Sexuality in transit – gender gaming and spaces of sexuality in late modernity

Abstract

Through an investigation of a reported rape, this article suggests that we conceive sexuality as a transitional object that changes and transforms depending on space and temporality. This makes sexuality difficult to grasp within specific and stable frames of gender and power analysis. Applying such an approach, the complexities of sexual assault, changing power relations and unstable narratives of gender and sexuality are illuminated. The analysis shows that the traditional divide between public and private has dissolved and that public spaces of pop culture are drawn into spaces of intimacy and thereby renegotiated and domesticated.

Keywords

Gender late modernity place rape sexuality space

Sexuality in transit – spaces of sexuality in late modernity

The divide between public and private space has played a dominant role in conceptualizing different rules for sexual behaviour, but this divide now seems outdated. Spaces of sexuality are not bound to either private or public space. City life and media intersect between private and public space and play an important role in sexualities today. In Liquid Modernity (2000), Zygmunt Bauman refers to the concept of ‘non-place’ to describe locations where one may feel at home, but not act as if one were at home. These places – airports, highways, public transport and anonymous hotel rooms – have the characteristics of passages in which people remain strangers toward each other. While I find Bauman’s conceptualization of non-places useful, my point in this article is to highlight the importance of thinking about space without a specific geographic locality and I turn to the concept of ‘transit’ to grasp important issues of sexuality in late modernity. This concept is also useful when it comes to sexual conflicts and sexual violation.

In this article I show that space is what is happening; it is action, materialities, possibilities and unexpected limitations. Sexuality in transit, therefore, is not a noun but a verb, it’s not a category but a space of being – a sheltering but vulnerable space (Thrift, 2006; Wentzel-Winther, 2004: 118). This space needs constant bodily, material and discursive negotiations.

Police reported rape and approach

The material analysed in this article is drawn from one case out of 95 rapes reported to the police in Copenhagen in 2003. The case is chosen for detailed analysis and represents an ideal combination of matters associated with being in the city, balancing between public and private space, gender games and power relations between young adults. Although no single case can be representative of all the cases of reported rapes, the case chosen has a number of central aspects that are relevant to almost any case of reported rape. The analysis takes as its point of departure anonymized interviews with two girls and three boys aged between 13 and 17 years who meet each other in a cinema in the centre of Copenhagen and are at the crime scene that night. The interviews are conducted by the police after the incident. In my analysis I attempt to challenge common interpretations of sexuality and power relations between men and women in late modernity (Heinskou, 2010, 2013; Husserl, 1977; Moustakas, 1994; Schutz, 1967). The direct physical violence is bracketed within the analysis, which some might find provocative; however, this is intended to highlight the complexities of the situation.

There are limitations to the narratives presented in these interviews as they are conducted by the police and under specific institutional conditions and expectations. What actually happened will remain unknown, since different voices and versions of the same incident are presented. There are ideological perspectives that dominate or structure the proceedings, and because of the interactional inequalities that structure this institutional setting, alternative ways of understanding the events are submerged. It is these submerged alternative ways I want to uncover by focusing on spaces of sexuality. Instead of a simple dichotomizing of the ‘discursive’ and the ‘material’, I want to investigate how discursive practices can have material effects and the other way around (Ehrlich, 2001, 2002: 5; Heinskou 2014). My article should be read as an experiment: rather than making manifest claims about the social realm, it is a tentative attempt at inquiring into the sexualities of spaces, places, discourse, subjectivities and materiality in late modernity.

Youth and sexualities

Gender has been discussed in relation to a number of aspects of the leisure lives of the young (Nayak and Kehily (2008) outline this discussion). A general finding is that feminine and masculine gender positions are structured during youth (Thorne, 1993: 75–76). Traditional gender positions are, to a certain degree, prevalent among young people in Danish society (Staunæs, 2005) even though the structuring of masculinity and femininity is slowly being rearranged (Illeris et al., 2009). However, it should be noted that structured self-presentations as masculine or feminine are made within gender games to actively play with sexuality and gender (Demant and Heinskou, 2011: 400).

