Abolitionist Reflections on Panic, Pedophilia, and Paranoia

ABSTRACT: This essay reads pedophilia and abolitionism together as a popular terrain of struggle in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century US. Child sexual abuse (CSA) and incest became sites of struggle, opening up popular negotiations of care work, social reproduction, and collective power before they were first policed as crisis, then dismissed as panic. The pedophile emerged as a dominant resolution to these struggles, a virtually White male figure used to counter abolitionist approaches while absorbing the affective charge associated with earlier CSA and incest mobilizations. These legacies appear in QAnon conspiracies and current abolitionist struggles.