Managed Not Missing

Abstract

Our article describes findings from a project exploring sexual agency and desire among young women, focusing on the negotiation of sexuality within relationship contexts. Adopting a social constructionist framework, we used discourse analysis to examine semi-structured, audio-taped interviews with 39 Canadian young women (aged 18–26). Three related interpretive repertoires were identified, namely, (a) Sex as Relationship Hygiene (i.e., beneficial to the health of one’s relationship), (b) Sex as Exercise-esque (i.e., part of a wellness regime), and (c) Sex as Economy Exchange (i.e., a commodifiable practice within the heterosexual marketplace). Desire was not absent from participants’ accounts, however, it was channeled into specific forms of sexual expression and mediated by multiple and competing cultural imperatives. The interpretive repertoires provided spaces for agentic sex within which subjective sexual desire was not the primary motive but rather was subordinate to a rhetoric of self- and relationship improvement as a key register of sexuality. We discuss these findings in the context of postfeminist directives about sexual desirability and proficiency that young women must traverse as they develop ideas about successful female sexuality within heterosexual relationships.

“Up for it” or “asking for it”? Violence against women in the age of postfeminism

“…While a postfeminist sensibility might view this (literal) performance as an empowering means to attract and sustain male desire (Erchull & Liss, 2014;Fahs, 2011), Irina rejects this logic and instead aligns herself with a logic in which her partner's desires are not privileged above her own. Both Luna's and Irina's assertions can be read as political stances-deliberately critical of the highly regulated and malecentered landscape of dominant makings of women's sexuality and desire (Brown-Bowers et al, 2015;Tolman, 2005).…”

Affective conjunctions: Social norms, semiotic circuits, and fantasy

“…These show that young Western women are adopting phraseology from both a pornographic lexicon and sexual expert discourses to describe sex and desire, resulting in paradoxical effects. Specifically, maximal sexual exploration is positioned as prized capital, with desire coded as doing; sex is framed as “relationship hygiene,” with frequency “dosing” cited as key to maximal relationship health; pornography is both repudiated as unrealistic and used prescriptively to inform sexual practices; and female sexual agency is both required and repudiated (Brown-Bowers et al, 2015; Gurevich et al, 2015). While drawing on Lacanian and post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalytic and affect theory, the analysis will remain primarily at the level of discourse.…”

“…The practicing pleasures repertoire refers to the construction of sexual allure and receptivity to a broad spectrum of sexual possibilities as a critical feature of contemporary sexuality. While there is considerable talk of sexual performance and sexual variety in these accounts, pleasure is more obliquely described in most cases (Brown-Bowers et al, 2015; Gurevich et al, 2015). The young women articulate persistent tensions between sexual agency and desire and the disciplining effects of regulatory norms, which operate within intrapsychic tracks always inflected by gender difference.…”

“…In the remainder of this paper, we want to bring together the theoretical strands discussed above to examine the way discursive-affective striations about sexuality become burrowed in the social skin of psyches and embodied practices, through the tangled assembly of semiotic and unconscious registers. We rely on two examples from a larger project on sexual desire and agency in young Canadian women, exploring how regimes of self-management and the rhetoric of autonomy, choice, and liberation characteristic of postfeminism are deployed to display and displace sexuality (Brown-Bowers, Gurevich, Vasilovsky, Cosma, & Matti, 2015; Gurevich et al, 2015).…”

How sexual empowerment gets in the way of liberation: A case study of a Turkish immigrant woman.

“…Neoliberalism has certainly laid the groundwork for the cannibalization of empowerment, as it frames the individual as responsible and accountable for their own decisions, rather than holding the broader social context and structures accountable (Bay-Cheng, 2015; Rutherford, 2018). Neoliberal discourses are then used as framework for sexual empowerment (Green, 2013), which has been popular in psychological research in recent years (Brown-Bowers et al, 2015; Evans et al, 2010). Passing off responsibility to the individual, often a young woman who is now required to think she “has agency” and is “sexually empowered,” and being responsible for her own fate and “bad decisions” results in new iterations of sexism (Bay-Cheng, 2015; Fahs & McClelland, 2016; Fine & McClelland, 2006; Harvey & Gill, 2011).…”