This study focuses on how space acts in shaping non-normative pre-teen gendered and sexual cultures. It was conducted in Northern Finland and consists of an arts-based case study of a group of 12- to ...13-year-old students, who during our creative workshops on gender, sexuality and power reflected on the possibilities of gender and sexual diversity in their everyday lives. Inspired by feminist new materialist scholarship, which focuses on spatiality and materiality in co-constituting gendered and sexual meanings, in the analysis, we explore how school and social media—two central life spheres of today’s youth—act in affording distinct possibilities for transgressive gender and sexuality as well as attachments to LGBTIQ+ communities. Furthermore, the analysis indicates how non-normative relationalities can be supported in school-based creative workshops. By mapping how spaces co-constitute non-normative gender and sexuality, we can develop them to promote the sexual rights and welfare of young people.
This paper examines how young people's friendships influence safer sexual practices. Through a thematic discourse analysis, interviews with Sydney-based young people (aged 18-25 years) and ...Australian-based sexual health websites for young people are considered. Interview data illustrate how friendships can support young people's sexual experiences, concerns and safeties beyond the practice of 'safe sex' (condom use). This is evident in friends' practices of sex and relationship advice, open dialogue, trust and sharing experiential knowledge, as well as friend-based sex. Meanwhile, friendship discourse from selected Australian sexual health websites fails to engage with the support offered by friendship, or its value to a sexual health agenda. Foucault's account of friendship as a space of self-invention is considered in light of these data, along with his argument that friendship poses a threat to formal systems of knowing and regulating sex. Whether sexual or not, many close friendships are sexually intimate given the knowledge, support and influence these offer to one's sexual practices and relations. This paper argues that greater attention to friendship among sexual health promoters and researchers would improve professional engagements with young people's contemporary sexual cultures, and better inform their attempts to engage young people through social media.
This paper considers the discourse of intimacy in young people's accounts of sexual health. In interviews with people from Sydney aged 18-25 years, diverse understandings of sexual safeties are ...offered, reflecting a range of sex partner intimacies. This is seen in participants' accounts of having a range of different partners, having different experiences with a particular partner, and having sex with friends. This discourse is considered against Australian sexual health websites for young people. In the websites, connections between safeties and intimacies are not explored, and discussion of safety is limited to condom use, as per the concept of 'safe sex'. How condom use is supported and/or challenged by sexual and friendship intimacies is overlooked. In considering research claims about the missing discourse of pleasure in formal approaches to young people's sexual health, I extend this to a missing discourse of intimacy. Connections between pleasure, intimacy, safety, and friendship are explored throughout this paper, and theorisations of intimacy as cultural, public, and intersubjective are considered, drawing upon the works of Lauren Berlant and Eva Illouz. It is argued that sexual health research and promotion that engages with young people's conceptualisations of intimacy will better engage with young people's sexual cultures, and hence be more relevant and useful to this population.
Sexualities and schooling is often constituted as a ‘controversial’ topic. Similarly, photo-methods are an unconventional data collection method in educational research associated with ‘risk’ in ...school settings. Given this context, why use photo-methods in research on sexualities and schooling? While acknowledging the challenges of using photo-methods in school-based research I suggest their capacity to disclose qualitatively different insights about this field. These findings are drawn from the use of photo-diaries and photo-elicitation in a project examining the sexual cultures of two New Zealand secondary schools. The value of these methods lies in their ability to explore broader features of sexualities and schooling than the official curriculum, policy and classroom practices. These methods can reveal embodied and spatial dimensions of sexuality which inhere in the unofficial minutiae of everyday schooling experiences. The participant driven process of taking photos can facilitate access to what some researchers conceptualize as the ‘unknown, unknowns’. For those concerned with the educative potential of research, photo-diaries might also be helpful in generating participants’ critical reflection of an otherwise taken-for-granted lived reality.
