Slut shaming, girl power and sexualisation : Thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls

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 not only 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 ‘sexualistion’. 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

Schizoid subjectivities? : Re-theorizing teen girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualization’

Drawing on three case studies from two UK ethnographic research projects in urban and rural working-class communities, this article explores young teen girls’ negotiation of increasingly sex-saturated societies and cultures. Our analysis complicates contemporary debates around the ‘sexualization’ 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 conceptualize 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 to 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

'Feel what I feel': making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters

Inspired by feminist new materialist and posthuman activist philosophy, this paper speculates on what happens when data entangles with arts-based 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 Ruler-Skirt 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’ (Barad 2007) 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 (Bennett 2010) might support young people to safely and creatively communicate and potentially transform oppressive sexual cultures and practices

Dyfodol y Cwricwlwm Addysg Rhyw a Pherthnasoedd yng Nghymru: Argymhellion y Panel o Arbenigwyr Addysg Rhyw a Pherthnasoedd Rhagfyr

This report outlines the key findings and recommendations of the Sex and Relationships Education Expert Panel. This panel was established by the Cabinet Secretary for Education to help inform the development of the future Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) curriculum in Wales

Rape culture, lad culture and everyday sexism: researching, conceptualizing and politicizing new mediations of gender and sexual violence

Introduction to Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies entitled Rape culture, lad culture and everyday sexism: Researching, conceptualizing and politicizing new mediations of gender and sexual violence

Informing the future of the Sex and Relationships Education Curriculum in Wales

This report examines the current and future status and development of the Sex and Relationships Education curriculum in Wales and provides a series of recommendations linked to a secondary report which has been presented to the Cabinet Secretary for Education (Renold and McGeeney 2017)