Young people, identity, relationships and sexuality in turbulent times

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Young people, identity, relationships and sexuality in turbulent times

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Title: Young people, identity, relationships and sexuality in turbulent times


1
Young people, identity, relationships and
sexuality in turbulent times
  • Janet Holland

2
Young people, sexuality, identity and
relationships
  • rethinking through the WRAP project. What we
    thought then, what I think now.
  • impact of the WRAP on research into and
    understandings of young peoples sexuality and
    sexual practice
  • Studies of sexuality in schools reproduction,
    production and resistance
  • Two more poststructuralist studies
  • Relationships in the Inventing Adulthoods study

3
Rethinking WRAP
  • Different decade, same old shit
  • Young women may have access to more sexual
    information than any generation in the past, are
    probably more sexually experienced and are more
    likely to espouse sexually egalitarian ideas, but
    the vast majority are still trapped within the
    confines of heterosexual relations which
    privilege mens desires and pleasures at their
    expense. (Jackson, 1999 31)

4
Rethinking WRAP
  • WRAP definition of sexuality
  • sexual practices and identities, and the varied
    historical and cultural forms that these can take
  • sexual beliefs and desires and how these are
    socially negotiated, and constructed in social
    relationships
  • embodied in the sense that it entails bodily
    activity- physical, desire and reproduction.
  • But this is both material and social, since what
    is embodied and experienced is made meaningful
    through language, culture and values.

5
Rethinking WRAP
  • We have no party line on feminism, and we have
    not always agreed with each other as a research
    team, but explaining ourselves to each other and
    arguing through our differences has been
    productive. (Holland et al. 19984)
  • The newer terminologies of materiality and
    materialization do not simply signal the
    displacement of the concept of the material by
    the cultural. They can induce feminist
    constructionism to work with a sociologically
    more adequate reconceptualization of the social
    as a more fully integrated realm of symbolic and
    material practices. (Rahman and Witz 2003 253
  • What really matters is how these newer
    terminologies of materiality and
    materialization induce us to develop a fuller
    social ontology of gender and sexuality one that
    weaves together social, cultural, experiential
    and embodied practices. (Rahman and Witz 2003
    243)

6
Rethinking WRAP
  • We were concerned with the social construction of
    heterosexuality and saw heterosexual power as
    being constructed at a number of levels or
    layers
  • the discursive - language, ideas, beliefs, norms,
    values, discourses and their effects
  • embodied embodied practices, sexual experiences
    and their meanings
  • individual and relational how people negotiate
    and produce their relationships involving agency
    and action
  • institutional structured, institutionalised
    power relations between sexual partners,
    heterosexuality constructed as hierarchal -
    family, law, economy, state
  • historically specific and subject to change

7
Rethinking WRAP
  • the ever-present watcher peering through the
    keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own
    head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a
    man inside watching a woman (Attwood 1993 392)
  • We take the male-in-the-head to indicate the
    surveillance power of male-dominated and
    institutionalised heterosexuality, as distinct
    from the man-in-the-bed of everyday experience
    (p.10).

8
Rethinking WRAP
  • YW ..well I think that I dont enjoy sex for
    what it is right, when a fella is like going
    away, Im not enjoying that, the actual
    intercourse. I like enjoyment from, I know it
    sounds like a typical woman statement, but them
    actually doing it and them enjoying themselves
    and
  • Q What, you enjoy him enjoying himself, right,
    you get pleasure from his pleasure-
  • A And also, like eh, oral sex, right.
  • Q Right, so things that that usually, that are
    sort of called foreplay thats what you get
    pleasure out of?
  • A Yeah, the actual, I mean not a lot of women, I
    dont think I mean theyve got to be very lucky
    to give you an orgasm, cos theyve got to hit
    something quite a few times (Holland et al
    1998/2004 111)

