Sexualities

Latino male bisexual experience has remained under-studied and under-theorized in much of the recent sexuality research. Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in Rio de Janeiro and New York City, this article seeks to examine the cultural patterns and social contexts in which male bisexual experiences took shape in these urban centers, and to explore and refine a number of key theoretical formulations that have been developed in recent sexuality research. It examines the ways in which bisexual desires take shape, the choreography of sexual interactions with both male and female partners, and the continuities and changes that seem to be taking place in these settings.

This article details the preliminary findings from Porn Laid Bare, a collaborative research project between the University of Sussex and the Terrence Higgins Trust, Brighton. We explore the multidimensional relationship that respondents identified as having formed with pornographic material, together with its role within gay male subculture. We then consider how interview respondents understood and conceptualised bareback pornography. Our findings reveal consistent contradictions between general discussions of gay pornography and specific discussions of bareback representations. Utilising Dean’s (2009) work on bareback subculture and the ‘ambivalent gift’, we develop a critical reading of these contradictions in order to identify the methods by which the anxieties and pleasures of bareback pornography were handled by respondents.

Understanding the ways in which South African teenage women give meaning to sexuality is important particularly in the context of increased risk to HIV and violence. Drawing from a focus-group interview with teenage women, this article challenges representations of African female sexuality as docile, in suffering and pain. Instead the article argues that teenage women’s construction of sexuality reveals both agency and complicity with male power. Agency was evident in the expression of sexual desire and pleasure and the ability to act on same-sex relations. Agency was ambiguous however and constrained by the need to protect sexual reputations, complicity in violent gender relations and the use of alcohol and drugs which serves to advance male sexual opportunities and power. The article demonstrates the need to work with young women as sexual agents, constrained by unequal relations of power, understanding and reflecting on their complicity in the reproduction of inequalities as well as taking heed of the diverse contexts within which gender relations are produced in South Africa.

This inquiry shows how youths negotiate sexualities and gender when commenting on profile pictures on a social networking site. Attention is given to (1) how discourses are constituted within heteronormativity, and (2) how the mediated nature of the SNS contributes to resistance. Using insights from cultural media studies, social theory and queer criticism, self-representations in SNSs are viewed as sites of struggle. A textual analysis is used to show how commenting on a picture is a gendered practice, continuously cohering between the biological sex, performative gender and demanded desire. Although significant resignifications are found, they are often accompanied by a recuperation of heteronormativity. Therefore, this inquiry argues for continued attention to current contradictions in self-representations.

Scholarship in cyberculture studies often frames the “real” world as the epistemic point of reference in thinking about identities in the virtual world. This article, however, considers cyberspace as its own epistemic point of reference and proposes “wikisexuality,” a new category of sexuality in cyberspace that takes into account the fluidity of sexuality, highlights the constant formation of sexual identities, and reflects the non-linear, postmodern, and chaotic formation of sexuality that moves us beyond the mono versus multiple categories of sexuality and beyond the nature versus nurture debate by evoking the notion of sexuality as constantly shifting with every encounter.

In 2004, Ashbourne High School¹ staged the first school-sponsored student performance of The Vagina Monologues, sparking a community controversy covered in the local and national media about the sexuality of minors. Through a content analysis of archival documents and media coverage, this study examines the discursive politics of this community debate over sex, youth, and schools. The author finds that underlying this community’s abundant and atypical support for sexual speech in school was a pervasive gendered discourse of sexual risk, one that transposed teen talk about sex into culturally defensible, protective social action.

Archival data offers rich source material for examining the complicated, and often paradoxical, deployment of the sexual child within protection literature crafted in the Anglophone West during the early 19th century. Drawing on a psychosocial framework, I analyze the affective and ideological subtext of social purity narratives in order to understand how and why it came to feel so natural for reformers and their primary audience – middle-class parents. I argue that the social construction of the sexual child within this discourse rests upon longstanding ideological preoccupations and middle class anxieties regarding class and race distinction. Attempts to secure the myth of middle-class purity through the disavowal of the middle-class child’s autoeroticism functioned as a foundational fantasy in calls for protection. In the end, the construction of the sexual child within this protection movement was largely a figment of middle-class anxiety and defense, but one which nevertheless had and continues to have powerful cultural resonance.

