- School of Social Sciences,
Cardiff University
Glamorgan Building
King Edward VII Avenue
Cardiff
Wales, UK
CF103WT - +44 (0)2920876139
EJ Renold
Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences, Faculty Member
- Gilles Deleuze, Methodology: Ethnography, Creative Methods, Participatory Methods, Multi media/multi sensory, Critical Reflexivity, and 15 morePsycho social, Substantive 2: Marginalisation, Pathologisation and Abject Subjects (Children In/ Leaving Care, Children, Social Class and Poverty, Gendered/sexualised Bullying ...), Substantive 1: Young Masculinities, Femininities and Sexualities (Subjectivity, Relationship Cultures), Sexualisation Debates, Gender and education, Real'/virtual Socialities, Theory: New Materialist Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, and Post-Humanismedit
- EJ Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. She is the a... moreEJ Renold is Professor of Childhood Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales. She is the author of 'Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities' (2005), co-editor Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation' (with Jessica Ringrose and Danielle Egan, 2015) and the co-editor of the book series “Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education”. Inspired by feminist, queer and new materialist posthumanist theory, her research investigates how gender and sexuality come to matter in children and young people’s everyday lives across diverse sites, spaces and locales. Here, (see www.productivemargins.ac.uk) she has explored the affordances of co-productive, creative and affective methodologies to engage social and political change with young people on gendered and sexual violence, and relationships and sexuality education (see www.agendaonline.co.uk).edit
This paper theorises the speculative process of how an arts-based online youth activist resource, AGENDA (www.agendaonline.co.uk) is becoming eventful and re-mattering youth voice on gender and sexual violence. Utilising the concept of... more
This paper theorises the speculative process of how an arts-based
online youth activist resource, AGENDA (www.agendaonline.co.uk)
is becoming eventful and re-mattering youth voice on gender and
sexual violence. Utilising the concept of the ‘cwrdd’ – a Welsh
word for gatherings made, found and stumbled upon – we
explore how our AGENDA cwrdds attune to, nurture and platform
a range of micro-political moments across performances and
workshops that entangle human and non-human participants.
Inspired by Erin Manning’s concept of the ‘more-than’, we
illustrate how the cwrdds carry the past-present-future potentials
of what has mattered and is mattering to young people.
online youth activist resource, AGENDA (www.agendaonline.co.uk)
is becoming eventful and re-mattering youth voice on gender and
sexual violence. Utilising the concept of the ‘cwrdd’ – a Welsh
word for gatherings made, found and stumbled upon – we
explore how our AGENDA cwrdds attune to, nurture and platform
a range of micro-political moments across performances and
workshops that entangle human and non-human participants.
Inspired by Erin Manning’s concept of the ‘more-than’, we
illustrate how the cwrdds carry the past-present-future potentials
of what has mattered and is mattering to young people.
Research Interests:
This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. It starts with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This... more
This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. It starts with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gendered body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time become actualised in girls' habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos (room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and dance of the not-yet) are presented. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place and the virtual potential of what movement.
Research Interests:
This paper theorises the speculative process of how an arts-based online youth activist resource, AGENDA (www.agendaonline.co.uk) is becoming eventful and re-mattering youth voice on gender and sexual violence. Utilising the concept of... more
This paper theorises the speculative process of how an arts-based online youth activist resource, AGENDA (www.agendaonline.co.uk) is becoming eventful and re-mattering youth voice on gender and sexual violence. Utilising the concept of the 'cwrdd'-a Welsh word for gatherings made, found and stumbled upon-we explore how our AGENDA cwrdds attune to, nurture and platform a range of micro-political moments across performances and workshops that entangle human and non-human participants. Inspired by Erin Manning's concept of the 'more-than', we illustrate how the cwrdds carry the past-present-future potentials of what has mattered and is mattering to young people.
Research Interests:
What happens when 'the margins of manouverability' (Massumi 2016) in a specific socio-political context are buzzing with promise and possibility? What might some crafty and serious play with the feminist posthuman ethics of research/er... more
What happens when 'the margins of manouverability' (Massumi 2016) in a specific socio-political context are buzzing with promise and possibility? What might some crafty and serious play with the feminist posthuman ethics of research/er reponse-ability (Barad 2007) cook up in such a conducive soup? This paper shares the pARTicipatory praxis that informed the creation of 'AGENDA: A Young People's Guide to Making Positive Relationships Matter' (Renold 2016). AGENDA is a 75 page youth-activist bilingual (Welsh-English) interactive tool-kit co-created with and for young people in Wales to address gendered and sexual violence. Crafted with an affirmative cut and nurturing a run-away praxis that secretes its own coordinates , AGENDA invites a careful re-mattering of 'what matters' and 'how' when it comes to conventional healthy relationships education. The paper offers a careful cartography of how AGENDA unfolded as a lively resource that continues to matter as it connects to policy and practice assemblages that push-pull the agential becomings of AGENDA on its way.
Research Interests:
The chapter focuses on a gut holding mannerism, observed in an improvised movement workshop with teen girls living in an ex-industrial town in south Wales (UK), as a vantage point from which to explore what more the gesture might be... more
The chapter focuses on a gut holding mannerism, observed in an improvised movement workshop with teen girls living in an ex-industrial town in south Wales (UK), as a vantage point from which to explore what more the gesture might be telling us. Drawing on Gille Deleuze’s (1993) readings of Leibniz concept of ‘Fold’ as a differential, we speculatively explore scalar orders of time, space and matter. Using a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008) with a transdisciplinary compass we offer three speculative journeys that fold outwards from the gut-holding mannerism: folds of time and place; gender unfolds and gut reactions. By taking the gut holding mannerism as a fulcrum we imagine folds that become larger and larger expanding into space, place and the universe, or become smaller and smaller by focussing on corporeal-movement, psycho-dynamic experiences and the ‘thinking gut’ (Wilson, 2015). We question what more the gut mannerism can illuminate, what more girls can be, and what more ex-mining communities might become.
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Inspired by speculative, post-qualitative research practices, this paper is framed within new feminist materialist ontologies of immanence to explore anticipation as the potentialities of the virtual, a prehension (Manning 2013) that can... more
Inspired by speculative, post-qualitative research practices, this paper is framed within new feminist materialist ontologies of immanence to explore anticipation as the potentialities of the virtual, a prehension (Manning 2013) that can be glimpsed in bodies, movements and artful processes of creation. These ‘prehensive’ potentialities are explored with an arts-based praxis, developed over many years, with young people living in an ex-mining community experiencing post-industrial trauma to interrupt the sedimented practices that can lock some young people into feeling stuck and trapped.
The paper follows a series of carefully composed events during a residential adventure weekend with a group of young people who wanted to explore their troubles by pushing their bodies to the limit with a range of physical activities and arts-based interventions. With ‘art as the way’ (Manning 2016), four speculative sections map how our speculative praxis enabled us to attune to the embodied and embedded affects of everyday practices, fears and concerns. We describe how prehensions as feelings, movements and images emerged and were transformed into creative artefacts; how these artefacts materialised affective prehensions as new and past potentials signalling the ‘more than’ of young people’s beingness, as a kind of buried, unknown-known anticipation; and how the artefacts continue to vibrate as micro-political affective matter in the after life of the project that none of us could have anticipated.
Citation: Renold, E. and Ivinson, G. (in press) Anticipating the more-than: working with prehension in artful interventions with young people in a post-industrial community, in K. Facer and T. Fuller (ed) Special Issue ‘Questions of Anticipation’ in Futures: the journal of policy, planning and future studies,
The paper follows a series of carefully composed events during a residential adventure weekend with a group of young people who wanted to explore their troubles by pushing their bodies to the limit with a range of physical activities and arts-based interventions. With ‘art as the way’ (Manning 2016), four speculative sections map how our speculative praxis enabled us to attune to the embodied and embedded affects of everyday practices, fears and concerns. We describe how prehensions as feelings, movements and images emerged and were transformed into creative artefacts; how these artefacts materialised affective prehensions as new and past potentials signalling the ‘more than’ of young people’s beingness, as a kind of buried, unknown-known anticipation; and how the artefacts continue to vibrate as micro-political affective matter in the after life of the project that none of us could have anticipated.
