In this introductory chapter I have outlined the cultural context in which my project emerged. I illustrated how within contemporary culture in the Anglophone West, sexuality is produced as risky and dangerous for young people, especially for young women. I also illustrated how such negative discourses co-exist with discourses which produce specific pleasures and practices as ‘normal’. In chapter two I outline my theoretical approach in more detail and discuss previous research in the field of youth sexualities. Chapter three develops my methodological approach. Chapters four to six are empirical chapters, and chapter seven comprises my discussion and conclusions. I introduce these chapters in the sections below.
Chapter Two
In chapter two I discuss research that has explored young people’s experiences of sexuality and sexual pleasure, as well as a range of theoretical approaches to youth sexualities. I begin by outlining early social constructionist and discursive approaches. These approaches tend to imply that sexual discourses act to produce and reproduce
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gendered inequalities. I argue that by using discursive, as well as psychological, approaches, and by drawing on normative definitions of ‘sex’, previous research may have unintentionally reproduced dominant understandings of what counts as sexuality. I also suggest that in order for sexuality to become disentangled from (hetero)gendered power, we need to allow ourselves and our research participants to re-imagine, to queer, the very core of what sex is. In the second part of the chapter I explore how feminist appropriations of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, and their theory of sexuality, may help us to do just that. I outline Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological approach and introduce the reader in more detail to feminist appropriations of the concepts of ‘becoming’, ‘assemblage’, territorialisation’, ‘deterritorialisation’, and ‘affect’. I also discuss sexuality research which has used these concepts.
Chapter Three
In chapter three the reader is introduced to the ‘research-assemblage’ (Fox and Alldred 2014; 2015): the different elements which assembled to produce my methodology. This includes the participants (N=36; 19 young women, 17 young men, aged 16 to 18), the three schools where my research was based, and the three phases of my data production. The latter included the following methods: in stage one, 36 participants took part in group discussions which included an object sorting task. This incorporated both objects related to normative understandings of ‘sex’ and objects relating to practices associated with bodily pleasure more broadly. In stage two, 24 out of the initial 36 participants took part in interviews which incorporated ‘pleasure objects’ that participants had brought in themselves. In stage three, ten out of those 24 participants took part in creative methods such as the production of collages, video clips, drawings and creative writing.
Chapter Four
Chapter four is the first of three empirical chapters. This chapter explores young people’s experiences of their encounters with other human bodies, especially those encounters normatively defined as ‘sex’. The chapter highlights how within encounters with other people - especially those normatively defined as ‘sex’ - young
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people often appeared to be striated and limited by violence, achievement discourses, and the objectification of bodies. Young women’s bodies, especially, often appeared limited in their possibilities for pleasure. The chapter illustrates how youth sexual subjectivities are shaped by the discourses I discussed in this chapter. However, the chapter also highlights moments of rupture and ‘alternative figurations’ of youth sexuality (Braidotti 1994), which Braidotti (1994, p.113) describes as “modes of expressing affirmative ideas, thus displacing the vision of consciousness away from the phallogocentric mode”.
Chapter Five
In chapter five I extend my exploration of young people’s experiences of sexuality to their relations with objects and other non-human elements such as discourses and technology. The chapter illustrates how affective capacities and sexual experiences are in no way limited to human relations. Specifically, the chapter illustrates how young people’s sexual subjectivities and experiences are shaped by both human and non-human (or ‘more-than-human’; Lorimer 2013; see chapter two) elements, and how participants’ relations with objects, media, and technology can be associated with immense pleasures. At times, more so than the human encounters discussed in chapter four, such relations seemed to have the capacity to temporarily free young people’s sexual bodies from the pressures linked to dominant notions of gender and sexuality.
Chapter Six
The final empirical chapter is themed around movement. I explore young people’s pleasures as they emerge through bodily movement, and how such movement opened up possibilities for deterritorialisation from dominant notions of gender and sexuality. The chapter shows how when bodies moved through/within space, they were often shaped and affected by gendered achievement discourses. However, bodily movements could also offer possibilities for the deterritorialisation of young people’s bodies from (hetero)sexist discourses. This possibility appeared to be particularly significant for young women. Indeed, often movement allowed young women to experience, and to pay attention to, an array of bodily sensations.
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Movement opened up possibilities for some young women to feel sexy, powerful, connected and/or free. The chapter concludes that, using Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, we can begin to recognise sexuality not as tied to specific practices or tied to genitals, but as associated with affect and connectivity, and as latent within the movement of relations within assemblages.
