‘Not in front of the parents!’ Young people, sexual literacies and intimate citizenship in the internet age

Abstract

Clause 13 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states that children have the right 'to seek, receive or impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in art or in any other media of the child's voice'. However, there is one area in which this directive is constrained in various countries by domestic regulations curtailing children's access to information. That area is human sexuality. The arguments for and against children's access to sex education are well rehearsed. In this article, the author pursues a different angle, looking instead at the increasing restrictions placed upon young people's ability to imagine and communicate with each other about sexual issues, particularly in online settings. The advent of the internet and a range of social networking sites have not only enabled young people to access previously quarantined information about sexuality, but also to actively engage in forms of 'intimate citizenship' online. In this article, the author focuses on young people's online fan communities which use characters from popular culture such as Harry Potter or a range of Japanese manga and animation to imagine and explore sexual issues. 'Child abuse publications legislation' in Australia and elsewhere now criminalizes the representation of even imaginary characters who are or may only 'appear to be' under the age of 18 in sexual scenarios. Hence these children and young people are in danger of being charged with the offence of manufacturing and disseminating child pornography. Despite research into these fandoms that indicates that they are of positive benefit to young people in developing 'sexual literacies', there is increasingly diminishing space for young people under the age of 18 to imagine or communicate about sexuality, even in the context of purely fictional scenarios.

Young people, online fandom and the perils of child pornography legislation in Australia

“…These manipulated images can be put to various uses including the trolling and harassment of other internet users by tricking them into viewing pictures with offensive violent, racist or sexist content (Jones 2010: 128-29). However, consonant with my previous work on fandoms (McLelland 2012;2017a;2017b) in this paper I am concerned with their circulation among fans, particularly largely female "slash" fandoms that involve content taken from both Japanese and western pop cultures. Many manips are playful and imaginative re-creations that superimpose images of the manipulator her-or him-self into a scene from a TV series, anime or movie, or with celebrities.…”

“…However, albeit stories of children as victims are more readily apparent in the media, there is an absence of what Karaian (2012: 59) refers to as ‘counter-narratives’, where young people are shown to demonstrate sexual agency and knowingness. These ‘alternative ways of knowing and being’ voiced by young people themselves are liable to be censored or subject to ‘implicit foreclosure’ by dominant discourses that acknowledge children as victims of sexual activity but not as sexual agents in their own right (Karaian, 2012: 64; McLelland, 2017a; see also Angelides, 2004; Harris, 2005).…”

Researching Intimacies and New Media: Methodological Opportunities and Challenges

“…Finally, the last few years has seen the publication of several important texts dealing with the relationship between new media and affect (e.g., Chambers, 2013;Garde-Hansen & Gorton, 2013 ;Hillis, Paasonen, & Petit, 2015;Hjorth & Lim, 2012;Karatzogianni & Kuntsman, 2012;McGlotten, 2013;McLelland, 2016;Paasonen, 2011;Payne, 2014;van Dijck, 2013). These volumes showcase a number of innovative theoretical attempts to think together new media and affect/emotion/intimacies, often drawing on empirical case studies.…”

Policy, politics and porn

“…It is instructive but depressing to see how these reports have seized so much public attention and how they have crowded out any of the research being undertaken in other spaces with various age groups, and which reach more complex conclusions about the significances of sexually explicit material in everyday life (cf. Albury, 2014; Angelides, 2013; Attwood et al, 2018; Curtis and Hunt, 2007; Gregory, 2018; Hillier and Harrison, 2007; McLelland, 2016; Mowlabocus et al., 2013; Mulholland, 2015; Paasonen et al., 2015; Smith et al., 2015).…”