Children's right to their bodies is something that is constantly relevant in society and this essay is based on preschool teachers' ideas about children's bodies. The purpose of this study is to investigate which discourses govern preschool teachers' perceptions of children's bodies in their practice. The purpose is also to examine power structures based on preschool teachers' ideas about children's bodies from an intersectional perspective. The essay uses theories such as subject positions, discourses and power order. In the essay, there are 15 participants who have worked in the preschool between 1 year and 20 years. The method is questionnaire questions and it´s a qualitative study in that the essay has a scientific approach from a Poststructuralist direction. The thesis theoretical approach is based on Ernesto Laclau &amp; Chantal Mouffe discourse analysis. In results and analysis, it becomes clear that children'sbodies construct by a child having, receiving and being given different subject positions in different discourses. The pre-school teachers' performances revealed six basic discourses with four sub-discourses. These discourses and subject positions are made visible, fighting with and against each other. The first discourse is a person with rights. which includes a subject position such as that children are considered a human being with rights and the right to be different. The second discourse is a gender binary discourse that is influenced by discourse based on appearance. Subject positions are girl and boy. The third discourse is a discourse on gender identity that is also affected by a future discourse. Subject positions are gender identities that are made visible, invisible and created while waiting for the gender identity to be found and to find oneself in the future. The fourth discourse is discourses about Swedishness and which are also influenced by a family discourse. Subject positions are children with a foreign background and culture as well as children born in Sweden who are“expected” to have a Swedish culture. The family background also becomes something that affects children's subject position. The fifth discourse is a discourse on integrity and sexuality that is influenced by a discourse on protecting and teaching the child. Subject positions are that the child is both strong, protective, vulnerable and independent. Something that is also asub-discourse is health discourse. Subject positions that the child receives are healthy, unhealthy and active. The sixth discourse is the discourse of the body as a function. Subject position is that children's body is considered unusual and invisible. The discussion is raised on the basis of a societal level around Christianity, Swedishness and racism, heteronormativity and children's rights. / <p>2022-06-02</p>

Scholarship on the cultural status of the child in America has taken diverse and fruitful forms, yet there exists a significant ellipsis within theories of filmic spectatorship regarding cinematic children. This study engages the child figure's relation to the cinematic apparatus and analyzes spectator responses to the child's presentation as a desiring subject and desired object. Within contemporary American culture, the child figure generates at once a mise-en-scène of desire and a mise-en-abime of potential stigmatization, self-abjection and shame. The vexed relation to the image of the child that characterizes the contemporary adult citizen and, more pointedly, the adult spectator, is a symptom of the contradictory discourses of childhood at play in contemporary American media and within its political bodies. The Columbine shootings, the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, the Catholic Church scandals, many well-publicized child abductions, and countless occurrences over the past decade have produced a climate of moral panic over children's endangerment. Yet, more than ever, the eroticization of children's bodies has inundated cinematic and other media productions, generating anxieties within the adult spectator concerning the propriety of gazing at children. Juvenile desires suggests that the dissonances produced by the contradictory signposts of moral panic and sexual objectification have too often given rise to a homophobically polarizing model of the adult spectator: one the one hand, the ostensibly heterosexual spectator whose relation to the child image is aesthetically distanced, moral, and nostalgic; and on the other, a perverse, likely homosexual spectator whose relation is libidinal, regressive, and genitally oriented. As a theoretical intervention and a reception study, this dissertation examines the term pedophilia as one both culturally over-determined and critically under-investigated. The deployment of the term pedophilia has the rhetorical effect of reducing the complex relations sustained among adult spectators and children to a space of inarticulate abjection or criminality. The dissertation proposes that a deconstructive queer theory can unsettle the recalcitrant association of pedophilia with homosexual pathology, and thereby afford a complex and nuanced account of the roles cinematic children play in generating visual and narrative pleasure across gendered and sexually oriented subject positions. / text