A01=Cristina L. H. Traina
abuse
affection
anxiety
appropriate
Author_Cristina L. H. Traina
breastfeeding
Category=JBFV
Category=QRAM1
childhood
children
contact
culture
desire
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
equality
ethical
ethics
exploitation
gender
inappropriate
inequality
language
love
motherhood
nurture
parenthood
parenting
perverse
physical
physicality
psychology
religion
sensual
sensuality
sexual
sexuality
taboo
theology
theoretical
theory
touching
victim
Product details
- ISBN 9780226811383
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2011
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Heightened awareness of the problem of sexual abuse has led to deep anxiety over adults touching children - in nearly any context. Though our society has moved toward increasingly strict enforcement of this taboo, studies have shown that young children need regular human contact, and the benefits of breastfeeding have been widely extolled. Exploring the complicated history of love, desire, gender, sexuality, parenthood, and inequality, "Erotic Attunement" probes the disquieting issue of how we can draw a clear line between natural affection toward children and perverse exploitation of them. Cristina L. H. Traina demonstrates that we cannot determine what is wrong about sexual abuse without first understanding what is good about appropriate sensual affection. Pondering topics such as the importance of touch in nurturing children, the psychology of abuse and victimhood, and recent ideologies of motherhood, she argues that we must expand our philosophical and theological language of physical love and make a distinction between sexual love and erotic love.
Taking on theological and ethical arguments over the question of sexuality between unequals, she arrives at the provocative conclusion that it can be destructive to completely bar eroticism from these relationships.
Cristina L. H. Traina is associate professor of religious studies at Northwestern University and the author of Feminist Ethics and Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas.
