Infant Sexuality and Techno Fetish as Expressed Via Teletubbies

In his essay, “Teletubbies: Infant Cyborg Desire and the Fear of Global Visual Culture,” Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses the implications of producing and subsequently marketing television for infants between the ages of one and three. This in turn raises questions of the very nature of childhood, as well as, the marriage of man and technology. I found the Freudian implications of Mirzoeff’s article to be particularly interesting, specifically its relevance to Freud’s notion that the child has sexual desires right from birth. The attribution of a gay teletubbie by members of both conservative religious organizations in addition to progressive gay rights activists and the ensuing commotion that developed amongst parents struck me as particularly interesting, given the fact that these same people would probably deny any notion regarding the proclivity of their children to think and fantasize in a sexual way. This in turn led me to consider Freud’s analysis of dreams and the idea that dreams are our way of subconsciously acting out our desires that would otherwise be considered inappropriate by society. I thought next of technology and the way in which technology must inherently be the manifestation of human ambition and accordingly, at some level, of human dreaming. This intrinsic relationship between technology and human fantasy is evocative of technology’s newfound purpose as an outlet for human sexuality, whether that means having sex via the computer/phone or the considerable availability of porn by means of the television and internet. Is it possible then that since the use of technology has replaced much of what once required real face-to-face contact between people that the next step is the actual physical melding of man and machine? I was reminded of David Cronenberg’s film Videodrome, wherein people actually develop slits in their stomachs, which then act as literal VCRs allowing them to be programmed through videotapes that are directly inserted into these openings. This image bears a startling resemblance to the teletubbies and their monitor stomachs on which they are able to receive broadcasts of “’real’ television pictures, showing children at play” (Mirzoeff 441). Thus, I am again led to wonder about the original concept of infant sexuality and to what extent our perceptions of childhood innocence actually exist.