Here gender and gender roles are used to present the self with a certain set of chosen – or accepted – characteristics (Bech, 2004) and in late modernity they are used in a more aesthetic (e.g. Maffesoli, 1996) manner to perform within a gender game. The growing body of post-subcultural youth research argues that this play with forms, interactions and identities is evident among most young people (Hollway and Jefferson, 1998). Young women and men are practising ‘playful’ sexualities with the intention of inhabiting changing roles in gender games during a night out (Demant and Heinskou, 2011; Demant and Törrönen, 2011). It is a central point in this analysis to explore this empirically.

Palace/transit/mobility

Palace is a cinema located in central Copenhagen and has a striking appearance. It is painted pink, purple, turquoise and yellow – a provocative, kitschy monument to the industrial revolution. Originally, Palace was the central train station of Copenhagen, but in 1912 it was converted into a cinema. Because of its central location, it is an obvious place for young people to meet. It is a highway of social transit.

Inside, Palace offers a variety of popular films, popcorn is sold in every corner and the noise level within the lobby is high. There are small dark rooms that provide the illusion of being alone in a private space, with access to viewing the world of others – a collective but voyeuristic space (Gordon, 1984: 177). It is possible to sit in the dark and at the same time touch the person sitting next to you. It is a social space that works as an allegory of sexuality in late modernity; it is open to large crowds of people; it is possible to cruise; it is possible to get carried away by the atmosphere of transit. It provides unique moments of social relations and social experiences. Some of these experiences are created within Palace while others are based within a larger spaciousness that connects the locality to other social spaces (Simonsen, 2002: 42; Thrift, 2006).

It is here that the young people involved in the case met each other one evening in May. Louise is 14 years old, and she is the one who goes to the police the next day to report that she has been raped.

Fadi: I knew the person who was selling popcorn inside Palace, and I gave them two big boxes of popcorn. Standing outside Palace, they all started to ‘fight’, throwing popcorn at each other.

Louise: They started a popcorn fight, which resulted in grease and crumbs in my hair. It was quite disgusting and I wanted to get home and wash the dirt out of my hair. The boys, who happened to overhear the conversation between Annika and me, knew that my mother was not at home. The boys said that they wanted to go with us back home, and I did not feel that I could say no, so I said that the boys could stay for half an hour. We took a train back home [to a suburb of Copenhagen].

The promiscuity of the city

In the city, everybody is subject to the glances of the Other, and as Walther Benjamin has suggested, the city is a reified space (Benjamin, 2008; Buck-Morss 1991; Wilson, 1992: 3). The Other turns into fragments and entities dissolve; what matters is expression and staging, the gaze, ways of moving the body. The city can be seen as a promiscuous environment, where classical virtues concerning restriction and suppression are impossible to practise – at least in terms of the gaze (Wilson, 1992: 1). Everybody, in principle, is available to everybody else: ‘… there is an accentuation of the visible and the visual quality of surface, of the distance and the alien, of the potential tactility of materials and shapes’ (Bech, 1998: 227).

Urban sexuality, as such, represents the appealing tension between intimacy and distance, showing and hiding, and the reckless consumption of the Other and being consumed by the Other (Bech, 1998: 9). This means that the urban individual is reserved towards other individuals, but a longing for surrender to the masses and to the stranger also seems to characterize life and sexuality in the city. This has consequences for the way we approach others. Every identity in the city is an identity in transit – it is something that can move, something that is not static over time; what the individual is (or seems to be) in the city space does not necessarily express identity over time. The city is a city of strangers with strangers (Lofland, 1973). Or as Bauman writes, ‘The meeting of strangers [is] an event without a past. More often than not, it is also an event without a future’ (Bauman, 2000: 95).

Intensity

What characterizes urban sexuality is a longing for intensity, and the potential of bodily experiences is an immanent possibility for the intensification of the ‘now’ (jetzzeit). This intensification can challenge the reification and emptiness of the social relations of urbanity. Sexuality in late modernity can be seen as an epistemological blowhole – as the lungs of the city, which can intensify the ‘now’ in a way that both reproduces and momentarily resolves the indifference and triviality of the repetition of diversity (Heinskou, 2007). Through sexuality there is the potential for authenticity and sensitivity to transcend blasé attitudes or indifference in one single ‘now’. As such, urban sexuality connects the stranger and intimate encounter as one, without abandoning the principles of being in transit. But the bodily intimacy that follows these sexual experiences is bound by repetition and reveals the human and mental distance that is a part of the living conditions that constitute the late modern individual (Bech, 1997; Benjamin, 1998 [1935]; Heinskou, 2002, 2007; Simmel, 1998 [1903]).

