Mainstream and pornographic images and practice norms are becoming increasingly blurred (Paasonen et al., 2007), while sexual entrepreneurship discourses (Gill, 2009) promote ongoing sexual self-transformation. Women's sexuality, specifically, is expected to be proficient and perpetually practising. We examine what the mainstreaming of pornography means for sexual desire and agency among 27 young women negotiating heterosex. Participants' accounts of sexuality and pornography are reflected in a (dis)ordering porn interpretive repertoire. Porn is positioned alternately as: ridiculous and recapitulated performance; a (contested) arousal tool; pedagogy and pictogram; and (resisted) re-enactment pressure. Pornography's regulatory effects are both rejected and recapitulated. Whether they use porn as a template for sexual possibilities or decry its codes as undesirable, porn acts as an unavoidable cultural reference point for considering sexuality for these young
Canada has one of the world's largest refugee resettlement programs in the world. Just over 48 percent of Canadian refugees are women, with many of them of childbearing age and pregnant. Refugee and asylum-seeking women in Canada face a five times greater risk of developing postpartum depression than Canadian-born women. Mainstream psychological approaches to postpartum depression emphasize individual-level risk factors (e.g. hormones, thoughts, emotions) and individualized treatments (e.g. psychotherapy, medication). This conceptualization is problematic when applied to refugee and asylum-seeking women because it fails to acknowledge the migrant experience and the unique set of circumstances from which these women have come. The present theoretical article explores some of the consequences of applying this psychiatric label to the distress experienced by refugee and asylum-seeking women and presents an alternative way of conceptualizing and alleviating this distress.
Contemporary social theorists emphasise the cultural quest for authenticity under conditions of increasing artificiality. Within this context, the body is commonly treated as an 'unfinished' surface requiring ongoing transformation to fulfil identity obligations. In this paper, we examine one such identity authentication project in the form of marketing of men's sexuopharmaceuticals. We use online pharmaceutical advertising for four approved sexuopharmaceuticals (Viagra, Cialis, STAXYN and Stendra) to describe the ideal neoliberal consumer. These campaigns underscore the robust role of pharmaceuticals in sexual authentication projects undergirded by neoliberal consumerist and aspirationalist ideals. Penile dependability as a luxury consumerist project reinvigorates traditional sexual (masculine) authentication as yoked to phallic control, by repackaging sexual enhancement medication use as a neoliberal beacon of aspirational achievements. The ideal targeted user is increasingly younger, and consumption of sexuopharmaceuticals is represented as achieving elite status and exclusive pleasures; masculine authenticity and choice; progressive relationships and a contemporary urban, fast-paced life; and a prepared yet spontaneous romantic sexuality. Women are also increasingly used in promotional materials directed at men; their responsibility centres on coaching and coaxing potential users.
Postfeminist and neoliberal discourses that characterize sexual meanings, messages, and mandates in a contemporary Western context invoke choice, liberation, and mastery to propel a perpetually performing female sexuality. Agency and autonomy have been co-opted as robust scaffolding for regulatory regimes, such that practices of mandatory self-objectification and self-surveillance are rebranded as playful practices arising from a range of preferences. We plot several intersecting theoretical coordinates, along which sexuality is usefully traced: affect scholarship, Lacanian and post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalysis, and feminist poststructuralism. This is followed by two elaborated examples from an ongoing research project on sexual agency and desire among young women. Our analysis traverses these varied but interconnected theoretical frames, arguing for their joint usefulness in thinking about how sexual messages and ideologies permeate and persist across social and psychic spaces, with both resistance and recapitulation at work. We join a body of feminist scholarship directed at expanding epistemic and empirical conversations beyond sexual empowerment/oppression oppositions by addressing the ways social meanings, symbolic representations, affects, and fantasy about sexuality cohere in subjectivities.
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