Confessing sex in online student communities

Abstract

In this paper, we examine Facebook "Confessions" sites associated with two large universities (one North American and one South African) to investigate the ways in which students interactionally negotiate normativity in discussions initiated by confessions relating to sex. The research is grounded in a Foucauldian framework that emphasizes the centrality of sex and sexuality. Our findings focus on two interrelated aspects of the data. The first concerns the features of the initial (anonymous) confessional posts, and the second relates to subsequent comments on the initial post. Close examination of initial posts offers insights into participants' orientations to sexual acts, situations and beliefs that are treated as either normative or transgressive. Subsequent comments posted by participants reveal ways in which the "confessability" of confessions is interactionally ratified or contested. The findings thus demonstrate some ways in which normative sexuality is (re)produced, ratified, and contested within student online communities.

Confession, psychology and the shaping of subjectivity through interviews with victims of female-perpetrated sexual violence

“…The finding that online media resources provide opportunities for incitements also points to the ways that contemporary society offers incitement and validation opportunities for victim subjectification, beyond those theorised by Foucault’s confessional model (see Dominguez-Whitehead et al 2017 ). Through blogs and forums, the internet, as a ‘technology of self’ (see Aycock 1995 ), has transformed the expert gaze so that it includes (and sometimes blurs) both professional and lay experience.…”

“…Given the FSA victim’s tenuous status in currently circulated discourse, opportunities for persons subjected to FSA to take up a victim subject position are significantly constrained. In keeping with Foucault’s ( 1978 ) account of how modern sexuality has been constituted as a privileged site of insight into self-hood, it is often the technology of the confession as a form of incitement to discourse that prompts the subject to speak about sex and sexuality in the most minute kinds of details that can be continuously dissected to expand the surveillance of human science knowledge (Dominguez-Whitehead et al 2017 ). In this way subjects speak sex into the human sciences, and these sciences carve out new possibilities for sexuality, and therefore the ‘self’ (Kotze and Bowman 2018 ).…”

“…The current global use of internet and media is a key driver of knowledge production and provides an optimal context for the incitement to peripheral gender discourses. It is also demonstrative of the ways that contemporary media formats have widened incitement opportunities for confessing victimhood (Dominguez-Whitehead et al 2017 ). As many of the participants noted, they did not self-identify as FSA victims until they were exposed to material that availed this subject position to them.…”

Undergraduate Students’ Academic Information and Help-Seeking Behaviours using an Anonymous Facebook Confessions Page

“…Several researchers have examined issues of relationships, sex, and cyberbullying on Facebook Confessions pages generally (e.g. Barari, 2016;Houlihan & Houlihan, 2014;Dominguez-Whitehead , Whitehead, & Bowman, 2017). Amador and Amador (2014) presented their case study for the use of Facebook to support academic advising, while Clark-Gordon, Workman, and Linvill (2017) highlighted that anonymous information seeking and sharing behaviours do occur frequently among students using other social media platforms.…”