Palace tunes the atmosphere. It is here that the young people ‘hang out’. They don’t just look at the popcorn, but eat it and throw it at each other. They start their physical contact. It is here that the contact between the young people changes and gets a bodily dimension, only committing themselves to this temporal ‘now’. Palace is a social space that produces possibilities for transcending the borders between public and private. It is a space in the making – making the social forms of living liquid, making the space for transit.

Urban space and materiality

In the following, we see what happens and what kinds of changes unfold after these young people move from a public place to a place that is traditionally conceptualized as private – the home. They take the S-train to where Louise lives with her mother. Her mother will not be home tonight, because she is partying somewhere else. Louise has to be in church the next morning for her confirmation class, and her mother’s boyfriend will call her in the morning to ensure that she is awake and on her way to church. The young people arrive at the house in the suburbs at around 11 p.m.

The home is furnished with the materiality of social living in urban space: cocktail cabinet, computer and TV. The cocktail cabinet is like a bar in the city. It is a place where one can order something to drink; where one can hang out and keep an eye on the others and flirt. With a bar located at home – one can play the game of being a stranger to others. The TV and the computer (via the internet) are distanced ways of becoming intimate and at the same time maintaining a distance to the world and strangers that enter those spaces (Bech, 1998: 218). The important fact here is that urban materiality is central to the ‘homeliness’ of the home. It is precisely the condition that characterizes homelessness and distance in the city that is being transferred to homeliness and intimacy right here. In this respect, the borders between private and public – between place and space – are transcended. The meaning of this space is liquid.

It is in this situation that the young people unfold their social activity and that sociality, by way of experimentation, transforms their first meeting to a somehow more private and intimate space. In what follows, there are changes in temporality and intensity; the bodily intensity between the boys and girls increases, but the pace does not decrease proportionally with the frame that sets the situation: being at home. The pace is still high and the actions point in multiple directions.

Louise: I called my mother and told her that I arrived safely at home. I did not tell her that I had invited a crowd of young people to our house.

Fadi: We sat down on a couch in the corner of the living room. In the living room there was a big bar, a computer, shelves with a TV and a wireless phone. I had some vodka from the bar. Louise did not allow the boys to drink from the bar and she got upset and told me off. In the beginning, we had some popcorn and later they ate some food from the fridge. While we were sitting in the living room, Nadim and Annika started kissing. At some point Louise wrote ‘Hi sweetie’ on my arm.

Annika: We were all in the living room; we were having a good time and listening to music. At that time there were no problems at all. It was as if one of the boys was in control of the entire situation, and they were all quiet and behaving well.

Research on youth culture has highlighted the conflict between supervision and independence among youth at parties (Demant, 2009; Demant and Järvinen, 2006), where young people often seek to create an independent space of their own, on their own conditions. Janet Holland argues that friendship between young people is valuable social capital, providing entry to wider social networks (Holland, 2009: 342). But as Thulin and Vilhelmson argue, a noticeable change among youngsters in social practice has emerged, characterized as a more impulsive and hasty practice of decision-making, which is in turn characterized by continuous renegotiation, a preference for retaining freedom of action as long as possible, and for last-minute choices (Thulin and Vilhelmson, 2007: 249). Seen in this light, it is understandable that Louise does not tell her mother that she has invited guests home. In this way she retains freedom and independence, yet on the other hand, she tries to strike a balance by keeping to the rules that normally limit action in the home (e.g. by not drinking the alcohol that is available in the bar). She seeks to demonstrate that she is making the rules and as such she clearly has some expectations regarding the behaviour of the others, which are in line with the ‘private’ space.

