Aims of 'analysis'

The section above illustrates that I was interested in tracing gendered patterns and inequalities, and molar lines in youth-sexuality-assemblages, but also in mapping singular affects and rupture. Fox and Alldred (2015) have pointed to two tasks for empirical social inquiry that flow from Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology: to explore

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specific assemblages and map the desires and capacities that they may produce in bodies; and to take an experience and explore the relations and affects which produced it. Given my interest in pleasure, I paid special attention to the ways in which specific assemblages opened up or closed down experiences of pleasure for young people. Similarly, when data appeared to suggest that a young person was experiencing pleasure (or pain), I explored the conditions which seemingly produced this experience.

Unlike much of the previous literature in the field of youth sexualities (e.g. Tolman 2002; McGeeney 2013; 2015b), I was not only interested in the ways in which human bodies and the practices normatively defined as ‘sex’ produced desire and pleasure in young people. I was also interested in how participants’ relationship with the more- than-human (Lorimer 2013) - for example discourses, objects or music - affected young people’s sexual subjectivities and their capacities for pleasure. A second aim of my ‘analysis’, then, was to avoid focusing solely on sexualities that emerged in expected places. I wanted to think about sexuality not only as a set of specific practices tied to sexed bodies, but move towards a conceptualisation of sexuality as affect, intensities, and bodily sensations (see chapter two; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; also see Beckmann 2011; 2013).

3.5.4 Thinking with concepts: ‘becoming’, ‘assemblages’, ‘territorialisation’ and ‘deterritorialisation’

In this final section of this chapter, I will illustrate what it meant to think with Deleuzo- Guattarian concepts throughout my encounters with data, and directly address research question three (“How can the use of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts within youth sexuality research contribute to a re-conceptualisation of the field?). I use a short example to explicate how these concepts may act as a tool to map complexities and alternative figurations of youth sexualities. The data extract I use is a short quote taken from an interview with Sarah, who we met earlier in this chapter. Sarah was a young white woman aged 17 from a strict Christian background. She talked about experiencing her religious backgrounds as somewhat restrictive. For example, she talked about how she was “not allowed” to have sex outside of marriage. Although

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Sarah contended at the start of the research that she had never kissed anyone or been in a romantic relationship, throughout the research it emerged that Sarah did consider many parts of her life to be sexual. In particular, this related to dance, which she loved and which took up a substantial amount of her free time. As her ‘pleasure object’ in phase two of the research, Sarah brought in a video clip of herself dancing. For phase three of the research, Sarah produced an additional four dance videos. In the quote below, Sarah speaks about the bodily sensations she experiences in the context of dancing with another person in a dance studio:

Sarah: I quite enjoy Cuban dancing […] it’s bumping and grinding, you’re not really bumping and grinding […] you’re moving your hips and your like, your legs and stuff […] you’re flicking your hair […] it makes me feel a bit more sexier, and it just feels more, I don’t know, fun. […] I've danced with people, and I think like Latin and stuff and that's like, that movement towards like tummy like, bringing you close together like that yeah it feels, it feels good [laughs].

In this quote, Sarah talks about how when she is dancing she emphasises her “hips”, her “legs”, her “hair”, and her “tummy”. Some of Sarah’s movements, “flicking [her long straight] hair” for instance, were intrinsically gendered and racialized. Sarah even talked about how dance made her feel “girly”. Through a discursive or performative analytic lens, one might argue that Sarah's narratives may be read as illustrating how within dance she is performing a feminine sexuality in line with popular portrayals in pop music videos, and that her feelings of sexiness emerge through internalising and embodying a male gaze. Drawing on Evans and Riley’s (2014; Evans et al. 2010) work on ‘technologies of sexiness’, one could continue this analysis by arguing that Sarah’s experiences illustrate how while within contemporary Western culture young women are able to display sexual agency, this display must remain within established notions of feminine conduct. Within such an approach, the focus is on what Sarah’s dance is or means: how we can make sense of it and what it says about culture. Whilst highlighting gendered inequalities, it arguably downplays the specificity of Sarah’s context, and traces that which has already been established within (feminist) discourses about sexuality.

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Thinking with Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, the focus shifts somewhat from what Sarah’s dance is or means, and towards what it can do. Specifically, the focus is laid on what capacities a specific dance produces, for example what capacities it produces for Sarah. The concepts of ‘becoming’, ‘assemblage’, territorialisation’ and ‘deterritorialisation’ enable thinking about the productive capacities of Sarah’s dance as complex and multiple. This is because using these concepts affective capacities can be thought of as unfolding rhizomatically, as branching out in different directions, and as emerging differently within specific assemblages. While within a discursive theory Sarah’s dance may be interpreted as reproducing specific notions of femininity, using Deleuze and Guattari, we may think about the multiple capacities of dance as they emerge in different assemblages. For instance, we can think about Sarah’s sexual body in many everyday-life situations as stabilised by her robust relationship with religious sexual discourses, which limit her capacities for sexual pleasure. Dance-assemblages, on the other hand, seemingly had in certain constellations the capacity to momentarily deterritorialise Sarah’s sexual body, and in this way open up possibilities for Sarah to experience sexual pleasure. Sarah spoke about how to her this felt like something was actually being “remove[d]” from her body.