9
Rethinking WRAP
  • YM I tend to ask some girlfriends what they
    prefer sort of thing, and try and do that to them
  • Q And what do you find they do prefer?
  • A A bit more caring and a bit more slowly, not
    just get undressed and do it and just sit there.
    They tend to like it a bit more caring and
    lovingly even thought I didnt love them. I did
    try to keep them happy. (Holland et al 1993 25)

10
Impact of WRAP
  • this tension between a static top-down view of
    male power, and power as something fluid,
    contestable and individually negotiated features
    throughout the book (Frith 2000 117).
  • taken up and replicated, or the ideas developed
    and expanded in e.g. UK, New Zealand, Australia,
    South Africa, Brazil, Croatia, Finland, Spain
  • an analytical approach into different areas of
    study in different countries eg violence against
    women, computing, beauty therapy, health
    promotion, contraceptive behaviour, sexual and
    other risk taking, and resistance to dominant
    discourses.

11
Impact of WRAP
  • high impact on sex education in the UK
  • important contributions to HIV/AIDS research in
  • moving away from a focus on high risk groups and
    problematizing conventional heterosexual
    relations
  • by moving away from attempts to quantify sexual
    practice to a qualitative exploration of social
    and cultural meanings
  • by revealing the power of heterosexuality as
    masculine and showing the relevance of this
    power to young peoples management of sexual
    safety (Frith 2000)

12
Impact of WRAP
  • Brazil
  • the subject positions made available to the
    girls in public discourses of risk, conflict with
    those available in gender discourses
  • sexual initiative is not a real option for
    girls. Under dominant gender regimes
    initiative and action are masculine roles. A
    girl showing sexual initiative may be seen as
    having sexual knowledge and expertise, which
    itself would be seen as a sign of previous and
    multiple sexual experiences. This does not fit
    into the prevalent conventional model of feminine
    passivity/masculine activity (de Oliveira 2002).

13
Impact of WRAP
  • Australia
  • lack of what she calls affirmative feminine
    sexuality and sexual pleasure masculine
    sexuality was constructed as a biological drive
    by both sexes, and there was a high level of
    sexual coercion and pressure on the young women.
  • But young women were keen to present themselves
    as equal to young men, having agency in their
    relationships.
  • A narrative where they are the agents of
    relationship management, knowledgeable about
    mens behaviour, active subjects in the
    relationship. But problematic when they
    experience violence
  • conceptual framework of WRAP helps to explain how
    both men and women can have little empathy with
    or sympathy for women who are victims of domestic
    violence, it enables them to minimise the
    violence and to continue to privilege the
    importance of the relationship.

14
Impact of WRAP
  • Louisa Allen (2003) in New Zealand, and Fiona
    Stewart (1999) in Australia were both interested
    in resistance to dominant discourses of
    (hetero)sexuality, possible shifts in definitions
    and practices of femininity for young womens
    experience of heterosex.
  • Louisa Allens title Girls want sex, boys want
    love, was a comment from a participant talking
    about how sexuality is gendered
  • I mean you have got your stereotypical, women
    want commitment and love, and guys just want a
    fling, but I think that girls are pretty much
    like that as well (laugh) (Rosalind, 17)
  • I was called a slut when I cheated on someone and
    I was called a slutbut a slut is supposed to be
    someone who sleeps around, I dont sleep around
    (Anna, 17)

15
Impact of WRAP
  • The young women in Fiona Stewarts study show a
    critical consciousness, and adopt alternative
    femininities that challenge the norms of
    heterosex in a number of ways.
  • they take a proactive approach and initiate
    sexual contact,
  • they own their sexual desire,
  • they seek and engage in other forms of sexual
    practice than penetration
  • there was a transition from relative
    powerlessness in relationships, to one of control
    and direction.

