and reproduce it. Through this normalization, we become subjects-subjects who, for example, touch or don't touch. Foucault claims, "Power must be analysed as something which circulates.... It is never localized here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power."

Foucault shows us the relationship between normalization and networks of power and knowledge. Knowledge and "truth" are not facts that we gather separate from culture. Truth is always born from a cultural context, and with that context, it changes. What we understand to be "true" about touching changes as culture changes. Ultimately, that which we know, that which we believe to be true, is the expression of social power within our own cultural situation. Indeed, our ways of thinking about the world, our ideas about truth, and our knowledge in any given historical time both articulate and are embedded in social power. As Foucault makes clear, we must "abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.... We should admit rather that power produces knowledge ... that power and knowledge directly imply one another." Knowledge, or what Foucault also calls "discourses of truth," are created through power. "In a society such as ours ... there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth." In this book, I explore how elite discourses of truth about adult-child physical contact function as such forms of power in shaping parents' attitudes about "normal" touch. Indeed, these "touching truths" shape more than attitudes. They shape us as parent-subjects and child-subjects, people who live and think in particular, culturally bound ways. More broadly, these normalizing discourses of truth about touch both spring from and help reproduce our social order.

One important way in which ideologies of touch reproduce social power is that they replicate a dualistic framework in Western thought and culture. They tend to enforce an either/or rather than a more inclusive both/and orientation. Dualisms demand that individuals conform to limited models of what it means to be human and prescriptions for living. Because of this dualistic rigidity, a binary framework makes...