So, on the one hand, this place – being at home – opens to a larger degree of bodily intensity and intimacy, but on the other hand Louise tries to underline that this space is limited to other kinds of actions – actions that would be acceptable in the urban space – in a bar, for example. This is a private bar, and therefore not available to others unless they have her permission. But the question is whether everybody had the same perception of private and public in this context. It seems as if the girls try to insist on privacy and intimacy, while the boys still remain in the space of transit – the space between public and private. In that respect, they have not left Palace.

The young people agree to have a good time. They play music, the girls dance and the girls and boys flirt. Around midnight one of the girls, Mette, leaves and she is followed by the boy that Annika reports is in charge of the situation. Now Louise, Annika, Fadi, Nadim, Hamza, Samir and Khalid are left.

Popcorn

In the following, I will focus on the popcorn that the girls and boys were given in Palace, the popcorn that they played with and threw at each other, that made Louise’s hair greasy and made her decide that she wanted to leave Palace in the centre of Copenhagen for the suburb where she lived, bringing with her not only the popcorn in her hair but also two girlfriends and a group of boys she just met. The popcorn forms the starting point for the event; it does not point towards the future and the past, but makes people present in the present. It can be viewed as a material creating a subjective relation between event and destiny (Badiou, 2007: 38–39). By focusing on the popcorn, it is possible to investigate gradual, rapid or slow changes, how links between places, people and objects are forged, and how materiality and sociality are connected to this particular space (Deleuze 1994; MacMahon, 2008).

Nadim and Annika disappear together into one of the rooms upstairs and have sex. When Louise sees Annika a little later, she asks her ‘if she would guard the door to the bathroom, while she is having a shower’, to wash the popcorn out of her hair as she originally had planned to do.

Nadim: I remember some time during the night when Louise wanted to take a shower. She asked Annika if she could guard the door to the bathroom to prevent the boys from disturbing her and entering the bathroom. While Louise was having a shower, we (all 5 boys) went upstairs and stood outside the bathroom. Fadi began to push the door from the outside, while Annika tried to hold the door closed from the inside. When Annika could not keep the door closed, we entered the bathroom, where Louise stood naked in the shower.

Louise: The boys tried to take my towel, while I squirted water at them.

They laugh and squeal with delight and Louise runs out of the bathroom with her towel around her body. She runs downstairs and into the living room with the boys running after her. Tension between fun and gravity is growing out of this incident.

It is important to reflect on this incident for a moment. Even though Louise said earlier that evening that the boys could stay for just half an hour, she chooses to take a shower while they are there. The situation in the bathroom is a game between pleasure and danger, opening up or closing down the space for sexuality, and the question that follows of the door as an exit is still open. Has the situation remained undefined? Or are the actions that follow from here determined? Right after her shower, Louise changes her clothes to boxer shorts and a T-Shirt. She chooses a surface that has a clear masculine connotation immediately after her femininity and nudity have been exposed.

It is important to reflect a little more on this balancing game. In his book ‘Sex and Manners’, sociologist Cas Wouters (2004) points out that attitudes towards sexual encounters today call for a particularly sensitive awareness of mood and timing (Wouters, 2004: 148). In his article ‘The drive for sexual equality’, another sociologist, Gert Hekma (2008), queries the one-sided focus on equality in analysing sexuality, outlining the importance of an analytical separation of equality and pleasure. Pleasure is not always the outcome of equality. If we interpret the current situation in terms of these considerations, the shower episode is not easy to grasp, nor is it simply one-sided. Seen from Louise’s perspective, the shower has the character of sexual self-staging (she takes the shower right after Annika and Nadim had sex) in relation to the boys, and it is obviously a part of the gender game with the boys that evening. This is a game in which the boys can be seen as sexually desirable subjects that she can turn on with her showering scene. In this scene, the boys are staged as masculine, potent and even sexually unruly – as caricatures of the dangerous man, which makes the need for a guardian friend unavoidable.

We have to remember that the condition for this game is that they all consider each other equal players and partners in the game. Louise is naked in the shower washing off the popcorn – which is reminiscent of their meeting in transit. Her action is symbolic, and could be interpreted as a way of making the boys available as sexual objects through the way she is playing with the (un)availability of her body. Playing with the possibility of being open to sex and playing unattainable as a ‘woman’ positions the boys as ‘masculine’. The door cannot remain closed – partly because the lock is missing – but also due to the game between femininity and masculinity, the game between equal and unequal positions, a game that in itself is pleasurable. However, the game is predicated on equality between the players. If it is not, it will transform into a gender fight – a point made by sociologist Henning Bech (2004).