The multi-phase approach of my research project allowed me to map many of the relations which produced Sarah’s sexual subjectivity (e.g. her religious belief, music videos), and how different dance-assemblages territorialised her body in different ways. Exploring Sarah’s experiences of dance in a range of assemblages allowed me to map how the affective capacities of dance varied between contexts. Sarah spoke about how she does not feel pleasure when dancing in front of her class mates, and how in certain dance-assemblages her pleasure seemingly becomes detached from her physical appearance (see chapter six for further discussion of Sarah’s experiences). Thinking with Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, then, dance may be viewed as producing different capacities in Sarah’s body in different assemblages, and, indeed, as producing multiple effects within any given constellation. Sarah’s subjectivity emerges as always in flux. Her experiences are not fixed by discourse, nor

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are they determined by biological responses. In this way, rather than closing down possibility, a Deleuzo-Guattarian approach looks towards possibilities of change.

Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, then, allow researchers to take an approach to the study of youth sexualities which differs from psychological and discursive approaches (see chapter two). In order to respond to my research questions (especially research question one), like the work of psychologists and discourse analysts, my empirical chapters offer an interpretive account of my data, as well as treating it as productive. However, what sets my analysis apart is its ability to highlight multiplicity and movement. As I noted in chapter two, this is important not only to explore the complexities of youth sexualities, but also to legitimise ways of experiencing sexuality that exceed normative expectations and representation, and to make visible potential for change.

3.6 Conclusions

This chapter discussed the methodological approach of my research project, which, due to its novelty, must perhaps be viewed as an experiment that is exploratory. My non-linear, and potentially rupturing, approach to research was reflected in this chapter by my somewhat unusual decision to include empirical data in it. Using such data, I illustrated how my methods and concepts allowed me to work with affect, to map alternative figurations of youth sexuality, and to address complexity and multiplicity. I also explored the role of myself and the research sites within the research-assemblage, and how I viewed the analytic process as productive.

The chapter highlighted some of the strengths and weaknesses of my approach, and I will illustrate these in more detail throughout the empirical chapters (chapters four to six). Specifically, the empirical chapters will illustrate in more detail how, while my research was still in many ways dependent on spoken language, it allowed for the emergence of rich data which pointed towards complex subjectivities that were always in motion. This included experiences of both pleasure and pain, and territorialisations as well as deterritorialisations. While I had initially considered

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writing separate chapters on the ways in which sexual bodies were territorialised in painful ways, and on the possibilities for sexual bodies for processes of deterritorialisation and pleasure, I quickly noticed that these processes were far too entangled to be artificially separated. Instead, I chose to structure the empirical chapters in such a way that with each chapter the reader may think about sexuality and sexual subjectivity in ever more creative ways.

Whilst it was difficult for me to artificially divide data that were inevitably entangled, three chapters emerged. In chapter four I highlight young sexual subjectivities as they emerged in encounters with other people, especially those encounters normatively defined as ‘sex’. This chapter highlights gendered patterns of inequality, but also emphasises experiences that exceed normative representations of youth sexuality. In chapter five I foreground the ‘more-than-human’ (Lorimer 2013), and explore young people’s sexual subjectivities as they emerged in their engagements with objects, the media, and technologies. Chapter six is themed around the moving body, and explores how youth sexual subjectivities emerged during dance and sports. I bring together the conclusions from chapters four and five to rethink sexuality as something not tied to individual bodies, but as something that can be understood as impersonal affective flows which travels across and through bodies. In the final discussion chapter, once the reader has been introduced to a greater proportion of my data, I will also explore in more detail the limitation of the use of linguistic methods, and the educational implications of my methodology’s capacities to influence participants’ attentiveness to bodily experiences and connectivity in their every-day lives.

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Chapter Four

“It was like a sensation of like pain and pleasure at the same time”:

Young people, ‘sex’, and the complexities of human encounters

4.1. Introduction

In this chapter I explore young people’s experiences of encounters with other young people. The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part, I explore the complexities of young people’s experiences during those encounters normatively defined as ‘sex’. I trace gendered patterns in the ways in which young people experience sexuality. However, I also map alternative figurations of youth sexuality (Brown 2006; Nigianni and Storr 2005; Colebrook 2009; Renold and Ringrose 2011; McCallum and Tuhkanen 2011; Renold and Ivinson 2015; see chapter two). I focus on those data which emerged as painful, pleasurable, or baffling ‘hotspots’ (MacLure 2013) for me. This included narratives relating to appearances, status, and violence (which are themes which emerged repeatedly), as well as narratives in which pleasure and connectivity were emphasised. I also explore the implications of these affective flows for sexual consent between young people. In the second part of the chapter, I explore how we can recognise sexuality in human encounters which are not normatively defined as ‘sex’.

While in my research I used an array of methods, data concerning specific human encounters mainly surfaced in participants’ individual interviews (group interview data and art work are discussed in chapters five and six). Given that participants had sacrificed their time to take part, and many had seemed keen to provide input for my thesis, I felt an ethical responsibility to include the voices of many young people, rather than focusing on only one or two participants.

Part One: Young people and ‘sex’

Despite the focus of my project on pleasure, when participants spoke about their engagement in practices normatively defined as ‘sex’, experiences of sexual pleasure tended to be embedded within complex stories which incorporated an array of other

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bodily sensations (also see Tolman 2002). Often participants’ narratives were populated by stories of anxiety, experiences of hurt and pain, violence, and a sense of limitation in relation to pleasure. I begin this chapter by tracing some of these patterns. I pay attention to the ways in which participants seemingly experienced these patterns as fixed and inescapable, but also to those moments in which participants’ experiences appeared to temporarily divert from them. I focus on three themes which surfaced repeatedly, and which appeared to feel significant to many participants: appearances, status, and violence. I then explore in greater detail some sexual encounters in which pleasure emerged for young people.