New technologies of representation, collaborative autoethnographies and ‘taking it public’: An example from ‘Facilitating Communication on Sexual Topics in Education’

New technologies for representing and communicating autoethnographies make it possible to be publically visible in new and interesting ways that weren’t possible prior to the digital revolution. An important ingredient in this process is the internet platforms that can make the digitisation of performances accessible across the world, even for short, modest creations from less experienced digital storytellers and film makers. As an illustration of the potential applications of digital technologies for ‘taking’ autoethnographic research to the ‘public,’ and making our research accessible to a wider audience we share ‘Reverberations,’ a collaborative autoethnography exploring bullying, homophobia, and other types of sexual harassment and associated feelings of shame, embarrassment and fear which often surround these topics

Old Jokes, New Media – Online Sexism and Constructions of Gender in Internet Memes

The Internet is a space where the harassment of women and marginalised groups online has attracted the attention of both academic and popular press. Feminist research has found that instances of online sexism and harassment are often reframed as “acceptable” by constructing them as a form of humour. Following this earlier research, this present paper explores a uniquely technologically-bound type of humour by adopting a feminist, social-constructionist approach to examine the content of popular Internet memes. Using thematic analysis on a sample of 240 image macro Internet memes (those featuring an image with a text caption overlaid), we identified two broad, overarching themes – Technological Privilege and Others. Within the analysis presented here, complex and troubling constructions of gendered identity in online humour are explored, illustrating the potential for the othering and exclusion of women through humour in technological spaces. We argue that this new iteration of heteronormative, hegemonic masculinity in online sexism, couched in “irony” and “joking”, serves to police, regulate and create rightful occupants and owners of such spaces

‘Everyone Knows Me as the Weird Kid’: Being Bisexual, Genderfluid and Fifteen

Everyone Knows Me as the Weird Kid is a performance text created from collaborative narrative interviews between the first author and a 15-year-old participant named Max who identifies as bisexual and genderfluid. The performance explores how Max negotiates a range of challenges—including homophobia, transphobia, bullying, and harassment—on a day-to-day basis. It offers evocative insights into life as a young person with an intersecting identity across school, community, online, and family contexts. By choosing to represent Max’s experiences as a performance text, we offer a living, breathing resource that can be performed in educational settings not only to young people but also by young people. We share Everybody Knows Me as the Weird Kid as a resource to help others respond to sexual and gender-related bullying and discrimination in their own lives

Pre-Adolescent and Adolescent Sexual Relationships - More Than Just Sex!

A great deal has been written, and said, about ‘teenage pregnancy’ and the resultant status of ‘young’ motherhood. Much of this commentary takes a moralistic position that seems insistent on imposing causal and consequential explanations; based upon values and beliefs that are seldom subjected to detailed scrutiny. This chapter relies upon recently completed research that did not presume to locate ‘young’ motherhood within such problematising narrative structures. Rather the emphasis was on gaining an appreciation of lives: how they are lived and how they are told. Presented in this chapter is what might be termed a brief encounter with Abby. The data that is presented, and analysed, focuses upon her pre-adolescent and adolescent relationships. The story told here is not one of early pregnancy and caring for children; although these are most certainly later aspects of her life story. Rather we offer an account of a vibrant young woman who enthusiastically shares her experiences and interpretations of events and locations where her understandings and expectations around sex and sexual relationships developed

Dominant cultural narratives, community narratives and past experience : their impact on 'young' mothers' personal narrative accounts of experience

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

What lies between romance and sexual equality? A narrative study of young women's sexual experiences

Changing attitudes towards female (hetero)sexuality throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are generally storied within Western societies as a move away from regulation and towards liberation. This narration of the (hi)story of female (hetero)sexuality is underpinned by a taken-for-granted assumption that in terms of sexual freedom, liberty and autonomy, these changes have been progressive and beneficial for women. The narrative study presented in this paper explores the ways in which a group of young women make sense of and narrate their unique sexual experiences and relationships. The implications of these findings are then discussed in terms of the options for negotiating sexual encounters that are made available or denied to young women by their appropriation of different narrative frameworks. This discussion raises questions about the degree to which young women in contemporary society can be considered to be sexually liberated

Introduction

This book gathers together selected papers from the sixth Narrative & Memory Research Group annual conference. The sixth annual conference had an inclusive theme focusing broadly on how individuals narrate the self and interpret past experiences and on future directions in narrative/biographical research