Chapter 3 - NAMBLA - Summary

.

.

... unpacks NAMBLA’s mission and actions to demonstrate the ways that the group’s definition of liberation challenged the politics of the left and the boundaries of dissent.

.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the nascent North AmericanMan-Boy Love Association argued that the modern child should share fully in the rights, privileges, and liberties of democratic citizenship. Presenting the child as an autonomous agent, NAMBLA challenged family and state ownership models that focused on safeguarding children rather than ensuring their freedom.

.

In addition to fighting to liberate children from state endorsed sexual repression, NAMBLA members also fought a battle to be recognized by other groups on the left as participants in a shared radical struggle. Rejected by other homosexual groups as pathological and by feminist groups as exploitative, NAMBLA members nevertheless framed their political mission as the hallmark of radical leftist activism.

.

In as much as NAMBLA members imagined themselves as the proper saviors of boys, they challenged the province of reformers, legislators, doctors, politicians and even parents to provide for the social and sexual needs of children.

.

I argue that NAMBLA capitalized on cultural ambivalence about the proper treatment of children to introduce frameworks that disrupted the foundations of American social and political life. The group highlighted the inadequacies and hypocrisies of a system of laws that rested on erroneous assumptions about gender and the universality of heterosexuality. NAMBLA also challenged the role of the family as a political and economic unit and sought to undermine the authority of parents therein. In so doing, NAMBLA represented an articulation of liberation that called for an extreme transformation of American culture and politics.