But something happens here that does not confirm Louise’s sense of timing, or of the space that has been created and the power that has been initiated by the situation. There is something that does not correspond to the undercurrent of the situation, and which intensifies the event. Is it because the popcorn is losing its importance as it is thrown out with the bath water? The popcorn is gone now and the situation opens up again with multiple starting points. The transitional objects have disappeared, and it is at this point that Louise puts on a T-Shirt and boxer shorts. Is Louise wearing these to emphasize her own bodily femininity, or is she attempting to create a partnership with the boys as a homoerotic relation? To answer this, we can examine what happens next.

A cinematic home

When Louise is dressed again, she returns to the living room where the boys now stand with their pants down, masturbating while they watch a pornographic movie.

Khalid: Nadim and Samir drank booze from the bar. I had some milk, but no booze. Nadim changed to a porn channel on the TV. First striptease and then hard core porn.

Annika: I laughed at the boys, kissed Nadi and I tried to look the other way, but it was hard not to see, what was happening. When they masturbated, they spoke some other language and got even more excited. Louise returned to the living room and changed the channel on the TV, away from the porn channel.

Louise: I said that the boys were disgusting and that they would have to clean up themselves. After this, two of the boys took some milk from the fridge and ejaculated into the carton, and then put the carton back in the refrigerator.

Nadim: Fadi, Samir and Khalid were sitting on the couch masturbating, while they were watching a porn movie. Three of the boys had called the sex line of the porn channel and they were in direct contact with the girls stripping on TV. I began to masturbate while watching the TV. Louise came down and turned off the porn channel. She said, ‘You are so disgusting’. I did not ejaculate in the living room, but I heard Louise ordering us to clean up ‘the dirt’. We promised to do so.

Fadi: I masturbated and ejaculated, hitting a part of the couch, the table and some of the pillows. I also ejaculated into a carton of milk and dropped Annika's telephone into this. The telephone was retrieved from the milk. We cleaned up a little of the mess and put the milk carton back into the refrigerator. When Annika discovered that her telephone had been in the milk, she got angry and left the party shortly after.

Fadi: They started teasing me about the size of my penis and Samir boasted about the size of his own penis while showing it to the other guys.

Louise is obviously not the centre of focus any longer. Instead, the boys have found another medium for their lust – the TV and each other. Louise and Annika seem to be superfluous in the community of boys, and the girls are being pushed out by the women the boys are making contact with through the TV. These are women who were not invited by Louise and Annika, but who dance in the middle and between the boys. The space is being transformed from heterosexual to a space with homo- and heterosexual connotations. The boys’ embodied connection accentuates the sexual atmosphere played out here – they compare the size of their penises, they boast and speak a language the girls do not understand.

Even though Louise has been trying to transform their collective social space from an open and undefined space of transit to a private space with a new frame for behavioural expectations, the boys have remained in the transitional scope of the space. They also demonstrate the excluded position of the girls by ejaculating into the milk carton and on the furniture. They signal that it is not Louise as a person, but Louise as a female body, as an aesthetic surface, which awakens their desire. It is a surface they want to share with each other and have access to through the pornographic movie on the TV and through the women who suddenly dance in the living room. Parallel with the destruction of the space that Louise tried to create, they open up a new space where categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality are liquid (they masturbate together), where materiality and subjectivity become equal, and where the difference between fiction and reality is suspended. This is a space of transition between the boys, the TV and the dancing figures/women.

Henning Bech argues that some men with ethnic backgrounds other than Danish can have difficulties playing the gender game from an equal standpoint, since they are not used to or socialized in this culture of gender gaming (Bech, 2004).

To understand this lack of knowledge about gender gaming, it is necessary to conceptualize the space that the boys are creating. What kind of temporality is at play? What kind of limitation does this kind of space have? And if we want to speak of space in transit, we should look at the places where girls with Danish backgrounds meet boys with ethnic backgrounds other than Danish.