Citation: Renold, E. and Ivinson, G. (in press) Anticipating the more-than: working with prehension in artful interventions with young people in a post-industrial community, in K. Facer and T. Fuller (ed) Special Issue ‘Questions of Anticipation’ in Futures: the journal of policy, planning and future studies,
Research Interests:
Enlivened by queer and feminist enactments of new materialist, posthuman and affect theory, this chapter explores what has become possible with speculative pARTicipatory activist encounters with young people, educational practitioners and... more
Enlivened by queer and feminist enactments of new materialist, posthuman and affect theory, this chapter explores what has become possible with speculative pARTicipatory activist encounters with young people, educational practitioners and politicians in the field of gender and sexuality education in Wales (UK). Sparked by a throw-away comment of how some boys use rulers to lift up girls’ skirts, the chapter maps what else a ruler can do through a series of five ‘ruler-skirt risings’. Each rising provides a glimpse into the agency of ‘d/artaphacts’ (arts-based research objects) across micro-resonating moments to macro force-fields of change. From fashion activism to curriculum and national policy, every rising takes form and shape to in-form and re-animate how sexism, sexual violence and sexuality education might be felt, noticed and engaged with differently, but never in ways known in advance and always on the move.
Research Interests: Posthumanism, Arts Education, Gender and Sexuality, Gender Equality, Posthumanist Ethics, and 15 moreFeminist activism, Young People, Arts-Based Research, Art and Activism, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, Sex Education, Healthy Relationships, Sexuality education, Brian Massumi, Sexualisation of children, Gender Based Violence and Sexual Harassment, Impact of Social Sciences and Humanities, Erin Manning, Postqualitative inquiry, and Skirt
Research Interests: Sex and Gender, Violence, Transgender Studies, Masculinity Studies, Digital Media, and 12 morePosthumanism, Sexuality, Sexualities education, Gender and Sexuality, LGBT Youth, Posthumanist Ethics, Feminist activism, Young People, Arts-Based Research, Arts-Based Educational Research, Girls' Studies, and Post-Qualitative Research
Inspired by posthuman feminist theory, this paper explores young people’s entanglement with the bio-technological landscape of image creation and exchange in young networked peer cultures. We suggest that we are seeing new formations of... more
Inspired by posthuman feminist theory, this paper explores young people’s entanglement with the bio-technological landscape of image creation and exchange in young networked peer cultures. We suggest that we are seeing new formations of sexual objecti cation when the more-than-human is foregrounded and the blurry ontological divide between human ( esh) and machine (digital) are enlivened through queer and feminist Materialist analyses. Drawing upon multimodal qualitative data generated with teen boys and girls living in urban inner London and semi-rural Wales (UK) we map how the digital a ordances of Facebook ‘tagging’ can operate as a form of coercive ‘phallic touch’ in ways that shore up and transgress normative territories of dis/embodied gender, sexuality and age. We conclude by arguing that we need creative approaches that can open up spaces for a posthuman accounting of the material intra-actions through which phallic power relations part-icipate in predictable and unpredictable ways.
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Inspired by feminist new materialist and posthuman activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what happens when data entangles with artsbased methodologies in a school-based participatory activist project with six teen girls (age 15)... more
Inspired by feminist new materialist and posthuman activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what happens when data entangles with artsbased methodologies in a school-based participatory activist project with six teen girls (age 15) on gender-based and sexual violence. Mapping the journey of how data become da(r)ta and how da(r)ta become d/artaphacts, the paper follows how the Runway of Disrespect, the Shame Chain, the RulerSkirt and the Tagged Heart ripple through peer cultures, school assemblies and national policy landscapes. Each journey provides a small glimpse into how bodies, space, objects, affects and discourse ‘intra-act’ in dynamic assemblages to produce d/artaphacts crafted from and carrying experience. The paper concludes to consider the ethical-political affordances of how participatory arts-based methodologies and the im/personal vitality of objects might support young people to safely and creatively communicate and potentially transform oppressive sexual cultures and practices.
Research Interests: Posthumanism, Sexual Violence, Gender and Sexuality, Gender, Anti Bullying, and 10 morePosthumanist Ethics, Arts-Based Research, Arts-Based Participatory Action Research, Karen Barad, Sex and Relationships Education, Sexuality education, Brian Massumi, Guatarri/Deleuze Et Al, Post-Qualitative Research, and Post Qualitative Inquiry
This paper draws on school-based ethnographic research in two elementary schools (South Wales, UK and Oulu, Finland) to explore the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart 2009) of gendered/sexual power in young children's (age 5-6) negotiation of... more
This paper draws on school-based ethnographic research in two elementary schools (South Wales, UK and Oulu, Finland) to explore the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart 2009) of gendered/sexual power in young children's (age 5-6) negotiation of their own and others’ bodies in playground and classroom spaces. We apply queer and feminist appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘becomings’ and ‘territorialisations’, not to pin down what a kiss is, but to explore the kiss as always more than itself, and thus what (else) a kiss can do. To explore the affective journey of the kiss as an always-relational social-material event, we sketch a range of kissing assemblages across four vignettes – ‘the kiss chase’, ‘the classroom kiss’, ‘the kissing line’ and ‘the dinosaur kiss’ – mapping the enabling/restriction of a range of gendered and sexual becomings. Each vignette foregrounds the complex, contradictory nature of children’s gendered and sexual cultures which we argue are vital to map in a socio-political terrain where discourses of denial, silence and (over)protection dominate accounts of how young children are doing, being and becoming ‘sexual’.
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT The paper works with queer and feminist posthuman materialist scholarship to understand the way young teen valleys’ girls experienced ubiquitous feelings of fear, risk, vulnerability and violence. Longitudinal ethnographic... more
ABSTRACT The paper works with queer and feminist posthuman materialist scholarship to understand the way young teen valleys’ girls experienced ubiquitous feelings of fear, risk, vulnerability and violence. Longitudinal ethnographic research of girls (aged 12-15) living in an ex-mining semi-rural community suggests how girls are negotiating complex gendered and sexual mores of valleys’ life. We draw on Deleuze and Guatarri’s concept of ‘becomings’ emerging in social-material-historical ‘assemblages’ to map how the gendered and queer legacies of the community’s equine past surfaces affectively in girls’ talk about horses. Our cartography traces a range of ‘transversal flashes’ in which girls’ lives and their activities with horses resonate with a local history coloured by the harsh conditions of mining as well as liberatory moments of ‘pure desire’. We creatively explore Deleuze and Guatarri’s provocation to return desire to its polymorphous revolutionary force. Instead of viewing girls as needing to be empowered, transformed or rerouted, we emphasize the potential of what girls already do and feel and the more-than-human assemblages which enable these desires.
