I got drunk and lost my virginity : young women's magazines and the management of sexual identity

It has often been argued that young woman’s magazine’s, like Cosmopolitan, Cleo Dolly and Seventeen, constitute a significant instrument in the patriarchal repression of young women - their hegemonic success lying in the fact that they appear to be sites wherein young women are ‘free’ from the elements of coercion so obviously in evidence within other terrains, such as the school and the family. This paper will suggest an alternative approach to these magazines. Rather than locating such texts within an overall model of repression and patriarchal domination, it will be argued here that they can be regarded as practical manuals which enrol young women to do specific kinds of work on themselves. In doing so, they form an effective link between the governmental imperatives aimed at constructing particular personas (such as, for example, ‘the sexually responsible young woman’), and the actual practices whereby these imperatives are operationalised. These manuals do not prevent young women from learning to ‘project a unique self’, they constitute a significant source of practices and techniques through which particular types of self are shaped.

Effects of disclosure of sexual identity at work for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex (GLBTI) employees in Queensland

All Australian businesses are governed by legislation aiming to prevent workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and sexual identity and serious penalties apply to companies found contravening legislation. While other Australian studies have examined these issues, Queensland has either not been included or relevant data is not easily identified. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study using a quantitative survey to determine the consequences of disclosure of a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity to colleagues in workplaces in Queensland. Results suggest GLBTI workers are disclosing their sexuality more and are experiencing more discrimination in the workplace, despite anti-discrimination policies. This suggests the need to further investigate companies’ compliance with workplace legislation.

‘He has a way gayer Facebook than I do’ : investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site

This study extends previous research into social networking sites (SNSs) as environments that often reduce spatial, temporal, and social boundaries, which can result in collapsed contexts for social situations. Context collapse was investigated through interviews and Facebook walkthroughs with 27 LGBTQ young people in the United Kingdom. Since diverse sexualities are often stigmatized, participants’ sexual identity disclosure decisions were shaped by both the social conditions of their online networks and the technological architecture of SNSs. Context collapse was experienced as an event through which individuals intentionally redefined their sexual identity across audiences or managed unintentional disclosure. To prevent unintentional context collapse, participants frequently reinstated contexts through tailored performances and audience separation. These findings provide insight into stigmatized identity performances in networked publics while situating context collapse within a broader understanding of impression management, which paves the way for future research exploring the identity implications of everyday SNS use.

Establishing a sexual identity: case studies of learners with autism and learning difficulties

The physical and emotional changes that occur in adolescence are part of the process of sexual maturity. These changes occur irrespective of ability and are often aligned with psychological and social factors. When the nature of a disability has an inherent limitation in social awareness, as is the case for individuals with autism, the achievement of personal sexual identity can become much more complex. Challenges in supporting individuals in this respect can be caused by the sensitive aspects of inappropriate behaviour, the abstract nature of teaching the topic, and the general reluctance on the part of parents and staff to discuss sexuality in individuals with disabilities. This article explores how a residential school addressed this gap. It provides details of how this need was met for seven students and the process undertaken to involve staff, parents and other stakeholders to establish ongoing support.

Children’s literature: sexual identity, gender and childhood

On the twenty-third of May 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote. This event reversed a large part, if not all, of Ireland’s reputation for a Catholic-led conservatism concerning sexual and gender identities. I argue in this article that we can see a parallel-in-miniature to this momentous shift in something of a reversal of children’s literature’s views in this respect too, and I will concentrate on exploring what is at stake in the ways that childhood, sexual and gender identities are constructed in some recent children’s literature criticism in the light of these shifts. My interest is to consider: what is the ever-burgeoning interest in the gay, queer, cross-dressing, transsexual or transgender child precisely about? I ask this question on the grounds of not assuming that this interest in these identities arises necessarily simply out of a self-evident, progressive, liberatory impulse, and, alongside this, I also do not assume that ‘identities’ are essential, self-organised traits awaiting revelation and liberation.

Is being #instagay different from an #lgbttakeover? A cross-platform investigation of sexual and gender identity performances

This paper introduces research in progress that examines how queer women perform sexual identity across social media platforms. Applying a lens of queer theory and Actor Network Theory, it discusses women’s embodied self-representations as taking on forms that both conform to and elaborate upon the selfie genre of digital representation. Acknowledging similarities and differences across platforms, specifically between Instagram and Vine, a novel walkthrough method is introduced to identify platform characteristics that shape identity performances. This method provides insights into the role of platforms in identity performances, which can be combined with analysis of user-generated content and interviews to better understand digital media’s constraints and affordances for queer representation.