According to Mehmet Necef (2000), mixed ethnic encounters often arise when strangers meet in public or in situations that are impersonal. These occur in places where the individuals appear either as surfaces or with predetermined social roles. In Denmark, they mainly take place between immigrant (Muslim) men and Danish women. Necef suggests that sexuality and sexual attraction represent an equalization and a de-ethnicification, and that looks of ethnicity and their associations mobilize an erotic kick (Necef, 2000: 38). Here sexuality in itself has the potentiality of integration, since the erotic encounter has the possibility of changing negative representations of the Other (Staunæs, 2005: 38). Nevertheless, Necef observes that the rules of sexuality carry the importance of showing an ‘authentic’ belonging to an ethnic group. In the Muslim community, the virginity and decency of girls are crucial for their social legitimacy. Girls acting in opposition – no matter what their ethnicity – and exercising sexuality before marriage are considered immoral by the members of the community (Necef, 2000: 39). Girls with Danish backgrounds who socialize with boys with ethnic backgrounds other than Danish are often problematized and stigmatized as promiscuous liminal figures (Staunæs, 2005). If we reflect on these considerations in relation to the issue of space, it could be said that Louise is in deep water as a woman – both in relation to her own Danish background and in relation to the boys’ backgrounds.

The boys and the girls get an erotic kick from aesthetic and ethnic surfaces, but contrary to Necef’s argument, they do not seem to come closer to each other. The boys get closer – as men – but the girls are not included. They share openly and with solidarity their desire for the same women in their space, but they do not share this desire with the girls. The boys remain tourists in the space, looking into the world of telemedia, and Louise also exhibits this tourist gaze when after her shower she enters the living room in her boxer shorts and T-Shirt. In this situation, Louise is the stranger, while the boys are getting closer in their ‘authentic’ community.

Nevertheless, Annika’s remark regarding how hard it was not to notice what the boys were doing should be noted. The boys were showing off – in a way just as Louise did in the shower – but the question is whether the girls had the same opportunity to intervene in the space. Is it possible for them to participate in the voyeurism and exhibitionism and sexualize the boys as the boys sexualize the girls? The way the girls reacted does not signal this possibility, or the possibility for social integration. They remain in a space of transit and in essence strangers towards each other. There is a certain way of doing heterosexual subjectivities that points toward specific masculinities and femininities, a way that moves beyond ethnicity, even though it plays an important role in this case, due to the masculine aesthetics and change of language among the boys.

The situation makes Annika and Louise angry. Annika leaves the party after she finds out that her telephone has been in the carton of milk and sperm. Louise cannot cope with the situation and returns to her room to sleep. But why does Louise choose to sleep instead of ordering the boys to leave? The bottom line is that the boys are tourists in a space of transit that they try to domesticate, while the girls, especially Louise, are in a space of privacy, which Louise tries to make intimate. The girls are splitting up – placed in a non-space – as Bauman would say, and the boys are uniting in the space of transit.

‘Spin the bottle’ or rape?¹

The explanations describing what occurred after Annika left the house differ considerably from each other. The boys’ explanations are somewhat different from each other, and Louise’s explanation differs totally from the boys’. The boys reported that they were playing ‘spin the bottle’ and had a gang bang (group sex). Louise says that she woke up when Hamza, Khalid and Fadi started to rape her. As an analytical strategy, we should accept that the truth here is indefinable (Law, 2004) and therefore try to include as many angles as possible. Fundamentally, the most important issue is what we overlook, what we do not see if we only choose to see the rape. What would be revealed if the rape were excluded in this context – as an analytical reading strategy?

Rape might seem the logical end to the intensity that arises between the boys. But the question could also be whether Louise is fighting against the women who entered the living room through the TV and staging herself as sexy and independent. Is it possible to see their playing spin the bottle as a materialization and continuation of the gender game? Would it be possible for the boys to include Louise in their community – in the social space they are creating – or is it defined by being masculine or ‘authentically’ ethnic? Is it possible that Louise chose to have sex with three ‘immigrant’ strangers about her own age, and that she, like the boys, was experimenting with the possibilities and limits of her own sexuality?

