Transcript Young people, identity, relationships and sexuality in

Young people, identity, relationships and sexuality
in turbulent times
Janet Holland
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 people’s sexuality and sexual practice
• Studies of sexuality in schools: reproduction, production and
resistance
• Two more poststructuralist studies
• Relationships in the Inventing Adulthoods study
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 men’s desires and
pleasures at their expense.’ (Jackson, 1999: 31)
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.
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. 1998:4)
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)
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
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).
Rethinking WRAP
YW: ..well I think that I don’t enjoy sex for what it is right, when a fella is like going
away, I’m 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
pleasureA: And also, like eh, oral sex, right.
Q: Right, so things that that usually, that are sort of called foreplay that’s what you
get pleasure out of?
A: Yeah, the actual, I mean not a lot of women, I don’t think – I mean they’ve got to
be very lucky to give you an orgasm, ‘ cos they’ve got to hit something quite a
few times (Holland et al 1998/2004: 111)
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 didn’t love them. I did try to keep
them happy. (Holland et al 1993: 25)
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.
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 people’s management of sexual safety’
(Frith 2000)
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).
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 men’s 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.
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 women’s
experience of heterosex.
Louisa Allen’s 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 slut…but a slut
is supposed to be someone who sleeps around, I don’t sleep around (Anna,
17)
Impact of WRAP
The young women in Fiona Stewart’s 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.
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
Methodological comments
intellectual empowerment was expressed through the young women’s 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.
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
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.
Education and institutionalised heterosexuality
Mary Jane Kehily’s findings, like many before her
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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.
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).
• One’s 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)
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!’
It’s 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.
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 2005:35)
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.
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.
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.’
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.
Two poststructural approaches: Deborah Youdell
Int:
How do you know if people are virgins or not?
Molly I dunno, because people don’t give a shit.
Diane: [Indicating Nicola] She ain’t.
Nicola: [Shouting, high pitch] I am Diane
Molly: [Laughing] She ain’t.
Int:
How do you know?
Nicola: [More serious, agitated] But I’m still joking around, I’m just
having a laugh Molly!
Molly: Yeah but people like [boy’s name] and [boy’s name], they’ll
take it differently and think ‘Ah, she’s a right little slapper’ and that.
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 woman’s 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
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).
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 longterm, monogamous, stable.
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
Relationships in inventing adulthoods
Fusion
…the fact that I wouldn’t want to live without him, I couldn’t live
without him, I just couldn’t, it’s like I could never remember him
not being in my life..and…the fact that he’s just like, he’s not just
a husband, and lover he’s the bestest friend I’ve ever had,
completely made for each other. And it’s always having someone
there, when you need them (Hazel, aged 19)
I don’t know why I find it while hard when I’m 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 she’d just sit and she’d be
listening, I can talk to her about it. (Glen, aged 21)
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) )
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)