'Homophobia' in the university classroom : law and justice students' conceptualizations of queer identity

Heteronormative discourses provide the most common lens through which sexuality is understood within university curricula. This means that sexuality is discussed in terms of categories of identity, with heterosexuality accorded primacy and all ‘others’ indeed ‘othered.’ This paper reports on research carried out by the authors in a core first year university justice class, in which students of law and/or justice were required to engage with, discuss, and reflect on discourses on sexuality. It uses a poststructural framework to identify how students understand non-heterosexualities and how they personally relate to queer identities, in the sense that it asks questions about gender and sexual identity, and the discourses surrounding them. It was found that strongly negative attitudes to non-heterosexualities are quite resistant to challenge, and that some students express being confronted with queerness as a deep-seated fear of being drawn into otherness against their will. The result was that, while many students were able to unpack their attitudes towards queerness and engage in critical reflection and re-evaluation of their attitudes, students with strongly negative views towards non-heterosexualities conversely refused to engage at all, typically perceiving even the engagement itself as a threat to their core heterosexual identity. However, the authors caution against relying on the idea that students are simply “homophobic” to explain this reluctance, as this term does not necessarily account for the complexity of the discourses that inform students’ reactions in this context. This “homophobia” may simply be related to a way of performing gender and sexual identity as opposed to overt discrimination and fear.

A constituição da identidade em crianças vítimas de abuso sexual

Subject s identity is constituted in the relation with the other, which is characterized by dialeticity, and is configured as an identification and/or recognize movement, and strangeness and/or distance. In social interactions, people with whom subject relates himself assign meanings to him and, from these, the subject will ressignify, producing sense about himself. In other words, is through these interactions that subjects organizes themselves, recognize what is yours, and acquire the sense about themselves. It can be highlighted, too, the social-historic context s importance in the self-constitution process, whereas, from this, the subject produces particular forms of perception about reality charged with cultural meaning. Thus, the self-conception, the manners of thinking, of being, of relates, of take position against experiences, coming from values internalization, roles and related, are permeated by the manner witch the others relates themselves with the subject. However, when the relation with the other happens to be in a violent way, like in children sexual abuse, there are implications in the subjects constitution, whereas violates his physical and psychological integrities, as well as the rights of dignity, respect and even healthy physical, psychological and sexual developments. Therefore, this work aims to investigate how the identity process is constituted in children victims of sexual abuse. As specific aims the research proposes: 1) to characterize the relations between child and abuser, before and after the abuse act; 2) to identify images that the subjects, abuse victims, have about themselves and; 3) to identify the features of subject s relation with their own body. Toward this aims, procedures involving drawings, painting, collage, photography, activities with cardboard, colored pens, glue and tissue snips. The research took place at the Social Assistance Specialized Reference Center, where there is the treatment of children who suffered of rights violation, which includes sexual abuse. The research subjects were 3 girl children, between 6 and 10 years old, victims of sexual abuse. The corpus analyses was done through Thematic Content Analysis, structured in three meaning nucleus: 1) self-reference without the explicit attendance of other s discourse; 2) self-reference with the explicit attendance of other s discourse; 3) The other abuser. The analysis indicates that children, research subjects, have deteriorated images about themselves, about their bodies, which is consistent with the studies in the children and adolescents sexual violence field. In the other hand, were identified, too, self-references with positive values in the cases with mention about their way-of-being, which can be read as important to subject s development. About the other s discourse towards the subjects, were identified positive observations and found that these can contribute to subject s self-image reorganization. The contribution of negative comments, on the other hand, was showed in a more clear and incisive form in subject s constitution. There is, yet, an overvaluation of the other s discourse, so the meanings attributed toward them by the other are internalized, overshadowing the self-appreciation. To conclude, it can be highlighted that the need of psychological accompaniment of the children victims of sexual abuse, based on the possibility of this trauma experience elaboration, trying to overcome, as well as can be expected that this research s results contributes to the practices of professionals who work with subjects who have their rights violated

