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Play-Doh Vulvas and Felt Tip Dick Pics: Disrupting phallocentric matter(s) in Sex Education
Abstract
In this paper, we explore our experiences working as team comprised of researchers, teacher, and founder and director of a sex education non-profit organisation, who have formed an intra-activist research and pedagogical assemblage to experiment with relationship and sexuality education (RSE) practices in England’s secondary schools. We draw upon phEmaterialism theory and socially engaged, participatory arts-based research methodologies and pedagogies to explore two examples of arts-based activities that have been developed to de-center humanist, male-dominated, phallocentric, penile-oriented RSE. We also demonstrate how these practices enable educators, researchers, practitioners and students to revalue and rematter feminine genitalia, and resist and refigure unsettling experiences of receiving unsolicited digital dick pics.
... In sexuality education research, scholars are also pursuing posthumanist-inspired participatory methodologies (see, e.g., Gunnarsson and Ceder 2023;Renold et al. 2021;Renold and Timperley 2023). A research-activist inquiry is endorsed here, stressing how creative engagement with the world is crucial to making sexuality education, as well as educational research, matter (Renold et al. 2021;Ringrose et al. 2019). With this approach, the 'response-abilities' of doing research imply 'working as collaborative assemblages in order to generate social changes' (Ringrose et al. 2019, p. 262). ...
The aim of this paper is to explore the affective implications of working with participatory methodologies within the context of sexuality education. For this exploration, a feminist posthumanist approach is put to work, building on a relational ontology and the notions of affectivity, assemblage and environmentality. Drawing from a practice-based research project concerning sexuality education conducted together with teachers in Swedish secondary schools, the analysis puts forward how the research assemblage navigates and manages affective conditions in ways that produce, allow and exclude certain feelings. With (dis)trust, uncertainty, frustration, laughter and shame, the assemblage made bodies act and become in specific ways. Thus, the analysis shows how participatory and practice-based research become moulded by power relations and intense flows of desire working together. This raises questions about how participatory methodologies within an ontological view of interdependence afford to manage affective intensities to move in certain directions of socially just sexuality education.
... Primarily due to a lack of standardized definition, this research remains inconclusive and risk-focused (Barrense-Dias et al., 2017;Krieger, 2017). As Krieger (2017) has argued, the conflation of consensual and non-consensual image sharing practices in a great deal of sexting research has led to the common categorization of all youth sexting as risky and harmful (equivalent to abstinence teachings in sex education), as opposed to distinguishing between the wide range of sexting practices when assessing for harm (Ringrose, Whitehead, Regehr, & Jenkinson, 2019;Mishna, 2021;Mishna et al., 2021). Across international contexts, educational approaches to sexting similarly underscore the risks of sexting, and often emphasize the illegality young people's (under 18) creation of nude images (including England and Canada), despite the fact that young people creating these images are unlikely to be prosecuted. ...
This article reports on a qualitative research study Sharing Networked Image Practices (SNIP) among young people. We explore our findings from 37 focus groups with 206 young people aged (11–19) in London and South East England and Toronto, Canada conducted in 2019 and 2020. Drawing on feminist legal and criminological scholarship (Powell & Henry, 2017; McGlynn et al., 2017; McGlynn and Johnson, 2020) we develop a framework to clearly identify how and when image sharing should be constituted as forms of: (1) Image-Based Sexual Harassment (IBSH) (i.e. unsolicited penis images (‘dick pics’) and unwanted solicitation for nudes), and (2) Image-Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) (i.e. non-consensual image creation/sharing). We argue that categorizing non-consensual image sharing, showing and distributing as image-based sexual harassment and abuse rather than ‘sexting’ is an important conceptual shift to enable young people, schools, parents and all relevant stakeholders to recognize and address new forms of technology-facilitated sexual violence.
... Swedish sexuality education, focusing on health, cleanliness, and ethics, began in the latter part of the 1800s (Hultén 2008). In 1955, it became compulsory and has since maintained its status in Sweden as a tool "for fostering a healthy development among the Swedish population and particularly the Swedish youth" (Bredström, Bolander and Bengtsson, 2018, p. 539-540) and internationally (Ringrose, Whitehead, Regehr and Jenkinson, 2019). In Sweden in the 1970s, the idea of abstinence until marriage was abandoned in sexuality education and replaced with the notion of sexual responsibility-mainly through education on contraceptive methods (Bolander, 2015;Sandström, 2001). ...
In this study we examine upper secondary students’ notions of contraceptive methods, as human reproduction and contraception are common content in sexuality education in Sweden and worldwide. Our data were constructed during an extensive educational sequence in natural science sexuality education and include audio recordings of 17–18-year-old students’ stories. Since the main body of the stories was about hormonal and digital contraception and contraceptive responsibility, these stories are the focal point of our analysis. Our study further aims to problematize, challenge, and develop education on contraceptive methods, and Donna Haraway’s theoretical perspectives have been particularly useful. We have in the analytical process linked Haraway’s cyborg image with her later work on tentacular thinking. Our result shows that scientific facts about human reproduction are important for the students’ ability to navigate between the advantages and disadvantages of various contraceptive methods. However, sexuality education turns out to not only be a matter of scientific facts. This study accentuates how natural science, historical, political, cultural, and market-oriented intertwinings affect students’ notions of contraception—and thereby also the construction of natural science sexuality education.
