Reframing Risqué/Risky: Queer Temporalities, Teenage Sexting, and Freedom of Expression

Canada recognizes young people’s constitutionally protected freedom of expression and consequently their right to engage in a narrow subset of consensual sexually expressive practices without be

Lolita speaks: 'Sexting,' teenage girls and the law

Recently, national and local media across North America have warned against the risks of 'sexting'-the practice of sending, posting or possessing sexually suggestive text messages and images via cell phones or the Internet. In response to this phenomenon, Pennsylvania District Attorney Skumanick threatened to bring child pornography charges against teenagers who had been caught sexting and who refused to attend a gender-based 're-education' program designed to teach them about its dangers. Three girls refused the ultimatum, resulting in Miller v. Mitchell [2010], the first case to challenge the constitutionality of prosecuting teens for their digital sexual expression. This article critically considers dominant and intersecting cultural and legal narratives about sexting and troubles the predominant construction of teenage female sexters as dupes of the 'pornification' of a generation and as 'self-sexually exploiting.' The cultural and legal disavowal of girls' narratives about digital sexual expression is considered through Judith Butler's poststructural analysis of sexuality, speech and censorship. Drawing on two online studies of sexting, contributions to an online forum on the topic, and third-wave feminist writings on a generational re-envisioning of risk, respectability and privacy, I argue that that the foreclosure of the 'domain of the sayable' within which girls seek to speak works paradoxically to further render them fetishized sexual objects, thus engendering the very harm that criminal law seeks to remedy

Pregnant Men: Repronormativity, Critical Trans Theory and the Re(conceive)ing of Sex and Pregnancy in Law

This article argues that a critical re(conceive)ing of sex and pregnancy is required in law. Drawing on the dual meaning of conceive - 'to become pregnant' and 'to imagine, or form a mental representation of', the goal of this article is to better ensure that pregnant men and trans individuals are not denied their reproductive rights, the legal recognition of their gender identities, and the protections of pregnancy discrimination law. Here, I survey molecular biologists' and critical trans theorists' scientific and discursive challenges to the understanding of sex as biologically determined; I map the extent to which biological and repronormative discourses - those which materialize and maternalize female identity - underpin legal determinations of trans subjects' sex and their ability to access state issued documentation; finally, I suggest that feminists' efforts to construct pregnancy discrimination as sex discrimination may unwittingly factor into discriminatory practice against pregnant men by reifying pregnancy as necessarily female and thus pregnant men as 'really' women. Drawing on Darren Rosenblum's call to unsex parenting, I conclude by briefly considering the opportunities presented by unsexing pregnancy in law

Policing ‘sexting’: Responsibilization, respectability and sexual subjectivity in child protection/crime prevention responses to teenagers’ digital sexual expression

This article examines the motivations, techniques and potential consequences of the governance of teenage sexting. I examine the over-representation of white, middle-class, heterosexual, female sexters, and abstinence from sexting discourses in the ‘Respect Yourself’ child protection/crime prevention initiative. This campaign, I suggest, exploits slut shaming in an effort to responsibilize teenage girls for preventing the purported harms that may flow from sexting—including humiliation, sexual violations and criminalization—for both themselves and their peers. I examine this responsibilization effort through the lens of critical whiteness, queer, girlhood/young feminist and porn studies’ theorizations of the politics of sexual respectability and sexual subjectification and argue that this campaign simultaneously: reveals anxieties about the decline of the moral authority of the white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family; constitutes certain teenage girls’ unintelligibility as sexual subjects; and, undermines teenage girls’ ability to challenge a normative sexual order in which they are often blamed extra/legally for their sexual victimization