OBJETIVOS DE LA MATERIA/SEMINARIO: Que el alumno

So far, this chapter has highlighted how young sexual bodies were territorialised by multiple and fluctuating affective flows which limited or opened up their capacities

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for pleasure. The patterns of affects which circulated in sexual encounters – and young people's relations with violence, and discourses of status and appearances - appeared to be gendered. However, the ways in which bodies were territorialised was also situational and often shifted. Within the narratives I discussed so far, pleasure was often embedded in other narratives, hidden, tied to specific practices, individualised, and/or separated from emotions (also see Tolman 2002). Many found it difficult to communicate pleasurable experiences which emerged within sexual encounters. In this part of the chapter, I focus on one participant, Dan, for whom a focus on affect, and an ability to communicate bodily experiences eloquently, seemed to be the norm. Unlike Rosie, for Dan, there appeared to be no separation between physical and emotional pleasure. Compared to many of the other participants, Dan seemed more able to recognise human encounters, including those normatively defined as ‘sex’, as singular events, to pay attention to the affective flows which registered in his body within them, and to make a decision as to whether he liked these sensations. In my engagement with my data, Dan’s narratives often emerged as 'affective hotspots' (MacLure 2013; see chapter 3).

Dan was a young man aged 16 who was from a working-class background. His maternal grandmother was originally from a travellers’ community and Dan stated that he grew up with some belief in the supernatural: that it was possible for things to exist which science cannot explain. Dan was very close to his mother, who emphasised her heritage as a traveller and although Dan did not grow up on a traveller’s site himself, he spoke about strongly identifying with travellers’ culture. Dan lived with his parents, his sister, and his brother. His close-knit family spent a lot of time together. While, unlike some of his peers, his body was not slim or toned, and he had previously been bullied at school, he came across as confident and had a group of friends he was close to. Throughout the research, he spoke eloquently and in depth about the affects that registered in his body, often with minimal prompting from me. In the quote below, Dan speaks about his “first time” with a young woman who he was seeing for a while and who he “liked”:

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Dan: The one thing which I'll try and remember forever, is I could feel her heartbeat, if that makes any sense. [...] That's gotta be like one of the most intense things I've felt. [...] I could feel it everywhere. [...] Boom, and then it went all the way through [...] and it's almost as if that my heartbeat matched hers. [...] This is exactly what I felt, it went boomph and then through my body as well and that's one thing I'll always remember.

JA: So did it feel like you became one or something almost?

Dan: Yeah. [...] It was really intense as it, when it got faster and faster, cos then I started beating faster and faster and faster, and I was just getting more and more into it, but that's the one thing about the whole experience [...] that blew my mind was I could feel every single heartbeat which she did. [...] I was feeling it, it was if I could hear it and [...] she could feel the same cos she felt my heartbeat. [...] She'd never had that before. [...] She said ‘I could do the same for you’; I was like ‘oh my God that's quite weird’, and she goes, she, she was more surprised than I was cos obviously it was my first time. I obviously afterwards expected it to happen every time, but it didn't, that was like the only time.

While in this quote Dan speaks about an encounter normatively defined as ‘sex’, noticeably he does not talk about the specific practices in which he and his partner are engaging. Instead, there is a focus on the affective dimension of the encounter: on what happens when these two bodies meet. Dan’s use of the sounds “boom” and “boomph” - in addition to the linguistic descriptors "intense" and "weird" – indicates that his experiences are not easily captured by language, and do not necessarily make sense within dominant discourses. Although public discourses and educational guides surrounding the sexualities of young men increasingly emphasise the emotional aspects of committed sexual relationships (Redman 2001; Allen 2002; Allen 2007; Hancock 2014), dominant discourses simultaneously continue to produce sexual pleasure for young men as primarily linked to the physical stimulation of the genitals (Allen 2002; 2007). While ‘doing romance’ is no longer constructed as inferior to ‘hard’ masculinities (Allen 2007), emotional literacy and ‘soft’ masculinity are often produced as currency for ‘sex’ (Allen 2002; 2007). As I indicated earlier in this chapter, in his work on young south Welsh masculinities, Ward (2014; 2015) reported that some young men who reject hegemonic masculinities (e.g. self-identified geeks) sometimes perform such a rejection alongside a performance of hegemonic masculinity which produces ‘sex’ as masculine status. Contrary to hegemonic

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discourses, to his own “surprise”, for Dan the thing that "sticks out" the most within the encounter is the sense of a shared heartbeat. While the heartbeat has close discursive links within Western culture to romantic ideals, love, and sexuality, Dan’s level of attention to the affective, and his ability to communicate this, was unique not only when compared to other participants in my study, but also when compared to the wider literature in the field of young sexualities. Unlike Ward (2014; 2015), at least in my specific encounters with Dan, I could not see any evidence of a concurrent performance of masculinity which produces ‘sex’ as masculine status (although it is of course worth pointing out that my engagements with Dan were relatively limited in time).