By posing these questions we discover that the way we normally interpret and question our material is based on deeply founded dichotomies between men and women, which are reproduced by asking in this way again (Davies, 2007: 180). The point is that we usually make certain kinds of interpretations, excluding the chaos of situated possibilities and coincidences. Complex subjectivity is often conceptualized as irrational, confused or wrong. Women are seen as vulnerable and men as aggressive and driven by their ungovernable sexuality (Kulick, 2003). Interpretations like these reproduce a clear divide between men and women.

According to Bronwyn Davies (2007), experiences are often interpreted through well-known frames for storytelling, concepts and pictures. This point is important on two levels: (1) in relation to a scholarly need to uncover nuances that do not play only on one track of telling, and (2) in relation to a conceptualization of the stories of people involved in cases of rape, which points towards very limited positions (Davies, 2007; Plummer, 1995). By questioning the stories told by Louise, Fadi, Samir, Nadim and Hamza, I try to reveal multiplicity, complexity and incoherence in the patterns of desire and being. In essence, the caricatures of some very specific positions of gender and sexuality are ‘disturbed’.

That is why we now fast forward to the next morning. After the boys have left at 6 in the morning, Louise’s friend Camilla comes to pick her up to go to church. In church, Louise starts to feel bad and leaves. She returns to her home, which is a total mess from the night before. Her mother returns in the afternoon, and after speaking with her mother, Louise files a report to the effect that Khalid, Hamza and Fadi had raped her. When the boys hear about Louise’s police report, they talk together before they meet with the police. Hamza and Khalid are convicted, and serve two years in prison for raping Louise.

Conclusion

Sexuality and late modernity are intimately connected in a network of different and changing conditions, which makes them impossible to approach as solid categories. Sexuality represents bodily encounters in transit. It is in a late modern transition waiting for the undefined next – a space of excitement and tension. This poses a challenge to analyses and research on sexuality, as well as to reported rapes today. It is, as Bauman notes, an unattached signifier capable of being represented by any available signifiers² (Bauman, 1998: 27). By seeing ‘Palace’ as a historical space of transit (as a former railway station and contemporary popular cultural space, serving up the fictions and realities of global pop culture), I have described how this particular place creates a late modern space exceeding the distinction between place and space, history and present – creating its own temporality and intensity. This highlights materiality as a force of action that is struggling for (re)interpretation and that (en)genders multiple realities. ‘Palace’ is, as such, ‘spacing’ in the creation of unique moments of social relations and social experiences. Some of these are created within its geographical locality, while others are based within a larger spaciousness that connects the locality to other spaces.

By framing the case within this conceptualization, I have tried to outline the intensity, temporality and pace of a single case. This suggests that reported rapes today are mobilized in a grey zone in more than one way. Not only is it difficult to judge these cases legally, there is a large chain of transitive actions and substances that are continually negotiated and interpreted. These actions do not conserve traditional distinctions between public and private, materiality and humanity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, space and place, or intimacy and superficiality. Acknowledging the concept of fluidity helps us to grasp the transgressions of sexuality. This entails a wider understanding of sexual abuse and violation as well as normative restraints. By queering the spaces of sexuality, we can see that the gendered contexts in which young women and men act, have possibilities and constraints that influence their sexual expression and their ability to resist or consent. This ability is not only a matter for sexual relations and sexuality studies, but also to a certain extent part of the tensions of living in late modernity.

Footnotes

Notes

Marie Bruvik Heinskou is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen and coordinator of the departmental research group on culture. She has published theoretical as well as empirical articles on the subject of sexuality, gender, sexual assault and criminology. Her dissertation ‘A complex affair -- reported rape in Denmark (2010) is a micro-sociological study of sexuality and rape charges in late modernity. She recently engaged in the research project ‘Violence in the Street, Violence of the Street -- Street Violence in a Situational Perspective’ funded by the Velux foundation.

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Sexuality in transit – gender gaming and spaces of sexuality in late modernity

Abstract

Keywords

Sexuality in transit – spaces of sexuality in late modernity

Police reported rape and approach

Youth and sexualities

Palace/transit/mobility

The promiscuity of the city

Intensity

Urban space and materiality

Popcorn

A cinematic home

‘Spin the bottle’ or rape? 1

Conclusion

Footnotes

Notes

References

‘Spin the bottle’ or rape?¹