In this chapter, we return to questions and theorizing about phallogecentricism, particularly in the educational contexts of schools where we conduct our empirical research. We explore ongoing fears over the symbolic castration of... more
In this chapter, we return to questions and theorizing about phallogecentricism, particularly in the educational contexts of schools where we conduct our empirical research. We explore ongoing fears over the symbolic castration of boys/masculinity and educational anxieties over a free floating phallus which in individualised, neo-liberal discourse can be taken-up by girls, hence the title of our chapter – ‘phallic girls’. Rather than girls being able to easily occupy a lived subject position of ‘phallic girl’, however, we will argue girls are increasingly demanded to display a whole series of contradictory characteristics – those ascribed to femininity (nice, nurturing, passive, sexually desirable via hyper-feminine embodiment and display) as well as those ascribed to masculinity (rational, competitive, sexually assertive – bearing the phallus). Our empirical data thus underscores the impossibility of the fantastical figure of the ‘phallic girl’ and illustrates the abiding regulative rhythm of phallogecentric power in schooling. We will also, however, map some of the complex ways girls are negotiating phallic-centred sexual regulation in their everyday performances of ‘girl’ at school. But rather than understand girls’ attempts to take up masculinity as mere mimicry of the phallus, as has been promoted in recent feminist theorizing, we suggest, drawing on Butler, Braidotti, and others, that many of their practices indicate radical disruptions and displacements of phallogecentric power.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Sex and Gender, Feminist Theory, Domestic Violence, Psychotherapy, and 25 moreLiterature, Popular Culture, Queer Theory, Subjectivities, Educational Inequalities (class; race; gender etc), Eating Disorders, Sexuality, Class, Gender, Feminism, Qualitative Research, Judith Butler, Body Image, Media, Girlhood Studies, Constructions of femininity, Poststructuralist Theory, Film, Counseling, Identity, Race, Dieting, Critical Social Research, Phallogocentrism, and Women and Food/eating
This chapter offers a confessional account of an inexperienced researcher embarking an ethnographic fieldwork to investigate children's constructions of their gender and sexual identities within the primary school. Using... more
This chapter offers a confessional account of an inexperienced researcher embarking an ethnographic fieldwork to investigate children's constructions of their gender and sexual identities within the primary school. Using metaphors from the world of science fiction, I explore how, during ...
We are the new editors of Gender and Education. For the past six years we have watched with awe and admiration as Becky Francis and Chris Skelton have provided editorial guidance and leadership that has ensured the success of the journal... more
We are the new editors of Gender and Education. For the past six years we have watched with awe and admiration as Becky Francis and Chris Skelton have provided editorial guidance and leadership that has ensured the success of the journal in 'new times'. Their record is an impressive one. Moving from four issues per year to six issues, building up the international readership of the journal, increasing the submission of papers and moving up the Social Science Citation Index is an unqualified success story. It goes without saying ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Focusing on the experiences of boys who choose not to cultivate their masculinities through hegemonic discourses and practices, this paper seeks to empirically explore and theorise the extent to which it is possible to live out the... more
Focusing on the experiences of boys who choose not to cultivate their masculinities through hegemonic discourses and practices, this paper seeks to empirically explore and theorise the extent to which it is possible to live out the category ‘boy' in non-hegemonic ways in the primary school setting. Drawing upon a year-long ethnography of children's constructions of their gender and sexual identities in two primary schools, it examines how a minority of 10 and 11 year old white working and middle-class boys create and seek out spaces from which they can resist, subvert and actively challenge prevailing hegemonic (heterosexual) masculinities within a peer group pupil culture which thrives on the daily policing and shaming of Other masculinities. The paper attempts to theorise more fully the inter-relationship of hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities and argues that the ways in which boys inhabit and construct non-hegemonic masculinities both subverts and reinforces hegemonic gender/sexual relations.
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The aim of this article is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex... more
The aim of this article is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the
centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective ethical and political relationalities that circulate in, through, and outside empirical research. We explore research processes
as “intra-acting” drawing upon Barad, and develop Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “assemblages,” “intensities,”
“territorialization,” and “lines of flight” to analyze research encounters. Taking inspiration from MacLure’s notions of data
“hot spots” that “glow,” we explore methodological processes of working with “affective intensities.” In particular, we
draw upon our research with teen girls, mapping out how the discursive-embodied category “slut” works as an affective
intensity that propels our feminist research assemblage––from the co-creation of “data” in the field to the “data” analysis
and beyond.
centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective ethical and political relationalities that circulate in, through, and outside empirical research. We explore research processes
as “intra-acting” drawing upon Barad, and develop Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “assemblages,” “intensities,”
“territorialization,” and “lines of flight” to analyze research encounters. Taking inspiration from MacLure’s notions of data
“hot spots” that “glow,” we explore methodological processes of working with “affective intensities.” In particular, we
draw upon our research with teen girls, mapping out how the discursive-embodied category “slut” works as an affective
intensity that propels our feminist research assemblage––from the co-creation of “data” in the field to the “data” analysis
and beyond.
Research Interests: Coding Theory, Sociology of Education, Domestic Violence, Subjectivities, Educational Inequalities (class; race; gender etc), and 38 moreRape, Gender, Resistance (Social), Gilles Deleuze, Feminism, Deleuze, Qualitative Research, Body Image, Qualitative Research (Education), Postfeminism, Girlhood Studies, Children and Youth, Feminist activism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Gender and education, Qualitative Research Methods, Assemblage Theory - Manuel De Landa, Feminist Research Methods, Affect (Cultural Theory), Critical sociology and politics of education, Rape Culture, Counseling, Identity, Affect, Girls' Studies, New Materialism, Pornification Culture, Sexualisation Culture, of Children and Young People, Porn Chic, Pornography, Material Feminisms, Dieting, Karen Barad, Critical Social Research, Race and Class, Girls Education, Misogyny, Sexualization of Young Girls and Women, Deleuze and Guattari, Femininities and Sexualities, and Contemporary and Historical Sexualisation Debates
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... JESSICA RINGROSE AND EMMA RENOLD ... on a psychological literature of gender - differentiated aggression to suggest that boys aggress in physically direct ways, while girls are aggressive in ' indirect ' , ' covert... more
... JESSICA RINGROSE AND EMMA RENOLD ... on a psychological literature of gender - differentiated aggression to suggest that boys aggress in physically direct ways, while girls are aggressive in ' indirect ' , ' covert ' and ' relational ' ways (Owens, Slee and Shute, 2000a, 2000b ...
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TABLE OF CONTENTS BACKGROUND AND SCOPE RESEARCH OVERVIEW THE RESEARCH TEAM ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2. RESEARCHING CHILDREN’S GENDER AND SEXUAL CULTURES 2.1 INTRODUCTION 2.2 THE PROBLEM OF ‘SEXUALISATION’... more
TABLE OF CONTENTS
BACKGROUND AND SCOPE
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
THE RESEARCH TEAM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
2. RESEARCHING CHILDREN’S GENDER AND SEXUAL CULTURES
2.1 INTRODUCTION
2.2 THE PROBLEM OF ‘SEXUALISATION’
2.3 RESEARCH ON CHILDREN’S OWN GENDER AND SEXUAL CULTURES
2.4 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL CULTURES: SOME WORKING DEFINITIONS
2.5 RESEARCH AIMS
2.6 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
2.7 TOWARDS A PARTICIPATORY METHODOLOGY
2.8 SAMPLE
2.9 ACCESS
2.10 ANALYSING CHILDREN’S ‘TALK’
3 CHILDREN, SEXUALITY AND BODY CULTURES
3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.2 KEY THEMES
3.3 ‘GIRLS CARE ABOUT HOW THEY LOOK, BOYS DON’T HAVE TO’: (HETERO)SEXUALISING THE GENDERED BODY
3.4 ‘BE YOURSELF’ AND ‘BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE’: MANAGING CONTRADICTORY GENDER MESSAGES
3.5 THE (HETERO)SEXUALISING OF GENDERED BODIES IN PLACE AND SPACE
3.6 WHAT DOES DOING AND BEING (HETERO)‘SEXY’ MEAN FOR PRE-TEEN GIRLS AND BOYS?
3.7 DOING AND BEING ‘SEXY’: CONTEXUALISING SEXUAL RISKS FOR GIRLS
3.8 BOYS’ PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ‘SEXY AS RISKY’
3.9 ‘I WISH I WAS FIVE’/’IT’S SCARY BEING YOUNG’: WHAT PRE-TEEN CHILDREN HAVE TO SAY ABOUT ‘LOOKING OLDER’
4 CHILDREN, SEXUALITY AND RELATIONSHIP CULTURES
4.1 INTRODUCTION
4.2 KEY THEMES
4.3 ‘MY MUM FORCED ME TO WEAR A DRESS TO THE PROM’: COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY AND HETEROSEXISM AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL
4.4 ‘WE’RE SINGLE PRINGLES, NOT TAKEN BACON’: THE SOCIAL WORLD OF BOYFRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS.