Addressing sexting in sexual health education classrooms is one way of supporting young people to become good sexual citizens and to emphasise respect and consent in their sexual practices and in their lives. While a fair amount of research has worked with youth to understand their motivations for sexting, less research has been conducted with in-service teachers to understand their perspectives, pedagogical approaches, and beliefs regarding young people and sexting. Set in this context, this paper discusses findings from interviews with Canadian teachers who were teaching a new Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum that included discussions of sexting. Our findings suggest that many teachers are still engaging discourses of risk, shame and blame when they talk to their students about sexting. Likewise, longstanding gender norms and stereotypical sexual scripts are evident in the ways in which many teachers both understand and teach sexting. Some teachers, however, are engaging in more promising pedagogical practices that frame sexting as having a range of uses, outcomes, and purposes, painting a more holistic picture of young people’s sexting landscapes. Findings from this paper may be useful for educators and policymakers creating sexting curriculum for young people in educational settings.
We examine a Twitter attack against our phEmaterialist pedagogy during a UK-wide COVID-19 lockdown. We explore how trolls swarmed together in a collective mocking and ridiculing of images of colorful Play-doh genital models posted as part of a Master’s module we teach. The session explored “clitoral validity” as a feminist pedagogical concept to disrupt phallocentric sexuality education through the modeling of the vulva and clitoris. We focus on a sub-sample of the attack, tweets that explicitly refer to clitoral validity, vulvas, and penises. We develop an analytical frame of networked affect and affective homophily in combination with psychoanalytical concepts to map affective circuits of misogyny and hate. To conclude, we use this episode to shed light on what is at stake for scholars working in feminism and/or gender and sexuality studies using creative, participatory, and arts-based methods and we both trouble and reclaim a position of bad feminist researchers/pedagogues.
Purpose
This paper critically examines the development and direction of the Fabricating Future Bodies (FFB) Workshop. Troubling notions of co-production as enacting equality or empowering participants, it draws on feminist posthuman and new materialist concepts to understand it as an eventful process that occurs in unpredictable and shifting affect-laden assemblages.
Design/methodology/approach
The FFB Workshop formed part of the final phase of my Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded doctoral study, titled “Exploring young people's digital sexual cultures through creative, visual and arts-based methods”. With additional support from Wales' Doctoral Training Partnership, the workshop provided sixteen young people (aged 11–13 years) from one fieldwork school with the opportunity to work with two professional artists in order to creatively re-animate research findings on the digitally networked body. In a three-hour workshop, participants produced cut-up texts and life-size body fabrics that re-imagined what bodies might do, be and become in the future.
Findings
This paper finds that co-productive practices cannot flatten out the institutional and societal power dynamics operating within schools, highlighting how adult intervention was necessary to hold space for young people to participate. It also observes the agency of the art materials employed in the workshop in enabling young people to articulate what mattered to them about the digitally networked body. While the workshop was limited in its ability to renegotiate institutional and peer power dynamics, it produced rich data that indicated how carefully choreographed arts-based practices offer generative possibilities for digital sexualities research and education.
Originality/value
By employing speculative fiction, cut-up poetry and textiles to explore the digitally networked body, this paper outlines an innovative methodological-pedagogical approach to engaging with young people's digitally networked lives.
This paper draws upon a qualitative study with 144 young people in seven different research schools in England, exploring how cis-heteronormative homosocial masculinity practices shape digital sexual image exchange. We examine three types of practices: 1) boys asking girls for nudes (pressurized sexting, which we position as online sexual harassment); 2) transactional nude solicitation (boys sending dick pics and asking girls for nudes, which we position as image based sexual harassment and cyberflashing); 3) non-consensual sharing of girls and boys nude images (which we position as image based sexual abuse, showing the differential impacts with lasting sexual stigma worse for girls). Our findings confirm earlier research that demonstrated homosocial masculinity currency is gained via the non-consensual sharing of images of girls’ bodies. We also investigate the more recent rise of male nudes (dick pics) and how a homosocial culture of humour and lad banter tends to lessen the sexual stigmatization of leaked dick pics. We argue providing boys with time and space to reflect on homosocial masculinity performances is crucial for disrupting these practices and our conclusions outline new UK school guidance for tackling online sexual harassment, cyberflashing and image-based sexual abuse.
