Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The concept of a sex panic builds on the idea of moral panic – a term first coined within British sociology and Stuart Hall's cultural studies. Sex panics are a distinct form of moral panic. The term moral panic builds on themes from American sociology of deviance, theories of collective behavior, social problems, French structuralist theory, and Frankfurt School social theory. Moral panics about youth have been assessed as studies of subcultures, while other inquiries have adopted social and psychological perspectives borrowed from disaster studies. As theorists grappled with the meanings of the AIDS epidemic and public policies aimed at alleviating social problems, conceptions of moral panics overlapped with debates about “the underclass.” A frequent theoretical approach to studying representations of moral panics about sexuality is to analyze “discourses” that regulate sexuality and demarcate hierarchies of what is and is not normal and moral, worthy and unworthy. Thus, panics have been analyzed from a range of different perspectives. In Moral Panics , a reader on moral panic as a “key idea” for sociological inquiry, Thompson (1998 : 72) counsels: “It may be a sensible tactic to adopt insights from each of these in an eclectic manner or to combine them where appropriate, depending on the particular type of moral panic being studied.” The first reference to the term moral panic ... log in or subscribe to read full text