4.5 ‘BOYS ARE EXTRA TIME I DON’T WANT TO GIVE’: DARING TO SAY NO TO INCREASINGLY DOMINANT BOYFRIEND-GIRLFRIEND CULTURES?
4.6 THINKING AGAIN ABOUT WHAT BOYFRIEND-GIRLFRIEND CULTURES MEAN TO PRE-TEENS: BELONGING, FRIENDSHIP, PROTECTION
4.7 ‘I GOT CALLED STRANGE’: WHY CAN’T BOYS AND GIRLS BE FRIENDS?
4.8 PUNISHING SEXUALITIES: SEXUAL COERCION AND HARASSMENT
4.9 ‘SOME GIRLS LIKE OTHER GIRLS AND … YOU MIGHT ENJOY IT’: WHAT ABOUT NON-HETEROSEXUALITIES AND SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIP CULTURES?
5 CHILDREN, SEXUALITY AND MEDIA CULTURES
5.1 INTRODUCTION
5.2 KEY THEMES
5.3 ‘I JUST BLOCK IT IF IT GETS NASTY OR DISGUSTING’: CHILDREN AS CRITICAL AND SELECTIVE CONSUMERS OF SEXUALITY EXPLICIT MEDIA
5.4 ‘I WANT TO, BUT I DON’T WANT TO’: GENDERED PATTERNS OF REGULATION AND CONSUMPTION OF SEXUAL CONTENT
5.5 ‘WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO FACE IT’: COPING WITH UNWANTED SEXUALLY EXPLICIT IMAGES, TEXT AND TALK
5.6 ‘YOU CAN CHANGE SEX, RUN AROUND NAKED, ANYTHING’: USING POPULAR CULTURE AND ONLINE COMMUNITIES TO ESCAPE CONSTRAINING GENDER AND SEXUAL NORMS
6 IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE
BACKGROUND AND SCOPE
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
THE RESEARCH TEAM
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
2. RESEARCHING CHILDREN’S GENDER AND SEXUAL CULTURES
2.1 INTRODUCTION
2.2 THE PROBLEM OF ‘SEXUALISATION’
2.3 RESEARCH ON CHILDREN’S OWN GENDER AND SEXUAL CULTURES
2.4 SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL CULTURES: SOME WORKING DEFINITIONS
2.5 RESEARCH AIMS
2.6 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
2.7 TOWARDS A PARTICIPATORY METHODOLOGY
2.8 SAMPLE
2.9 ACCESS
2.10 ANALYSING CHILDREN’S ‘TALK’
3 CHILDREN, SEXUALITY AND BODY CULTURES
3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.2 KEY THEMES
3.3 ‘GIRLS CARE ABOUT HOW THEY LOOK, BOYS DON’T HAVE TO’: (HETERO)SEXUALISING THE GENDERED BODY
3.4 ‘BE YOURSELF’ AND ‘BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE’: MANAGING CONTRADICTORY GENDER MESSAGES
3.5 THE (HETERO)SEXUALISING OF GENDERED BODIES IN PLACE AND SPACE
3.6 WHAT DOES DOING AND BEING (HETERO)‘SEXY’ MEAN FOR PRE-TEEN GIRLS AND BOYS?
3.7 DOING AND BEING ‘SEXY’: CONTEXUALISING SEXUAL RISKS FOR GIRLS
3.8 BOYS’ PERCEPTIONS OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND ‘SEXY AS RISKY’
3.9 ‘I WISH I WAS FIVE’/’IT’S SCARY BEING YOUNG’: WHAT PRE-TEEN CHILDREN HAVE TO SAY ABOUT ‘LOOKING OLDER’
4 CHILDREN, SEXUALITY AND RELATIONSHIP CULTURES
4.1 INTRODUCTION
4.2 KEY THEMES
4.3 ‘MY MUM FORCED ME TO WEAR A DRESS TO THE PROM’: COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY AND HETEROSEXISM AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL
4.4 ‘WE’RE SINGLE PRINGLES, NOT TAKEN BACON’: THE SOCIAL WORLD OF BOYFRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS.
4.5 ‘BOYS ARE EXTRA TIME I DON’T WANT TO GIVE’: DARING TO SAY NO TO INCREASINGLY DOMINANT BOYFRIEND-GIRLFRIEND CULTURES?
4.6 THINKING AGAIN ABOUT WHAT BOYFRIEND-GIRLFRIEND CULTURES MEAN TO PRE-TEENS: BELONGING, FRIENDSHIP, PROTECTION
4.7 ‘I GOT CALLED STRANGE’: WHY CAN’T BOYS AND GIRLS BE FRIENDS?
4.8 PUNISHING SEXUALITIES: SEXUAL COERCION AND HARASSMENT
4.9 ‘SOME GIRLS LIKE OTHER GIRLS AND … YOU MIGHT ENJOY IT’: WHAT ABOUT NON-HETEROSEXUALITIES AND SAME-SEX RELATIONSHIP CULTURES?
5 CHILDREN, SEXUALITY AND MEDIA CULTURES
5.1 INTRODUCTION
5.2 KEY THEMES
5.3 ‘I JUST BLOCK IT IF IT GETS NASTY OR DISGUSTING’: CHILDREN AS CRITICAL AND SELECTIVE CONSUMERS OF SEXUALITY EXPLICIT MEDIA
5.4 ‘I WANT TO, BUT I DON’T WANT TO’: GENDERED PATTERNS OF REGULATION AND CONSUMPTION OF SEXUAL CONTENT
5.5 ‘WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO FACE IT’: COPING WITH UNWANTED SEXUALLY EXPLICIT IMAGES, TEXT AND TALK
5.6 ‘YOU CAN CHANGE SEX, RUN AROUND NAKED, ANYTHING’: USING POPULAR CULTURE AND ONLINE COMMUNITIES TO ESCAPE CONSTRAINING GENDER AND SEXUAL NORMS
6 IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH FOR POLICY AND PRACTICE
The aim of this paper is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective... more
The aim of this paper is to demystify what we think we are doing when we engage in qualitative analysis. We illustrate the centrality of affect in meaning making, showing how interpretation is always already entangled in complex affective ethical and political relationalities that circulate in, through and outside empirical research. We explore research processes as ‘intra-acting’ drawing upon Barad, and develop Deleuze and Guatarri’s concepts of ‘assemblages’, ‘intensities’, ‘territorialisation’ and ‘lines of flight’ to analyse research encounters. Taking inspiration from MacLure’s (2013) notions of data ‘hot spots’ that ‘glow’, we explore methodological processes of working with ‘affective intensities’. In particular, we draw upon our research with teen girls, mapping out how the discursive-embodied category ‘slut’ works as an affective intensity that propels our feminist research assemblage – from the co-creation of ‘data’ in the field, to the ‘data’ analysis and beyond.