Chapter Seven
In the final chapter I summarise my conclusions and discuss how the data that emerged through the young people’s engagement with the research addresses my research questions. I argue that the data that I presented throughout the empirical chapters not only point to the substantive contribution of my project to the field of youth sexualities, but also illustrates how my methodological approach advances the field of critical sexuality studies, as well as assemblage research. Indeed, this may be viewed as the most substantial contribution of my work. In the final parts of the chapter, I explore how my project might impact on educational policy and practices, and make some suggestions for future research.
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Chapter Two
Mapping the academic field of youth sexualities: A journey through
ideas and practices
2.1 Introduction
In this chapter I discuss the research literature in the field of youth sexualities, and offer an introduction to the theoretical underpinnings that frame my project. Given the broad focus of my research, and the complexities of the theories that I worked with, my overview is inevitably non-exhaustive. My theoretical overview, in particular, is limited to the concepts and ideas that were useful for the purposes of my study. Nonetheless, it is a long chapter, and I have therefore divided it into two parts. While I considered presenting the theoretical and empirical literature separately, I chose to combine it here, mainly because my research questions are weaved through, and emerge within, both parts. Moreover, I chose to interweave the theoretical and the empirical literature here, in order to illustrate the ways in which theory informs the capacities and limitations of research.
In the first part of the chapter, I provide an overview of the (feminist) empirical literature on young people’s experiences of sexuality and sexual pleasure, and the theoretical approaches that underpin much of this work. The majority of this work has been situated within the fields of critical psychology and sociology, and has drawn on social constructionist and/or discursive theories. It is this work which I focus on here. In order to introduce the reader to the theoretical underpinnings of much of the feminist work in the field, and after a brief introduction to the wider body of research in the field of youth sexualities, I begin the chapter by providing a brief summary to social constructionist and discursive theories. I then explore what the feminist literature conveys about youth sexualities. In particular, I highlight how this research has reported gendered inequalities in the ways in which young people experience sexuality and sexual pleasure. However, feminist researchers (e.g. McClelland and Fine 2008; Renold and Ringrose 2008) have increasingly pointed to the shortcomings of the existing literature in accounting for complexity and
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‘alternative figurations’7 (Braidotti 1994) of youth sexualities. I will argue that in part
this may be due to the psychological and discursive theories that underpin much of this work. While these studies do commonly explore counter-hegemonic discourses, many risk falling into a trap of either biological or discursive determinism. I argue that by using and reproducing normative definitions of sexuality and sexual pleasure, this body of work has been limited in its capacity to allow it to become something else; something less tied to (hetero)sexist definitions.
In the second part of the chapter, I explore conceptual tools which were useful in my endeavour to research sexuality with young people in such a way that allows experiences to emerge that exceed narrow and normative discourses of youth sexualities. I will argue that feminist appropriations of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of ‘affect’, ‘becoming’, ‘assemblage’, 'territorialisation', and ‘deterritorialisation’ are useful in understanding the complexities of young people's experiences of sexuality and pleasure. I argue that these concepts may enable research that contributes to social change, because they offer a framework for experiences which are captured by dominant discourse, as well as those which exceed such discourses. Through highlighting both gendered patterns and ‘alternative figurations’ (Braidotti 1994), a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach allows us as researchers, as well as our young research participants, to enable youth sexuality and the (hetero)sexism it is attached to, to become-other, without denying its current problems.
The second part of the chapter begins by introducing the reader to Deleuze an Guattari’s alternative theory of sexuality, where sexuality is viewed as a free-floating and productive energy that is everywhere, but that has been limited to mean only certain things. I then discuss the capacities of feminist appropriations of Deleuzo- Guattarian concepts to open up how we may think about youth sexualities. In the final part of the chapter, I introduce the reader to the small but growing body of
7 As I noted in chapter one, Braidotti (1994, p.113) describes ‘alternative figurations’ as “modes of
expressing affirmative ideas, thus displacing the vision of consciousness away from the phallogocentric mode”.
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research in the field of youth sexualities that has used feminist appropriations of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts. While none of this research has specifically focused on pleasure, it provides some initial insight into the capacities of these concepts to explore both gendered inequalities and ‘alternative figurations’ (Braidotti 1994) of youth sexualities.