16
Methodological comments
  • The male model of empowerment
  • Angela I just get carried away. I believe in
    equality, like a woman has a need as much as a
    man, and I think at the time, Oh yes, sod it. A
    fellow is allowed to get a pat on the back and a
    drink bought them.
  • Her assertiveness can be conceived of as
    intellectual empowerment, but she experienced it
    in a contradictory way
  • The dynamics of her strategy of empowerment
    characterise the accounts of other young women in
    the sample, whose words and behaviour, while
    actively resisting conventional femininity,
    ultimately seem to reinscribe the conventions of
    heterosexuality.
  • This reinscription of normativity is a strand
    that runs through the findings of work on gender
    and sexuality from Angela McRobbie in 1976. to
    Sinikka Aapola and her colleagues in 2005

17
Methodological comments
  • intellectual empowerment was expressed through
    the young womens intentions and expectations
    about having their needs and desires met in a
    relationship and their assertiveness in stating
    these needs
  • experiential empowerment referred to the degree
    to which they were able to put these plans and
    desires into practice from their own report.
  • Raises the issue of interpretation. In coding and
    analysing the transcripts we drew on three levels
    of meaning
  •  
  • 1. The language and meanings used by the young
    people and explicit in the language of the
    interview transcripts
  • 2. team discussion, interpretation and coding of
    the data, in the light of feminist and
    sociological theories
  • 3. explanation of any differences between these
    first two levels.

18
Education and institutionalised heterosexuality
  • in contrast to the focus on the part played by
    schools in reproducing hierarchical relations of
    gender, class, and race, recent work on sexuality
    has turned to contemplate and investigate schools
    as productive of sexuality, and of
    gendered/sexualised identities, within a
    framework of normative heterosexuality.
  • range of theoretical resources, from postmodern,
    to queer, to psychosocial
  • includes research on gay and lesbian identities
    and an examination of masculinities, recognising
    that boys too are gendered subjects

19
Education and institutionalised heterosexuality
  • in general this work is denaturalising gender and
    heterosexuality in opposition to the impetus of
    the school which is to naturalise gendered
    hierarchy and heterosexuality.
  • it also draws on more fluid notions of relations
    of power, seeing power not only as top down, but
    created locally.
  • studies of the official school and its
    curriculum, and the informal school, can be a
    focus of empirical attention, and a favoured
    method is ethnography
  • this is a context where informal cultures of the
    school are often saturated with sex, through
    innuendo, humour, commentary and types of
    enactment or performance, but the official
    culture seeks to deny the sexual.

20
Education and institutionalised heterosexuality
  • Mary Jane Kehilys findings, like many before her
  • The pervasive presence of homophobia, the concern
    with notions of reputation and the
    naturalisation of heterosexuality within the
    school site echo many of the themes of earlier
    work (Kehily, 2002 206).
  • she is keen to identify the young people as
    active autonomous agents specifically here in
    relation to sexual issues
  • She identifies student sexual cultures,
    describing them as the meanings ascribed to
    issues of sexuality by students themselves in
    peer groups, same sex friendship groups and in
    social interaction more generally
  • From the perspective of young people themselves,
    their informal peer group cultures remain one of
    the few sites within school that is not shaped by
    the demands of teachers, parents, politicians and
    policy makers.
  • Kehily argues that a particular version of
    masculinity is being invoked in talk and action
    by young men in schools, and in this
    heterosexuality is seen as central to a masculine
    sense of self, premised on doing and display, and
    involving bodily practices and performances.

21
Two poststructural approaches Kerry Robinson
  • Sexual harassment and sexual violence become
    part of the performance of hegemonic masculinity
    that can cement gendered cultural bonds between
    those boys and men who take up this form of
    masculinity as their own, creating a sense of
    identity. (Robinson 2005 20)
  • is not a fixed character type, always and
    everywhere the same. It is, rather the
    masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position
    in a given pattern of gender relations, a
    position always contestable (Connell 1996 76).
  • Ones subjective positioning is not fixed, but
    can discursively shift as individuals read their
    locations within relations of power, claiming or
    resisting discourses according to what they want
    to achieve ( Robinson 2005 23)

22
Two poststructural approaches Kerry Robinson
  • Boys explanations for sexual harassment of girls
  • Yes, boys do that (sexual harassment). They
    often call girls names and they touch girls but
    it is only a joke!
  • Its natural Boys do things like pinch girls on
    the bottom, pull their hair and call them names,
    but no more than normal. There is always that in
    any school.
  •  
  • Some girls ask for it They get called that
    because of the way they act and what they look
    like. They have the reputations for being
    slack!
  • what will my friends say? Here they are
    referring to the pressures of the male peer
    group.