Genom att introducera en postkvalitativ metodologi tar denna bok ett samlat grepp kring frågor om formulerandet av forskningsproblem, forskningsetiska överväganden samt konstruerandet och analyserandet av empiriskt material. Postkvalitativ metodologi beskrivs utifrån fyra centrala ingångar: posthumanistisk teori; forskning som verklighetsskapande; sammanvävning av diskurs, materialitet och affekt samt en feministisk ansats. Boken belyser hur postkvalitativ metodologi erbjuder experimenterande tillvägagångssätt och är en prövande berättelse om hur kunskap kan produceras och hur världen kan undersökas med ‘en metodologi i blivande’. Den är således inte någon handbok eller manual för hur forskning ska bedrivas utan ett teoretiskt och metodologiskt erbjudande som bland annat utforskar frågor om ontologi, epistemologi och etik. Med sin specifika utgångspunkt i postkvalitativ metodologi ger boken vägledning och inspiration inom många olika områden och vetenskapliga discipliner. Den är därför ett sällskap för studenter och forskare att arbeta tillsammans med i genomförandet av ett forskningsprojekt. Boken vänder sig framförallt till studenter på avancerad nivå, forskarstudenter samt forskare som undrar vad det innebär att arbeta och skapa kunskap med posthumanistisk teori.
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism-what we have also called elsewhere 'PhEmaterialism'. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting-edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory.
This article is an investigation of the agency of matter and an exposition of the new materialist methods I have been developing as part of a muti-sited trans-national ethnography that features socially engaged arts practices alongside more traditional ethnographic and qualitative techniques. I think through the agency of matter and consider the temporality of matter as part of its agency, understanding these agents as constitutive features of the research assemblage. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the United Kingdom, I examine how matter’s space-time can impact processes of making the social. I develop theoretical resources for moving the field forward.
Since its beginning in 2004, Facebook has come to serve as a digital record of life for many. Profiles have become personal archives, documenting significant relationships, work lives, education, leisure, and loss. Like reading old journals and going through photo albums, the act of ‘scrolling back’ through a Facebook profile can be nostalgic, challenging, and embarrassing, all at once. In this chapter, Robards, Lincoln, Pinkard, and Harris report on findings from qualitative research to examine the ways in which remembering happens through Facebook. By scrolling back with their participants on Facebook the authors explain how Facebook has become an archive of intimate memories and is central to many people’s practices of remembering.
Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood provides a critical examination of the way we regulate children's access to certain knowledge and explores how this regulation contributes to the construction of childhood, to children's vulnerability and to the constitution of the 'good' future citizen in developed countries. Through this controversial analysis, Kerry H. Robinson critically engages with the relationships between childhood, sexuality, innocence, moral panic, censorship and notions of citizenship. This book highlights how the strict regulation of children's knowledge, often in the name of protection or in the child's best interest, can ironically, increase children's prejudice around difference, increase their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse, and undermine their abilities to become competent adolescents and adults. Within her work Robinson draws upon empirical research to: provide an overview of the regulation and governance of children's access to 'difficult knowledge', particularly knowledge of sexuality explore and develop Foucault's work on the relationship between childhood and sexuality identify the impact of these discourses on adults' understanding of childhood, and the tension that exists between their own perceptions of sexual knowledge, and the perceptions of children reconceptualise children's education around sexuality. Innocence, Knowledge and the Construction of Childhood is essential reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking courses in education, particularly with a focus on early childhood or primary teaching, as well as in other disciplines such as sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies.
Youth, particularly female teens, are encouraged to self-monitor and be responsible for their actions online in order to avoid harm from cyberbullying, ‘sexting,’ and other forms of cyber-risk. Highlighting findings from 35 focus groups with Canadian teens regarding sexting, we show the continued saliency of a gendered double standard applied to the online distribution of nudes. Our sample of male and female teens (n = 115) from urban and rural regions, aged 13–19, underscores the relatively lower ‘stakes’ involved with sexting for male teens. We explore this trend with specific reference to the salience of hegemonic masculinities and the gendered aspects of public and private spaces, both online and offline. Public exposure of nudes has potentially serious stigmatizing consequences for youth. We highlight teen experiences sending and receiving images of male penises (‘dick pics’), which is an under-researched aspect of sexting. We show the relative ubiquity of receiving ‘dick pics’ among female teens, exploring various reactions, and male motivations for doing so from male and female standpoints. Policy implications are discussed with specific reference to school-based cyber-safety programs, which our participants indicate remain highly gendered, neglecting epistemological questions around male experiences and responsibility.
A ball of yarn unravels in rolls above desks, humming laptops, paper coffee cups, and human bodies. The yarn finds a hand amidst cheers and hoots. The yellow spool swiftly winds around a cookbook and then flies overhead to a new outreached hand. Next, it circles around a lipstick, a tampon, an iPhone and then is thrown again. It ducks under the buzzing ceiling projector and finds its way around a set of colorful beads, a flag, a plastic pack of birth control. Soon the room is a tangle of multi-colour thread, animated bodies, machines, and materialities.