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Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women... more
Recent feminist theorizing has pointed to a `resurgent patriarchy' within neo-liberal postfeminist times, which re-orders and restabilizes the heterosexual matrix through a politics of `postfeminist masquerade' demanded of girls and women (McRobbie). This paper seeks to complicate this thesis, exploring the regulation and rupture of Butler's `heterosexual matrix' as a complex performative politics through which girls' conflictual relationships with themselves, and other girls and boys are staged and through which dominant versions of tweenage and teenage femininity are reinscribed but also reworked, in race and class specific ways. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's powerful conceptual repertoire for disrupting Oedipal logics in Anti-Oedipus, we offer a `molecular mapping', illustrating cracks and ruptures in what is a porous heterosexual matrix, exploring a rhythm of `deterritorializations' and `reterritorializations' of the normative in our respective ethnographic and narrative interviews with girls. We also trace more sustained ruptures of heteronormative femininity drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari's notion of `lines of flight' and Braidotti's concept of `alternative figuration'. We argue ruptures and alternative figurations are not constitutive of total `molar' resistance to norms, but are significant spaces of doing girl differently and crucial to map if we are to perceive the malleability and multiplicity of contemporary girl subjectivities, which exceed heteronormative femininity and phallogocentric desire.
For other paper in the SI see:
http://fty.sagepub.com/content/current
http://fty.sagepub.com/content/current
This paper explores how subjectivities are affectively tied to the histories of space, place and time through ethnographic research on young people’s everyday lives in a semi-rural post industrial locale. Drawing on a longitudinal case... more
This paper explores how subjectivities are affectively tied to the histories of space, place and time through ethnographic research on young people’s everyday lives in a semi-rural post industrial locale. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of one teen girl’s inventive practices, we capture moments in time that we arrange as ‘enunciating assemblages’ (Guatarri 2006) to explore how conscious and unconscious affective relations repeat and rupture sedimented gendered histories of place. We experiment with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the full and empty Body without Organs (BwO) to trace the ‘ontological intensities’ of how, when and where newness and change become possible. We argue that making visible young people’s nascent becomings by focusing on what young people already do and imagine, we can potentially support young people pursuing new horizons without losing the very sense of place which makes them feel both safe and alive.
This paper draws on materialist feminist theories to rethink relationships between girls’ bodies and agency. New feminist onto-epistemologies redefine agency as ‘becomings’ that dynamically emerge through assemblages comprising moving... more
This paper draws on materialist feminist theories to rethink relationships between girls’ bodies and agency. New feminist onto-epistemologies redefine agency as ‘becomings’ that dynamically emerge through assemblages comprising moving bodies, material, mechanical, organic, virtual, affective and less-than-conscious elements. Vignettes from a multi-modal, ethnographic study conducted over three years are used to demonstrate how place influenced young teen girls’ body-movement repertoires. The place was a former coal-mining locale with a proud tradition of masculine, working class labour. The vignettes focus on corporeality and demonstrate wide variations and fluctuations in girls’ experiences of agency, which we theorise through the Deleuzeo-Guatarrian concept of ‘becoming’. We discuss how material feminism(s) helps us to understand girls’ becomings as emergent within assemblages that carry legacies of the past. Some girls experienced becomings that could not easily be spoken about yet which allowed them to imagine expansive futures while others felt unable to move on in life.
Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this paper explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis... more
Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this paper explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualisation’ moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualise the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of ‘becomings’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘schizoid subjectivities’. These concepts help us map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations.
This paper challenges post‐feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and... more
This paper challenges post‐feminist discourses and recuperative masculinity politics in education that have evoked mythical constructions of the successful ‘achieving’ girl in ways that flatten out social and cultural difference and render invisible ongoing gendered and sexualised inequalities and violence in the social worlds of schools and beyond. We map how girls negotiate contradictory neo‐liberal discourses of girlhood that dominate in popular culture; what McRobbie calls the new ‘post‐feminist masquerade’, which portends that girls can be/come anything they want, so long as they simultaneously perform ‘hyper‐sexy’, the new aspirational feminine ideal. Drawing on individual case studies from four qualitative research projects with teen girls in urban and rural working class communities across England and Wales, we explore how specific ‘working‐class’ girls struggle to negotiate this contradictory terrain of girlhood through imaginary ‘lines of flight’ in their narratives. Specifically, we are interested in applying Deleuze and Guatarri's writings on immanence and the productive, social status of desire and fantasy through an analysis of girls' (violent, aggressive or utopian) fantasies in ways that move beyond the binary of ‘real/not real’, and thus reject a reading of fantasy as futile, ‘escapist’ or ‘pathological solutions to working class life’. We suggest fantasy might operate as a space of survivability, political subjectivity and resistance to girls' subordination within Butler's ‘heterosexual matrix’.
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Since the 1990s the educational community has witnessed a proliferation of ‘bullying’ discourses, primarily within the field of educational developmental social psychology. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data of primary... more
Since the 1990s the educational community has witnessed a proliferation of ‘bullying’ discourses, primarily within the field of educational developmental social psychology. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative interview data of primary and secondary school girls and boys, this article argues that the discourse ‘bullying’ operates to simplify and individualise complex gendered/classed/sexualised/racialised power relations embedded in children's school-based cultures. Using a feminist post-structural approach, this article critically traces the discursive production of how the signifiers ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ are implicated in the ‘normative cruelties’ of performing and policing ‘intelligible’ heteronormative masculinities and femininities. It shows how these everyday gender performances are frequently passed over by staff and pupils as ‘natural’. The analysis also illustrates how bully discourses operate in complex racialised and classed ways that mark children out as either gender deviants, or as not adequately performing normative ideals of masculinity and femininity. In conclusion, it is argued that bully discourses offer few symbolic resources and/or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday school-based gender violence, and some new research directions are suggested.
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This article critically explores the seduction of contemporary tomboyism for young tweenage girls within neo-liberal postfeminist times and an in- creasingly commodified (hetero)sexualised girlhood culture. A central aim of the article is... more
This article critically explores the seduction of contemporary tomboyism for young tweenage girls within neo-liberal postfeminist times and an in- creasingly commodified (hetero)sexualised girlhood culture. A central aim of the article is to contextualize the persistence of the tomboy discourse and girls’ appropriation of tomboyism within competing schizoid discourses of presumed innocence and compulsory normative (hetero)sexuality. Drawing on past and current predominantly UK based ethnographic research map- ping girls’ relationship to tomboyism, the first half of the article considers how to theorise girls’ fluid appropriation of ‘being a bit tomboy’ within a discursive terrain of multiple femininities and fashion feminism. The second half of the article revisits a case study of one eleven-year-old self- identified tomboy, Eric/a, to re-think conceptualisations of girls’ sustained appropriation of ‘tomboy’ as more than some licensed mimicry of mascu- linity when it is taken-up as a performative politics of subverting empha- sized (hetero)sexualized femininities. The article concludes with a call for future theorizations of girlhood (for example, tomboyism) that foreground the intersection of gender, sex, sexuality, age and time and their socio- cultural and contextual contingency.
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This paper draws on ethnographic data of young teens (age 12-14) living in a postindustrial ex-mining community in the South Wales valleys to explore historically situated, emplaced and processual understandings of young sexual... more
This paper draws on ethnographic data of young teens (age 12-14) living in a postindustrial ex-mining community in the South Wales valleys to explore historically situated, emplaced and processual understandings of young sexual subjectivities. We draw upon recent materialist feminist and queer theorising which provides us with new epistemologies to map complex affective sexual assemblages that recognise the entanglement of bodies in space, place, materiality and time, "where individuals, and subjective micro-intensities blend with and connect to neighbourhood, local, regional, social, cultural, aesthetic and economic relations directly (Grosz 1994:180). We explore what a girl and boy body can do, become and bear in communities where sedimented dichotomous gender roles and myopic displaced social cultural representations of ‘valley girls’ and ‘valley boys’, inherited from the industrial past, endure. In this presentation, we take up Guatarri’s ethico-political aesthetic to map the ensemble of conditions or ‘existential territories’ that open and enable (e.g. through safety and belonging) and block and constrain (e.g. through fear and anxiety) deterritorialized movements or ‘lines of flight’ of a range of sexual becomings in our data.