While the Nordic countries are listed at the top in most international rankings of gender equality and citizens’ feelings of security, studies on the prevalence of sexual victimisation present a ...different picture, suggesting that the very countries that have invested much in establishing gender equality actually see a high prevalence of sexual violence. This book sheds light on the phenomenon and construction of rape and other forms of sexual violence within the Nordic region, exploring the ways in which rape and sexual violence are dealt with through criminal law and considering governmental policies aimed at combatting it, with a special focus on legal regulations and developments. Thematically organised, it offers new research on perpetrators, victimhood, criminal justice and prevention. Multi-disciplinary in approach, it brings together the latest work from a range of scholars to offer insights into the situation in the five Nordic countries, asking how and why rape and other forms of sexual violence occur, whilst also addressing the timely issues of online sexual cultures, BDSM and the grey areas of sexual offences. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, criminology and law with interests in gender and sexual violence.
This article considers how socio-cultural ideologies and practices can act as social technologies that help produce specific sexual practices and identities in young women. It identifies young ...women's libidinal economics as one contributing factor responsible for prescriptive gender roles in Southern Africa, and in this context, Zimbabwe. Understanding the contexts and structures of socio-sexual ideologies circulating among young women as part of their formal and informal sexual education might help address the root cause and understand the core conditions that exacerbate young women's sexual vulnerability Therefore youth-related programming may need to develop ways of assisting young people to develop intellectual, social and psychological skills in order for them to take full advantage of their youth. In revising prerequisites of womanhood and adulthood, there is need for a critical pedagogy which incorporates "deviance" as a concept which empowers young women to question and challenge rather than reinstate and reinforce normative pressures and essentialist perspectives of entering adulthood and "doing gender".
Resurgent HIV and sexually transmitted infection incidence among men who have sex with men (MSM) requires an urgent re-examination of sexual transmission sites. To these ends, we systematically ...review qualitative literature concerning men's sexual behaviors within public sex environments (PSEs). Sex, therein, is negotiated by the highly codified, largely nonverbal practice of "cruising." A generic, shared PSE sexual culture emerges from the literature-across locations, countries, and decades-because of the importance of concealment and common structural constraints on sexual encounters in PSEs. However, differences in local geography and facilities may transform key features of this, resulting in specific, local sexual cultures emerging for each locale. We argue that, although sexual cultures developed to minimize nonsexual cruising risks, they may be exploited to improve contemporary in situ outreach work.
This chapter argues that funk produces mythologies about the body, labor, leisure, and pleasure, and that these occur in music as well as in black fiction, art, and performance centered on the ...potential force or energy that excites or that neutral sexual pleasures might yield. Adding to Tony Bolden's “Groove Theory: A Vamp on the Epistemology of Funk,” where he argues that the sensing techniques that black dancers employ have been central to innovations in black musicianship generally, the chapter discusses how funk's sensing techniques innovate sexual cultures as sites of memory. It brings three disciplines together—literature, performance, and dance—to theorize nonhuman agency in the street party Freaknik, as well as black strip clubs.
This chapter reviews the importance of sacred subjectivity to various black sexual cultures. In its proposal of nonmonogamy as an alternative practice for funk's genealogy of affection, ...relationality, and sexuality between human and nonhuman beings, the chapter addresses M. Jacqui Alexander's question about sacred subjectivity. Using queer legal theory, debates about the marriage crisis in black communities, and cultural depictions of nonmonogamy in the science fiction of Octavia Butler and the erotica of Fiona Zedde, the chapter reveals how funk attends to alternative models of family and community to challenge the heteropatriarchal recolonization that happens with capitalism and the Western model of family.
El presente trabajo aborda, desde una perspectiva metodológica triangular, la incidencia de los medios masivos de comunicación (MMC) sobre los patrones de sexualidad de adolescentes escolarizados. Se ...evaluaron 300 adolescentes y telenovelas juveniles mediante cuestionarios, entrevistas a grupos focales y la observación sistemática del discurso audiovisual. Se analizaron seis dimensiones de la sexualidad: relaciones sexuales, el compromiso, erotismo, género, relación con la familia y la TV como MMC de pautas de comportamiento. El análisis cualitativo se realizó bajo el marco teórico del estructuralismo, con abordaje psicoanalítico. Para el análisis del discurso audiovisual se adoptó la teoría de los discursos sociales de Eliseo Verón
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