Young people's social knowledges about their potential and actual partners shaped the ways they approached them, and within school they were trapped in the nets of knowing and having been known since they were 11.
Zelda:11 that's why you don't wanna go out with anyone at school, they're just not mysterious enough
Link: Also you've known them since they were like 12, and you've known them since they were really short [...]
Link: Yeah, you don't know if they were really fat when they were – Zelda: I was really fat when I was young
This exchange between Zelda and Link (after which they continued to discuss Zelda's 'fat' past with humour ) speaks to the bodily anxieties and appraisals that form such a central part of doing sexuality in the public eye. This intersects with the heightened embodied awareness of physiological change and difference that comes with adolescence – during which time, as Catherine Driscoll says, sexual difference “makes vividly visible something apparently prior to culture but also instantiates the self's place in culture” (2002, p. 87). It also highlights the limits of performance, as discussed in chapter two : while a young person might try to perform gender
differently (by working on their bodily presentation through clothing, adopting a different style or spending time with different groups of friends), the power of that performance lies in how it is read/interpreted by others. Crucially, that reading is filtered not only through the actors' social contexts at the time of interaction, but also through the reader's prior perceptions and mutual historical awareness.
This consciousness of being known, and the awareness that performing sexuality in certain ways would make one known differently, was, as we will see, ever-present. Gossip about other people and their (rumoured) sexual encounters and practices was a key part of life. Such talk and gossip served in many ways as a form of
entertainment and diversion, in a similar way to talk and gossip about alcohol
11
As throughout, these pseudonyms are of participants’ own choosing. “Zelda” suggested hers first (as something of a joke), and “Link” was then named after the main character in the Legend of Zelda computer game series. Link in the games is a man, but the girls did not specifically co mment on this (although the discussion was not very serious).
104 consumption (and experiences while under the influence) has been discussed in other research – as a “social currency, which stretched far beyond the initial consumption activities” (Johnson 2011, p. 398). Indeed, when discussing the importance of relationships in their lives (a question which I asked most participants at the beginning of the first interview), several participants gave a variation on Lucy's comment:
Lucy: it’s just a bit of gossip, to create conversations with.
Lucy's use of the modifier “just” serves discursively to minimise the importance of relationships, as well as “gossip”. In chapter seven, I discuss further the nuances of young people's downplaying of sexuality and relationships. Here, though, I point out Lucy's self- aware positioning in relation to talk about sex; she is not relaying gossip, but talking about gossip, and her choice of the term “gossip” – with its connotations of insignificance, pettiness, and its related association with femininity (Rysman 1977; Collins 1994) – carries an implication that she understands this talk to be unimportant. In addition, I would suggest that the dismissal inherent in the word “just” does not reflect the vital importance of talk and narration of sexual stories as a part of young people's social cultures. Among my participants, parties, in particular, became a talking point and focus of spectacle. Stories circulated widely and swiftly about things that had happened at parties, often fixing people’s (especially girls’) perceived sexualities and identities in the light of particular acts.
Through telling such stories – both among their friends, and to me in their interviews – young people negotiated their own sexual identities in their identifications and disidentifications with others. Certain friendship groups, in particular, provoked particular fascination both from those who were part of the group and those who weren't. The “popular group ” – their parties, friendships, rivalries and sexual encounters – were in the spotlight, and their position as “popular” and talked-about was very much connected to their reputation as more sexually active, more sexually visible and more heterosexually desirable than other groups. Participants' fascination surrounding these young people was absorbed and is reinforced by both my
105 to tell me second-hand stories; my interest was piqued by the visibility and publicity of their performances of sexuality, but also, I think, by the distance between these young people's experience of life and my own teenage (in)experiences. As I retell the stories, I refocus the perpetual gaze on the sexualities of the popular girls. I
commented in my fieldwork diary after one interview:
“this is better for gossip than data” (5 July 2010).
This chapter, then, is in one sense another round of Chinese whispers, of gossip. But, as Ken Plummer tells us, sexual stories are a central resource for telling the self at the start of the 21st century (1995) – although the repertoire of sexual stories available for teenagers to tell is a very particular and constrained one. And these narratives formed an essential part of how young people navigated and constructed their own sexual selves.