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Few methodological papers exist which examine the use of vignettes within qualitative research and more specifically, with children and young people. The paper will briefly discuss the application of vignettes within quantitative and... more
Few methodological papers exist which examine the use of vignettes within qualitative research and more specifically, with children and young people. The paper will briefly discuss the application of vignettes within quantitative and qualitative research traditions derived from the ...
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Research Interests:
This viewpoint begins by exploring whether the global phenomenon of the 2011 ‘SlutWalks’ constitutes a feminist politics of re-signification. We then look at some qualitative, focus group data with teen girls who participated in a UK... more
This viewpoint begins by exploring whether the global phenomenon of the 2011 ‘SlutWalks’ constitutes a feminist politics of re-signification. We then look at some qualitative, focus group data with teen girls who participated in a UK SlutWalk. We suggest girls are negotiating a schizoid double pull towards performing knowing sexy ‘slut’ in postfeminist media contexts, but also managing de-sexualising protectionist discourses in school, particularly in relation to the highly regulatory moral panic over child ‘sexualisation’. We consider whether the SlutWalks are adult-centric and if teen girls’ involvement in a SlutWalk offered any critical rupturings to sexual regulation in their everyday lives.
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http://www.springerlink.com/content/u78233310786736t/ This chapter critically responds to Judith Halberstam’s concern that studies of masculinities are confined to boys and boyhood and Angela McRobbie’s despair that the “phallic girl”... more
http://www.springerlink.com/content/u78233310786736t/
This chapter critically responds to Judith Halberstam’s concern that studies of masculinities are confined to boys and boyhood and Angela McRobbie’s despair that the “phallic girl” with her licensed mimicry of masculinism disavows any resistance to regulatory gender/sexual regimes. Inspired by Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and her desire to trouble and undo gender/sex/sexuality binarisms, this chapter queers the field of masculinity/boyhood studies and addresses postfeminist concerns about the lack of a politics of resistance by foregrounding the seduction of contemporary tomboyism for young tweenage girls in their negotiation of an increasingly (hetero)sexualized girlhood (Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, Seven going on seventeen: Tween studies in the culture of girlhood. New York: Peter Lang, 2005). A central aim of the chapter is to problematize the binary logic of sexual difference that has informed past and current, even queer theorizations of tomboyism by queer(y)ing the ways in which girls’ ditching of or deviation from normative femininity is often theorized as performing masculinity. We argue, following Butler, that interpreting tomboyism as mimesis in this way misses how girls can manipulate norms, exceed them, and rework them and thus “expose the realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation” (Butler, Undoing gender. London: Routledge, 2004, p. 217). The chapter concludes by asking what would it mean (theoretically, methodologically, and empirically) to create gender taxonomies that are flexible enough to recognize a more capacious femininity that can embrace subversion and resistance without ejecting such queer performances into the realm of masculinity and thus reproducing dominant discourses of masculinity as “power” and femininity as “lack.”
This chapter critically responds to Judith Halberstam’s concern that studies of masculinities are confined to boys and boyhood and Angela McRobbie’s despair that the “phallic girl” with her licensed mimicry of masculinism disavows any resistance to regulatory gender/sexual regimes. Inspired by Judith Butler’s notion of performativity and her desire to trouble and undo gender/sex/sexuality binarisms, this chapter queers the field of masculinity/boyhood studies and addresses postfeminist concerns about the lack of a politics of resistance by foregrounding the seduction of contemporary tomboyism for young tweenage girls in their negotiation of an increasingly (hetero)sexualized girlhood (Mitchell & Reid-Walsh, Seven going on seventeen: Tween studies in the culture of girlhood. New York: Peter Lang, 2005). A central aim of the chapter is to problematize the binary logic of sexual difference that has informed past and current, even queer theorizations of tomboyism by queer(y)ing the ways in which girls’ ditching of or deviation from normative femininity is often theorized as performing masculinity. We argue, following Butler, that interpreting tomboyism as mimesis in this way misses how girls can manipulate norms, exceed them, and rework them and thus “expose the realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation” (Butler, Undoing gender. London: Routledge, 2004, p. 217). The chapter concludes by asking what would it mean (theoretically, methodologically, and empirically) to create gender taxonomies that are flexible enough to recognize a more capacious femininity that can embrace subversion and resistance without ejecting such queer performances into the realm of masculinity and thus reproducing dominant discourses of masculinity as “power” and femininity as “lack.”
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Research Interests:
"This is a comprehensive collection which takes the gap in our knowledge about the sexual cultures of children and young people as the starting point for investigation. With a clear emphasis on empirical research and on the contributions... more
"This is a comprehensive collection which takes the gap in our knowledge about the sexual cultures of children and young people as the starting point for investigation. With a clear emphasis on empirical research and on the contributions that a range of disciplines can make to the study of children’s and young people’s sexualities, the collection moves beyond the sensational, simplistic and often moralistic approaches which often characterize work in this area. A groundbreaking book which will be required reading for academics who work on gender, sexuality, children and young people".
Feona Attwood, Professor of Cultural Studies, Communication and Media, Middlesex University UK
Feona Attwood, Professor of Cultural Studies, Communication and Media, Middlesex University UK
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Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education showcases scholarly work over a wide range of educational topics, contexts and locations within gender and sexuality in education. The series welcomes theoretically informed... more
Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education showcases scholarly work over a wide range of educational topics, contexts and locations within gender and sexuality in education. The series welcomes theoretically informed scholarship including critical, feminist, queer, trans, postcolonial, and intersectional perspectives, and encourages creative and innovative methodological approaches. Proposals dealing with critical policy analysis, as it relates to gender and sexuality studies in education, are also invited. The series is committed to publishing scholarly monographs, both sole and co-authored, and edited collections.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Education, Sociology of Education, Sex and Gender, and 22 moreWomen's Studies, Feminist Theory, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Masculinity Studies, Queer Theory, Qualitative methodology, Educational Research, Sexuality, Gender and Sexuality, Gender Equality, Intersectionality Theory, Education Policy, Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Gender and education, Intersectionality and Social Inequality, Critical sociology and politics of education, Intersectionality, Women and Gender Studies, Sex Education, and Educational Policy Studies
Check out the collection of chapters:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Girls-Education-3-16-Continuing-Concerns/dp/033523562X
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Girls-Education-3-16-Continuing-Concerns/dp/033523562X
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Research Interests:
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities takes an insightful and in-depth look at the hidden worlds of young children's sexualities. Based upon extensive group interviews and observation, the author illustrates how sexuality is embedded in... more
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities takes an insightful and in-depth look at the hidden worlds of young children's sexualities. Based upon extensive group interviews and observation, the author illustrates how sexuality is embedded in children's school-based cultures and gender identities. From examining children's own views and experiences, the book explores a range of topical and sensitive issues, including how:
- the primary school is a key social arena for 'doing' sexuality
- sexuality shapes children's friendships and peer relations
- being a 'proper' girl or boy involves investing in a heterosexual identity
- children use gendered or sexual insults to maintain gender and sexual norms.
Grounded in children's real-life experiences, this book traces their struggles, anxieties, desires and pleasures as they make sense of their emerging sexualities. It also includes frank and open discussions of the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the boyfriend/girlfriend culture, misogyny and sexual harassment.
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities is a timely and powerful resource for researchers, educationalists and students in childhood studies, sociology and psychology and will be of great interest to professionals and policy makers working with young children.
- the primary school is a key social arena for 'doing' sexuality
- sexuality shapes children's friendships and peer relations
- being a 'proper' girl or boy involves investing in a heterosexual identity
- children use gendered or sexual insults to maintain gender and sexual norms.