23
Two poststructural approaches Kerry Robinson
  • Connell and Kimmel on the male peer group
  • the peer group, not individuals, are the
    bearers of gender definitions (Connell 1996
    220)
  • as adolescents we learn that our peers are a
    kind of gender police, constantly threatening to
    unmask us as feminine, as sissies (Kimmel 1994
    132).
  • It is crucial that intervention strategies are
    based on deconstructing discourses of hegemonic
    masculinity that limit the options of gendered
    identities open to young men (and young women)
    and perpetuate powerful cultural binaries such as
    male/female and heterosexual/non-heterosexual
    that operate to radically and aggressively
    exclude the Other. (Robinson 200535)

24
Two poststructural approaches Deborah Youdell
  • sex, gender and sexuality are constituted in
    constellations that open up possibilities and set
    limits for who a student can be (250).
  • Like Robinson, and other researchers, Youdell
    draws attention to the intersectionality of
    masculinities, sexualities, ethnicity and class
  • Youdell proceeds from an understanding that
    school practices are permeated by enduring
    hetero-normative discourses that inscribe a
    linear relationship between sex, gender and
    (Hetero) sexuality within the heterosexual
    matrix ( Youdell 2005 253).
  • She suggests that sex-gender-sexuality are joined
    in complex constellations that join together the
    body and discourse.

25
Two poststructural approaches Deborah Youdell
  • she sees identity, categories such as gender and
    sexuality, as constituting subjects, but also as
    equivocal, and this is where her space for agency
    for the subject appears. These names of identity
    categories are open to strategic reinscription.
  • Youdell is saying that sex-gender-sexuality are
    not causally related, but exist in
    constellations, and to name one category of the
    constellation is to silently infer further
    categories in a citational chain. The example
    she gives is that the identity dyke silently
    constitutes hetero-femininity. The elements of
    the constellation sex-gender-sexuality are
    constructed together.

26
Two poststructural approaches Deborah Youdell
  • Girls sit cross-legged with upper bodies
    drooping over the legs. They hold their hands in
    their laps, those wearing skirts hold the fabric
    and/or their hands to conceal groins. Some sit
    with their knees bent close to the chest, wrap
    their arms around their bent legs and again hold
    their skirt fabric or hands to conceal the
    genital area.
  •  
  • For boys Bent knees are rarely touching,
    pulled up close to the chest, or hugged.
    Outstretched legs lie apart. Boys often lean
    backwards and prop themselves up with braced
    arms.

27
Two poststructural approaches Deborah Youdell
  • this indicates a contradiction in the discursive
    constitution of heterosexual femininity
  • the requirement for the female-feminine body to
    deny its desire and to take responsibility for
    the control and constraint of the body and of
    sex
  • but also to display sexuality and be the
    repository for the body, sex and desire. This is
    a double bind underscored by the dichotomy of the
    virgin/whore.

28
Two poststructural approaches Deborah Youdell
  • Int How do you know if people are virgins or
    not?
  • Molly I dunno, because people dont give a shit.
  • Diane Indicating Nicola She aint.
  • Nicola Shouting, high pitch I am Diane
  • Molly Laughing She aint.
  • Int How do you know?
  • Nicola More serious, agitated But Im still
    joking around, Im just having a laugh Molly!
  • Molly Yeah but people like boys name and
    boys name, theyll take it differently and
    think Ah, shes a right little slapper and
    that.