Educação sexual orientada para a ação: um estudo bibliográfico sobre a aplicabilidade dessa modalidade de intervenção

Pós-graduação em Educação Escolar - FCLAR

'When everything old is new again' : class, consumerism and masculinity in Alasdair Duncan's Metro

Alasdair Duncan’s narrative Metro, set in Brisbane in the early twenty-first century, focuses on Liam, an unapologetically self-styled ‘white, upper middle-class brat’ whose sense of place and identity is firmly mapped by spatial and economic co-ordinates. This article considers the linkages between spatiality and identity in Duncan’s narrative, as well as the ways in which traditional, hegemonic (heterosexual) forms of masculinity are re-invigorated in the enactment of an upper-middle-class script of success, privilege and consumerism. It argues that the safeguarding of these hegemonic forms of masculine identity involves strategies of spatial and bodily expression underpinned by conspicuous consumption, relegating other forms of sexual identity to an exploitable periphery

Appreciating diversity: Confronting homophobia at school

The development of sexual identity is a complex, lifelong process involving the interplay of sex, gender and orientation, occurring within a social framework of heterosexual dominance (Murray 2001). Australia has a richly diverse culture and, at some point in our lives, we will all meet people, who look, think, live, or act differently to ourselves. Through understanding and celebrating the diversity of our culture, we enrich our lives and the lives of others. Schools influence how boys (and girls) see themselves and each other; those of us who work in schools cannot pretend to be outside the process of gender construction. In our daily business we send messages, set boundaries and respond with support, disinterest or censure to the acting out of various masculinities and femininities.

Porn and the mediasphere

The history of public discourse (and in many cases, academic publishing) on pornography is, notoriously, largely polemical and polarised. There is perhaps no other media form that has been so relentlessly the centre of what boils down to little more than arguments “for” or “against”; most famously, on the basis of the oppression, dominance or liberation of sexual subjectivities. These polarised debates leave much conceptual space for researchers to explore: discussions of pornography often lack specificity (when speaking of porn, what exactly do we mean? Which genre? Which markets?); assumptions (eg. about exactly how the sexualised “white male body” functions culturally, or what the “uses” of porn actually might be) can be buried; and empirical opportunities (how porn as media industry connects to innovation and the rest of the mediasphere) are missed. In this issue, we have tried to create and populate such a space, not only for the rethinking of some of our core assumptions about pornography, but also for the treatment of pornography as a bona fide, even while contested and problematic, segment of the media and cultural industries, linked economically and symbolically to other media forms.

After Sex? On Writing since Queer Theory, edited by Janet Halley and Andrew Parker [Review]

In its earliest and simplest form queer theory proposes that sexual identity is not essential, but socially constructed, and understandings of identity, gender and sexuality are constructed differently at different times and in different places. Queer theory aims to challenge normative understandings of sex, sexuality and gender, and also normative concepts of knowledge and being. Since its inception, queer theory has been taken up by a number of disciplines as an analytical framework. These include cultural geography, education studies, film studies and sociology. In the last decade queer theory has been used to consider citizenship, diasporas and post colonial experiences. A queer theoretical perspective has also been used to analyse emotions, the Death Drive, phenomenology, and disability. As queer theory enters its third decade Janet Halley and Andrew Parker ask what is after sex? ‘What has queer theory become now that it has a past?’

A prostitute's progress : male prostitution in scientific discourse

This paper examines discourses of male prostitution through an analysis of scientific texts. A contrast is drawn between nineteenth-century understandings of male prostitution and twentieth-century accounts of male prostitution. In contrast to female prostitution, male prostitution was not regarded as a significant social problem throughout the nineteenth century, despite its close association with gender deviation and social disorder. Changing conceptions of sexuality, linked with the emergence of the ‘adolescent’, drew scientific attention to male prostitution during the 1940s and 1950s. Research suggested that male prostitution was a problem associated with the development of sexual identity. Through the application of scientific techniques, which tagged and differentiated male prostitute populations, a language developed about male prostitution that allowed for normative assessments and judgements to be made concerning particular classes of male prostitute. The paper highlights how a broad distinction emerged between public prostitutes, regarded as heterosexual/masculine, and private prostitutes, regarded as homosexual/effeminate. This distinction altered the way in which male prostitution was understood and governed, allowing for male prostitution to be constituted as a public health concern.