This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered.

In this paper, we explore a contemporary panic around teen sexting considering why it focuses mostly on girls' bodies and 'breasts'. Drawing on empirical findings from research with 13-and 15-year olds in two London schools, we ask: How are girls' and boys' mediated bodies and body parts constructed, negotiated and made sense of in the teen peer group? How are images of girls' breasts surveilled and owned by others? In what ways can images of girls' bodies be used to sexually shame them? How do images of 'boobs' work differently than those of 'six-packs' and 'pecs'? When and how is digital proof of sexual activity shamed or rewarded? Our analysis explores the affective dimensions of digital affordances and how relative gendered value is generated through social media images and practices. We demonstrate how our qualitative research approach facilitates exploration of the online and offline relational, material embodied performance of negotiating gender and sexuality in teen's digitally mediated peer cultures.

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The bold argument of Mediated Intimacy is that media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people's knowledge, desires, practices and expectations about intimate relationships. While arguments rage about the nature and content of sex and relationship education in schools, it is becoming clear that more and more of usyoung and old look not to formal education, or even to our friends, for information about sex, but the media (Attwood et al., 2015; Albury, 2016). This is not simply a matter of media 'advice' in the form of self-help books, magazine problem pages, or online 'agony' columnsthough these are all proliferating and are discussed at length in the book. It is also about the wider cultural habitat of images, ideas and discourses about intimacy that circulate through and across media: the 'happy endings' of romantic comedies; the 'money shots' of pornography; the celebrity gossip about who is seeing whom, who is 'cheating', and who is looking 'hot'; the lifestyle TV about 'embarrassing bodies' or being 'undateable'; the newspaper features on how to have a 'good' divorce or 'ten things never to say on a first date'; or the new apps that incite us to quantify and rate our sex lives, etc. These constitute the 'taken for granted' of everyday understandings of intimacy, and they are at the heart of Mediated Intimacy. Here we present a brief summary of the book and its conclusions: Normativity and inclusivity Sex advice-and media more widely-is largely heteronormative: presenting 'normal' sex and relationships as primarily happening between one cisgender man and one cisgender woman. This is embedded within the representation of men and women as 'opposite' and 'complementary' exemplified in the bestselling Mars and Venus self-help books (Potts, 2002), men's and women's magazines, romantic comedies, and chick lit (Gill, 2007). Sex remains centred around men's pleasure with the omnipresent male sexual drive discourse (Hollway, 1984) and assumption that men are focused on sex and women on love. Recent shifts from objectification to subjectification mean there is now an onus on women to be 'up for' sex, to demonstrate enjoyment, and to find it empowering, whilst still navigating the sexual double standard to be sexual enough, but not too sexual. This plays out in many sex advice advice materials which-implicitly or explicitly-emphasise the vital importance of women providing regular sex to male partners so as not to lose the relationship. However, TV shows like Girls and Fleabag begin to open up the possibility of a more messy, complex female sexuality as their characters navigate this territory.

This article explores the use of private diaries in qualitative research about intimate everyday experiences. The article first reflects on existing diary-based research, then examines data from a small-scale UK study about the negotiation of condom use in heterosex to pose questions about the kinds of data made available when participants use private diaries as a prompt in qualitative interviews. The article discusses the use of private diaries as a way to explore ambivalent, everyday experiences and interrogates the role of diaries as a form of confessional or measurement of private life. It explores how combined researcher intimate diaries and field note journals can be used in reflexive qualitative sexualities research. The article finally examines the potential for diaries as a form of research intervention in participants' intimate lives.

This paper seeks to disrupt sensationalist racialised and classed media accounts of the youth looting in the 2011 London riots. It draws upon research on young people's uses of mobile digital technology, including social networking sites like Facebook and Blackberry Messenger to understand the performance of contemporary teenage masculinities. Developing the work of Beverly Skeggs, we demonstrate how value circulates in young people's digital peer networks. We analyse how images of designer goods and labels that signify wealth are used on social networking sites to embody cool masculine ‘swagger’ and attain popularity ‘ratings’, which we theorise as forms of social and cultural capital that circulate in the peer networks. Interview narratives also illustrate that the construction of online value must be verified in boys’ offline lives; and we show how teenage boys are negotiating power relationships and peer hierarchies online, at school and in their neighbourhoods. We argue that an analysis of symbolic value in digital contexts and in embodied everyday life helps in understanding new regulative formations of gender and masculinity in late-modern, globalised contexts of youth identity construction. In this way, our findings and analysis directly challenge the simplistic public discourses of ‘feral’ and ‘mindless’ youthful masculinities depicted in the UK media representations of the London riots, providing more complex insights into the construction of contemporary teenage masculinities.

In this paper, we consider how the cultural politics of austerity within Britain plays out on the celebrity maternal body. We locate austerity as a discursive and disciplinary field and contribute to emerging feminist scholarship exploring how broader political and socio-economic shifts interact with cultural constructions of femininity and motherhood. To analyse the symbolic function of mediated celebrity maternity within austerity, the paper draws on a textual analysis of three celebrity mothers: Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, and Beyoncé. This analysis was undertaken as part of a larger qualitative study into celebrity culture and young people's classed and gendered aspirations. We show how these celebrity mothers represent the folk devils and fantasy figures of the maternal under austerity-the thrifty, happy housewife, the benefits mum, and the do-it-all working mum-and attempt to unpick what cultural work they do in the context of austerity within Britain. Through the lens of celebrity motherhood, we offer a feminist critique of austerity as a programme that both consolidates unequal class relations and makes punishing demands on women in general, and mothers in particular. KEYWORDS austerity; celebrity; motherhood; post-feminism; social class IntroductionIn this paper, we consider how the cultural politics of austerity within Britain plays out on the celebrity maternal body. Locating austerity as a discursive and disciplinary field (Rebecca Bramall 2013), we contribute to an emerging body of feminist scholarship concerned with how broader political and socio-economic shifts interact with cultural constructions of femininity and motherhood.To explore the symbolic function of mediated celebrity maternity within austerity, the paper draws on a textual analysis of three celebrity mothers: Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, and Beyoncé. This analysis was undertaken as part of a larger qualitative study into the role of celebrity in young people's classed and gendered aspirations. Representing the fantasy figures and folk devils of the "maternal feminine" (Angela McRobbie 2013) under austerity-the thrifty, happy housewife, the benefits mum, and the do-it-all working Feminist Media Studies, 2015 Vol. 15, No. 6, 907-925, http://dx

Drawing on 24 group interviews on celebrity with 148 students aged 14-17 across six schools, we show that 'hard work' is valued by young people in England. We argue that we should not simply celebrate this investment in hard work. While it opens up successful subjectivities to previously excluded groups, it reproduces neoliberal meritocratic discourses and class and gender distinctions.