Dan’s capacity to pay close attention to and communicate singular bodily experiences, to exceed established discourses, and to connect with other human bodies, emerged within an assemblage that included a supportive family, a close circle of friends, and a “nan” with a “gypsy33_{” background. The term “gypsy” may}

refer to one of a variety of groups, including Romani and Irish travellers, and Dan did not specify the exact background of his “nan”. However, we may assume that his grandmother’s travellers’ background - where family and community are often central to people’s lives, and where practices that exceed Western science have often persisted (Okely 1983; Kiddle 1999; Griffin 2002; Levinson and Sparkes 2003; Levinson and Sparkes 2006; Cemlyn et al. 2009; Casey 2014; Tong 2015) - affected Dan’s engagement with other people and with the world more generally. While Dan did not grow up directly in a travelling community, given his identity as a “gypsy boy”, it is worth noting that Dan’s experiences are counter to some of the empirical and theoretical literature on travellers’ cultures, as well as media portrayals, which often emphasise ‘hard’ masculinities, male stoicism, and the objectifying and sexist treatment of women (Levinson and Sparkes 2003; Levinson and Sparkes 2006; Cemlyn et al. 2009; Jensen and Ringrose 2014; Casey 2014). Given this cultural

33 _{While the term “gypsy” is perceived as derogatory by many people from travellers’ communities}

(Richardson and Ryder 2012), I am using the term here, because Dan used it to refer to his background.

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portrayal, and Dan’s identification with the travelling community, Dan’s narrative is all the more rupturing.

Unlike many of the quotes I have presented in the previous sections of this chapter, especially in relation to young men, in Dan’s narrative there was a noticeable lack of reference to sexual status. While Dan did speak about the pleasure he derived from being “good at something”, the encounter he is describing here seemingly allowed for an escape for his body from molar flows which define human bodies, including their sexual bodies, in terms of success. Rather than being concerned with individual achievements, Dan describes the encounter in terms of a connectivity that has a deeply pleasurable resonance, and where a heartbeat is shared. Within this encounter, it does not make sense for either body to emerge as superior.

In my encounters with Dan there was not only a lack of narratives relating to sexual status, Dan also rarely spoke about appearances, both in relation to himself and in relation to his partners. Whereas in many of the examples I discussed in previous sections, sexual bodies appeared to be stratified according to narrow definitions of beauty, in Dan’s heartbeat-assemblage such a stratification became nonsensical, as individualised identities appeared to have given way to shared becomings and connectivity. Within these process, no longer was it possible for people to be ranked individually against culturally accepted standards of beauty. Dan stated that what he cared about in a sexual partner was that he “connect[s]” with them and that they are “compassionate”, not whether they are considered to be “pretty”.

The affects which seemingly circulated in Dan’s encounter with this young woman registered in Dan’s body as “one of the most intense things [he’s] felt”. Dan noted that he can feel it “everywhere”, not in particular parts of his body, and not even in

his body – “it went all the way through [...] and it's almost as if that [his] heartbeat

matched hers”. These expressions hint at how Dan’s experience may rupture not only molar flows within sexuality assemblages which produce sexuality as something tied to genitals, status and appearances, but also of molar flows which tie it to individualised subjectivities and pleasures. Overall then, within Dan’s narrative we

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can recognise an encounter where each body leaves its own individualised identity – its ‘territory’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983; 1987) - to produce something new. Dan and his partner’s individual lives give way to what Deleuze (2007: 390-391) calls “an impersonal and yet singular life […] that has been liberated from […] subjectivity and objectivity”. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) use the example of an encounter between an orchid and a wasp to illustrate such (queer) molecular becomings (Brown 2006; Nigianni and Storr 2005; Colebrook 2009; Renold and Ringrose 2011; McCallum and Tuhkanen 2011; Renold and Ivinson 2015). Together, they argue, the orchid and the wasp become something else: the wasp becomes part of the orchid’s reproductive system, whereas the orchid leaves its own territory by imitating the appearance of the wasp. As I argued in chapter two, for Deleuze and Guattari, sexuality - rather than being limited to a set of specific practices which are tied to sexed bodies - may be recognised as an active free-floating force which is the source for such becomings. This kind of sexuality is also recognisable in Dan’s narrative.

Dan spoke about how, although he expected his experience to “happen every time”, this was the only time that he sensed his partner’s heartbeat in an intense way during a ‘sexual’ encounter. Rather than being repeatable, it was singular and unexpected: what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘molecular’ (see chapter two). Once the preponderance of the shared heartbeat became to be expected, ‘sexual’ encounters were seemingly territorialised by these expectations. This seemed to hinder the potential for the shared heartbeat to emerge. Dan implicitly described the experience as pleasurable, and the affects which circulated in my interview with Dan were experienced as pleasurable by myself too. Dan’s narrative, in combination with the concepts I used, illustrates the potential role of pleasure in escaping individual subjectivity and signification (MacCormack 2011), in rupturing dominant notions of ‘sex’, and in offering sexual becomings which do not fetishise women.

While for Dan paying attention to the affects that registered in his body appeared to give rise to pleasure, and was seemingly part of his mode of being within social encounters, the previous sections of this chapter illustrate how for many young people the social was overwhelming, and, especially for young women, sometimes

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violent and painful. While Dan was confident, and felt safe and able to “let go” in social situations, others, especially young women such as Rhiannon, had to deal with the very real risks of sexual violence. Young (2005, p. 44; also see Renold and Ivinson 2015) has written how for young women to open their bodies is to “invite objectification”. In the sections above we saw how many young women appeared to feel this in profound ways. Dan’s white and masculine body on the other hand - as situated in our current racist and sexist contemporary Western culture - together with his supportive family and good friends, to some extent seemed to protect him from the risks of exploitation.