Absences that Matter: Constructions of Sexuality in Studies of Young Women’s Friendships

This article reviews recent research on young women’s friendship groups in western societies, arguing that much of this work has relatively little to say about the sexual and erotic dimension of such relationships and the construction of young women’s sexualities. Research on young women’s lives often overlooks the possibility of same-sex female desire, and also lesbian (or bisexual) existence, thereby assuming that young women are always already heterosexual by default. The article ends by arguing that feminist youth research could engage more fully with debates on the social, psychological and cultural processes involved in the construction of female sexualities, whether lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual or queer. ‘Adolescence’ is a crucial moment in which young women (and men) must be ‘won’ for the (heterosexual) patriarchal system, so these debates have important political implications for feminism.