Most studies of the media sexualisation of children debate focus on its significance in terms of discourses of sexuality and gender. This article makes observations about public meetings called to express concern about media sexualisation held in several Australian capital cities 2009–2010 to argue that media sexualisation is also meaningful in relation to discourses of nation. Drawing on the claim made by Valerie Walkerdine that concern with the eroticisation of girls is a defence against acknowledgement of difficult sexual desires and Gayle Rubin’s observation that concerns with children’s sexuality often carry other political agendas, this article argues that the concern with media sexualisation of children in the Australian context carries meaning about national identity and national virtue. It places the emergence of the discourse in the recent history of revelations about the systemic abuse of children by the state and the Christian churches throughout the 20th century and into this century, and argues that the media sexualisation discourse constitutes subjects who, via their investment in innocence, are exonerated from any culpability in this compromising national history.

The last several years in Anglophone societies have seen an explosion of anxiety about teenage ‘sexting’. Legislators are racing to have laws designed that can keep pace with new technologies and the exchange of sexually explicit material. However, in the absence of laws crafted with sexting in mind, police, parents, and prosecutors in many jurisdictions are sometimes responding by charging some teenagers with child pornography, sexual harassment, and indecency offences. Some of these felonies, even when involving the consensual exchange of self-images to a sexual partner, have resulted in adolescents being mandated to register as sex offenders. This article considers the stakes of current socio-legal and pedagogical responses to the practice of consensual teenage sexting. It argues that, beyond an expression of concern with child protection from harm, a ‘sexting panic’ is being generated in part as a way of displacing the question of teenage sexual agency.

Concern with children’s online safety dominated the early days of the internet, fuelled by a fear of online predators able to utilise online technologies to manipulate their identities and groom children. Such adults strike at long held notions of childhood innocence and often commit serious offences as a result. However, a possibly unforeseen consequence of new online technologies has been the apparent capacity they afford to children themselves to reconstruct the meaning of childhood and family relationships, especially in the age of mobile (and hence less capable of parental supervision) technology. A recent example of this is the phenomenon of ‘sexting’, which appears to be caught between debates on the sexual rights of children and the role of the state in protecting children from themselves. What I wish to explore, however, is whether such constructions of the debate are themselves static and belong to an older age. Instead, is it possible that online technologies are altering the dynamics of relationships which created romantic notions of childhood innocence in the past, and which now enable children to actively participate in the formation of their own identity? In other words, have new online technologies enabled the creation of new identities of childhood which challenge the order of childhood? If so, does this mean that regulations based on older notions of childhood are doomed to fail, or alternatively lead to such injustices in the eyes of young people that the law’s legitimacy will be open to question?

This article draws on school-based ethnographic research in two elementary schools (in South Wales, UK and north Finland) to explore the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart, 2007) of gendered/sexual power in young children's (aged 5–6) negotiation of their own and others’ bodies in playground and classroom spaces. We apply queer and feminist appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘becomings’ and ‘territorialisations’, not to pin down what a kiss is, but to explore the kiss as always more than itself, and thus what (else) a kiss can do. To explore the affective journey of the kiss as an always-relational social-material event, we sketch a range of kissing assemblages across four vignettes – ‘the kissing hut’, ‘the classroom kiss’, ‘the kissing line’ and ‘the dinosaur kiss’ – mapping the enabling or restriction of a range of gendered and sexual becomings. Each vignette foregrounds the complex, contradictory nature of children’s gendered and sexual cultures which we argue are vital to map in a socio-political terrain where discourses of denial, silence and (over)protection dominate accounts of how young children are doing, being and becoming ‘sexual’.

In media and policy discourses on sexualisation, there has been an apparent split. Some have constructed young women as innocent children, incapable of meaningful sexual and commercial choices; others have treated young women as neo-liberal adults, agentic and savvy choice-makers. We analyse how the Bailey Review on the Sexualisation and Commercialisation of Childhood (published by the UK Department of Education) attempts to manage the tensions associated with making both arguments at once. We theorise the split as ‘doing the möbius strip’, as both sides agree on the assumption that commercial and sexual choice is either present or absent for young women. In this way, they reframe the contradictions and inequalities that shape young women’s behaviours as a problem of propriety and decency.