29
Two poststructural approaches Deborah Youdell
  • Youdell also shows that middle class young women
    in her group have greater freedom to enact an
    active and consenting hetero-femininity (without
    becoming a slapper or whore).
  • She gave an example of a young woman engaging in
    bodily play with a young man in which he took the
    lead but she was a consenting partner. Here the
    young womans middle-classness gave her
    institutional protection and an alternative
    liberal/feminist discourse of sexual liberation
    and gender equality. Through this she could
    constitute herself as feminine and desiring.
  • Another example was of a young woman who
    jettisoned heterosexual femininity altogether.
    She wore combat trousers and various bodily
    adornments indicating a lesbian identity
  • Youdell does see these as examples of girls
    opening discursive spaces for themselves to be
    otherwise

30
Some concluding remarks
  • Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott suggest that
    progress in sexual matters is extremely uneven,
    which leads to sexual antinomies or
    contradictions and paradoxes.
  • They see this as a result of the specialness of
    sex, that it is seen as separable from mundane
    everyday life, with the potential to deliver
    ecstasy.
  • At the same time it is also seen as uniquely
    problematic and liable to provoke anxiety,
    disgust and revulsion (Jackson and Scott 2004
    233).

31
Some concluding remarks
  • A further contradiction lies in the greater
    acceptance, even valorization of sexual
    diversity, particularly in popular culture where
    gay and queer characters abound, alongside the
    continued primacy of institutionalized
    heterosexuality as the normative mode of adult
    relationship.
  • Even gay and lesbian relationships are more
    acceptable if they buy into the dominant values
    of normative heterosexuality, are long-term,
    monogamous, stable.

32
Relationships in inventing adulthoods
  • Unlike earlier generations - who tended to follow
    normative patterns - most young people in this
    study did not appear to enter and sustain
    relationships for the sake of getting married and
    having children, although when we first met them
    aged 11-18, most of them had expected to do just
    that
  • Having a good friend, a sexual partner, a
    companion, someone to have fun with and confide
    in, were some of the qualities they sought in an
    attempt to create a special relationship that
    was adjusted to their individualised plans and
    needs.
  • Although relationships are changing, and breaking
    up more frequently, as can be seen in patterns of
    divorce and repartnering, and serial monogamy,
    what is clear is that relationships, and
    commitment within relationships, are things that
    many young people still crave

33
Relationships in inventing adulthoods
  • Fusion
  • the fact that I wouldnt want to live without
    him, I couldnt live without him, I just
    couldnt, its like I could never remember him
    not being in my life..andthe fact that hes just
    like, hes not just a husband, and lover hes the
    bestest friend Ive ever had, completely made for
    each other. And its always having someone there,
    when you need them (Hazel, aged 19)
  • I dont know why I find it while hard when Im
    really pissed off, just like you know parents
    problems or whatever I just feel stupid and
    foolish talking to a friend or something, but my
    girlfriend like I could talk to her about
    anything and shed just sit and shed be
    listening, I can talk to her about it. (Glen,
    aged 21)

34
Relationships in inventing adulthoods
  • Autonomy
  • I'm definitely, definitely going. I have offered
    him he can come with me if he wants, I've even
    offered since we've broken up he can come with me
    as a friend as I would love to have him come with
    me but he's not going to hold me back because if
    he held me back I would hate him it might take a
    while because I might be happy to stay with him
    now but come a years time or come fifteen years
    time I would hate him for taking away my chance
    like because I wouldn't see it as me giving up my
    chance for him I would see it as him taking away
    my chance, I know I would. (Karin, aged 19) )

35
Relationships in inventing adulthoods
  • Uncommitted
  • You don't have your own time any more, you can't
    do what you want to do, you always have to
    consider someone else now, just not me.
    (Malcolm, aged 18)
  • I suppose you're always together stuck to each
    other like most of my friends and their
    girlfriends are like they never do anything
    without each other they always have to ask
    permission can I go here, can I do this, whereas
    I don't need to ask I just go and do so I don't
    have to worry about any of that so I'm happy.
    (Naz, aged 21)
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