Grounded in children's real-life experiences, this book traces their struggles, anxieties, desires and pleasures as they make sense of their emerging sexualities. It also includes frank and open discussions of the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality, the boyfriend/girlfriend culture, misogyny and sexual harassment.
Girls, Boys and Junior Sexualities is a timely and powerful resource for researchers, educationalists and students in childhood studies, sociology and psychology and will be of great interest to professionals and policy makers working with young children.
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Keynote for the Parisean Regional Observatory on Violence against women of the Hubertine Auclert Center and the Regional Council of Lle-de-France
Title of conference: sexist and sexual cyber violences: better know them, better prevent them.
Title of conference: sexist and sexual cyber violences: better know them, better prevent them.
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(Dr. Emma Renold, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University and Dr. Jessica Ringrose, Institute of Education, University of London) Abstract Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural... more
(Dr. Emma Renold, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University and Dr. Jessica Ringrose, Institute of Education, University of London)
Abstract Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this paper explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualisation’ moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualise the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of ‘becomings’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘schizoid subjectivities’. These concepts help us map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations.
Abstract Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this paper explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualisation’ moral panic by troubling developmental and classed accounts of age-appropriate (hetero)sexuality. We explore how girls are regulated by, yet rework and resist expectations to perform as agentic sexual subjects across a range of spaces (e.g. streets, schools, homes, cyberspace). To conceptualise the blurring of generational and sexual binaries present in our data, we develop Deleuzian notions of ‘becomings’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘schizoid subjectivities’. These concepts help us map the anti-linear transitions and contradictory performances of young femininity as always in-movement; where girls negotiate discourses of sexual knowingness and innocence, often simultaneously, yet always within a wider context of socio-cultural gendered/classed regulations.
This is a powerpoint pdf that accompanied our verbal performance of the PhEmaterialist keynote presented at Rosi Braidotti's summer school, University of Utrecht (August, 2019) on the theme of Posthuman Knowledge.
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This is the powerpoint of a keynote presented at the conference, "Give Girls' A Fair Chance", Holland Mercure Hotel, Oct 9th 2015, to celebrate international day of the girl.
http://www.fullcircleeducation.org/giving-girls-fairer-chance/
http://www.fullcircleeducation.org/giving-girls-fairer-chance/
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Research Interests:
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This fall, QuERI engaged with several key sociologists who research gender and sexuality in education for conversations on LGBTQ bullying. This is the third of these posts. How students navigate gender and sexual norms draws attention... more
This fall, QuERI engaged with several key sociologists who research gender and sexuality in education for conversations on LGBTQ bullying. This is the third of these posts.
How students navigate gender and sexual norms draws attention to an often-neglected issue in bullying conversations: heterosexist social expectations are everywhere and at all grade levels. Addressing sexual violence is not simply an issue of correcting violent behaviors of a few kids; it is an issue of completely rethinking what children learn about gender and sexuality and how schools can engage in a different kind of gender education -- one where gender norms are recognized and interrogated rather than normalized.
How students navigate gender and sexual norms draws attention to an often-neglected issue in bullying conversations: heterosexist social expectations are everywhere and at all grade levels. Addressing sexual violence is not simply an issue of correcting violent behaviors of a few kids; it is an issue of completely rethinking what children learn about gender and sexuality and how schools can engage in a different kind of gender education -- one where gender norms are recognized and interrogated rather than normalized.
Research Interests:
This paper draws on methodologically funded research which allowed us to map the affective ‘ontological intensities’ (Deleuze and Guatarri 1987) of those often imperceptible micro-moments of teen girls’ body-becomings. Building on a... more
This paper draws on methodologically funded research which allowed us to map the affective ‘ontological intensities’ (Deleuze and Guatarri 1987) of those often imperceptible micro-moments of teen girls’ body-becomings. Building on a series of artful interventions in a larger ethnographic study of young people and place we explore an experimental body-movement 4 day workshop with 18 girls (age 11-15), led by local choreographer, Jên Angharad. Inspired by the inherently social project of guattari’s schizoanalysis as the basis for radical pedagogies (Evans, Cook & Griffiths, 2007), and Erin Manning’s notion of physical transcendentalism to get at the rhythmic becoming of matter in movement, we present a micro analysis of Jên Angharad’s pedagogic approach to demonstrate its emancipatory potential. A micro mapping of video footage allows us to glimpse at girls’ bodies in movement at the cusp of their becomings, “when what appears is not the body as such but its biogram, the becoming-body at the threshold of appearance/disappearance” (Manning 128). We map bodily dis/orientation and affective force-fields when movement exceeds experience. We try to locate moments when girls’ more expansive body-becomings come into view – movements that may offer transformative potential for living through the harsh territorialisations of the girl-body in time, history and place.
This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in two elementary schools (South Wales, UK and Oulu, Finland) to explore and problematize the neglected area of gendered and sexual physical 'violence' between boys and girls (aged 5-6)... more
This paper draws on ethnographic research conducted in two elementary schools (South Wales, UK and Oulu, Finland) to explore and problematize the neglected area of gendered and sexual physical 'violence' between boys and girls (aged 5-6) in their friendship and play cultures. Through a series of case studies, including best-friend dyads and wider mixed gender peer group dynamics in the classroom and playground, we explore how shifting, tense and ambivalent alliances and relations between boys and girls mediate their experiences of gendered and sexual violence in discourse (e.g. story telling), through objects (e.g. toy play) and between bodies (e.g. physical touch).
In dialogue with scholars researching the complexities of gendered and sexual power plays operating inside young school-based peer cultures we draw on post-constructionist (Lykke 2011) and new materialist feminist and queer theories of how boy-bodies and girl-bodies intra-act in dynamic socio-material ‘assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guatarri, Barad, Braidotti). In particular we explore the methodological and theoretical challenge of how to map and make sense of the ways in which physical violence can be both consensual and non-consensual, simultaneously creating affects of pleasure and pain, depending upon particular configurations of the assemblage.
Our findings highlight the multiple ways in which physical violence flows across bodies and things, in expected and unexpected ways. These findings have implications for gender equity policy and pedagogy which demand unambiguity in what counts as ‘bullying’ or ‘violence’ – often conceptualized in opposition to, rather than entangled with, 'play'. They also have implications for when the hidden or subtle pleasures and pains of ‘doing gender’ and ‘doing sexuality’ (e.g. games of kiss chase) are acknowledged yet normalised through enduring gendered developmental discourses of, for example, ‘boys will be boys’. We introduce and critically explore the gendered and aged implications of Braidotti’s (2004) concept of ‘ethical relationality’ as a way of navigating this impasse and consider further the ways in which children themselves use physical violence to create, consolidate and resist highly classed, racialised and aged gender and sexual norms.
Dr. Naomi Holford (Open University, England)
Professor Emma Renold (Cardiff University, Wales)
Dr. Tuija Huuki (University of Oulu, Finland)
In dialogue with scholars researching the complexities of gendered and sexual power plays operating inside young school-based peer cultures we draw on post-constructionist (Lykke 2011) and new materialist feminist and queer theories of how boy-bodies and girl-bodies intra-act in dynamic socio-material ‘assemblages’ (Deleuze and Guatarri, Barad, Braidotti). In particular we explore the methodological and theoretical challenge of how to map and make sense of the ways in which physical violence can be both consensual and non-consensual, simultaneously creating affects of pleasure and pain, depending upon particular configurations of the assemblage.
