A book cover’s image and caption quietly invoke Orientalized pedophilia

Evidence

A moment of pause over this cover begins to reveal something more pernicious. The image and the caption together—in an example of the classical instance analyzed by Roland Barthes in his magnificent essay “The Photographic Message”—suggest the tantalizing addition of an Oriental. Both as social sign and as literary signifier, the term “Lolita” invokes illicit sex with teenagers, the obsessive indulgence of an old man with a young girl. Then, the fact that these two teenage faces are framed by headscarves suggestively borrows and insidiously unleashes an Oriental fantasy and binds it to the most lurid case of pedophilia in the modern literary imagination. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 377

Categorization

• XREF: Directly applies Barthes’ ‘The Photographic Message’ concept of denoted vs connoted message — a useful methodological tool for visual analysis.