Performativity and eroticization of childhood in the media

Abstract

In the era of hyper-connectivity, personal lives have taken on a global dimension of “accelerated existence” in a space-time characterized by the intensity of communication flows. Today, “to be” does not matter as much as “to be present”: making one’s private public. An artificial and artifact need, which concerns the symbolic and cultural meaning of the performance, through the staging “of one’s body, one’s feelings, one’s desires”. The concept of media performance allows us to understand the symbolic contents of the current forms of interaction, communication and production of meaning.

Narcissism, spectacularization and performativity have even “diverted” childhood, often defrauded of its physiological and healthy innocence, and, paradoxically, adultized by a society of eternal teenagers. Girls pay the highest price, penalized, increasingly, by being females: subject to a process of eroticization of the image and identity; protagonists of a phenomenology based on gender stereotypes; target of a sexist and sexualized advertising marketing.