Our findings highlight the multiple ways in which physical violence flows across bodies and things, in expected and unexpected ways. These findings have implications for gender equity policy and pedagogy which demand unambiguity in what counts as ‘bullying’ or ‘violence’ – often conceptualized in opposition to, rather than entangled with, 'play'. They also have implications for when the hidden or subtle pleasures and pains of ‘doing gender’ and ‘doing sexuality’ (e.g. games of kiss chase) are acknowledged yet normalised through enduring gendered developmental discourses of, for example, ‘boys will be boys’. We introduce and critically explore the gendered and aged implications of Braidotti’s (2004) concept of ‘ethical relationality’ as a way of navigating this impasse and consider further the ways in which children themselves use physical violence to create, consolidate and resist highly classed, racialised and aged gender and sexual norms.
Dr. Naomi Holford (Open University, England)
Professor Emma Renold (Cardiff University, Wales)
Dr. Tuija Huuki (University of Oulu, Finland)
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Inspired by posthuman feminist theory (Braidotti, 2006; 2013) this paper explores young people’s entanglement with the scopic bio-technological landscape of phallic image creation and exchange in young networked peer cultures. We suggest... more
Inspired by posthuman feminist theory (Braidotti, 2006; 2013) this paper explores young people’s entanglement with the scopic bio-technological landscape of phallic image creation and exchange in young networked peer cultures. We suggest that we are seeing new formations of sexual objectification when the more-than-human is foregrounded and the blurry ontological divide between human (flesh) and machine (digital) are enlivened through a queer and feminist materialist analysis. Drawing upon multi-modal qualitative data genereated with teen boys and girls living in urban inner London and semi-rural Wales we map how the digital affordances of Facebook ‘tagging’ operate as a form of coercive phallic touch in ways that shore up and transgress normative territories of dis/embodied gender, sexuality and age. We conclude by arguing that we need creative approaches that can open up spaces for a posthuman accounting of the material intra-actions through which phallic power relations shift and fold in on themselves.
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Inspired by posthuman and feminist new materialist activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what else research and activism on young sexual violence can do, be and become. It explores the unexpected twists and turns of using creative... more
Inspired by posthuman and feminist new materialist activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what else research and activism on young sexual violence can do, be and become. It explores the unexpected twists and turns of using creative methodologies in an ESRC/AHRC-funded community activist project with six teen girls (age 15) on sexual safety and violence. Mapping the journey of how data becomes da(r)ta and da(r)ta becomes d/arta-phact, the paper traces how the runway of disrespect, the shame chain, the ruler-skirt and the tagged heart ripple through peer cultures, school assemblies and national policy landscapes. Each journey offers an ‘onto-cartography’ of how bodies, space, objects, affects and discourse ‘intra-act’ (Barad 2007) to produce d/artaphacts crafted from and carrying experience. The paper concludes by considering the ethical-political affordances of the im/personal vitality of objects (Bennett 2010) and the invocative ways in which arts-based methodologies might help us work with young people to safely and creatively communicate and transform oppressive sexual cultures and practices.
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This paper explores the views of young people aged 12-14 on gender diversity, drawing upon school-based qualitative data from a study conducted in England in 2015-16. Although earlier feminist and queer research in schools often found... more
This paper explores the views of young people aged 12-14 on gender diversity, drawing upon school-based qualitative data from a study conducted in England in 2015-16. Although earlier feminist and queer research in schools often found evidence of variable local gender cultures and gender non-conformity, we argue that the contemporary context, with its increasing global awareness of gender diversity, offers young people significant new ways of learning about and doing gender. Findings reveal that many young people have expanded vocabularies of gender identity/expression; critical reflexivity about their own positions; and principled commitments to gender equality, gender diversity and the rights of gender and sexual minorities. We also show how young people are negotiating wider cultures of gendered and sexual violence. Schools are providing some spaces and learning opportunities to support gender and sexual diversity. However, overall it appears that young people’s immediate social cultural worlds are constructed in such a way that gender binary choices are frequently inevitable, from school uniforms and toilets to sports cultures and friendships. Our conclusion touches on the implications of our findings for how educational practitioners, external agencies and young people can address gender rights, equality and justice in schools and beyond.
Research Interests:
This paper explores the views of young people aged 12-14 on gender diversity, drawing upon school-based qualitative data from a study conducted in England in 2015-16. Although earlier feminist and queer research in schools often found... more
This paper explores the views of young people aged 12-14 on gender diversity, drawing upon school-based qualitative data from a study conducted in England in 2015-16. Although earlier feminist and queer research in schools often found evidence of variable local gender cultures and gender non-conformity, we argue that the contemporary context, with its increasing global awareness of gender diversity, offers young people significant new ways of learning about and doing gender. Findings reveal that many young people have expanded vocabularies of gender identity/expression; critical reflexivity about their own positions; and principled commitments to gender equality, gender diversity and the rights of gender and sexual minorities. We also show how young people are negotiating wider cultures of gendered and sexual violence. Schools are providing some spaces and learning opportunities to support gender and sexual diversity. However, overall it appears that young people’s immediate social cultural worlds are constructed in such a way that gender binary choices are frequently inevitable, from school uniforms and toilets to sports cultures and friendships. Our conclusion touches on the implications of our findings for how educational practitioners, external agencies and young people can address gender rights, equality and justice in schools and beyond.
Research Interests:
This chapter tells our story of the ‘Relationship Matters’ project. This was a collaborative adventure of how we (six teen girls and Professor Emma Renold) used arts-based methods in a group activist research-engagement project to address... more
This chapter tells our story of the ‘Relationship Matters’ project. This was a collaborative adventure of how we (six teen girls and Professor Emma Renold) used arts-based methods in a group activist research-engagement project to address sexual harassment in school, online and in our communities. We show how we worked creatively with our own and others’ interview ‘data’ to bring about personal (e.g. in minds and bodies) and political change (e.g. in legislation and practice). Professor Renold has written about the process as making ‘darta’ and ‘dartafacts’ using theories to get us thinking about ‘the emotional power of objects to communicate personal experience on sensitive topics’ (Renold 2017). This is our story of the making of those dartafacts and what they helped us and others achieve.
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stARTing out As we (the four guest editors) worked toward assembling the editorial introduction to this Special Issue, we exchanged many emails, texts, Facebook prompts, Skype calls, and, when possible, met in coffee shops to work through... more
stARTing out
As we (the four guest editors) worked toward assembling the editorial introduction to this Special Issue, we exchanged many emails, texts, Facebook prompts, Skype calls, and, when possible, met in coffee shops to work through our thinking. During one video call, we contemplated the fraught issue of how to introduce ourselves into the editorial, discussing various modes such as autobiography, figurations, poems, and artwork (see Figure 1). Figure 1. T(og)ethering (PhArt by Emma Renold, 2019).
We heatedly debated how to write collaboratively as a complex exercise in cutting-together-apart (Barad, 2003). We struggled with sharing and negotiating boundaries—questioning the meaning of introducing ourselves, to what end, and what would be response-able. Throughout this editing journey we have stayed with all of the “trouble” presented by our mixing and mingling with one another and working out our relationships toeach of the papers in this Special Issue, as we show, tell, and share in what follows.
As we (the four guest editors) worked toward assembling the editorial introduction to this Special Issue, we exchanged many emails, texts, Facebook prompts, Skype calls, and, when possible, met in coffee shops to work through our thinking. During one video call, we contemplated the fraught issue of how to introduce ourselves into the editorial, discussing various modes such as autobiography, figurations, poems, and artwork (see Figure 1). Figure 1. T(og)ethering (PhArt by Emma Renold, 2019).
We heatedly debated how to write collaboratively as a complex exercise in cutting-together-apart (Barad, 2003). We struggled with sharing and negotiating boundaries—questioning the meaning of introducing ourselves, to what end, and what would be response-able. Throughout this editing journey we have stayed with all of the “trouble” presented by our mixing and mingling with one another and working out our relationships toeach of the papers in this Special Issue, as we show, tell, and share in what follows.