What (else) can a kiss do? Theorizing the power plays in young children’s sexual cultures

Abstract

This article draws on school-based ethnographic research in two elementary schools (in South Wales, UK and north Finland) to explore the ‘ordinary affects’ (Stewart, 2007) of gendered/sexual power in young children's (aged 5–6) negotiation of their own and others’ bodies in playground and classroom spaces. We apply queer and feminist appropriations of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts of ‘assemblage’, ‘becomings’ and ‘territorialisations’, not to pin down what a kiss is, but to explore the kiss as always more than itself, and thus what (else) a kiss can do. To explore the affective journey of the kiss as an always-relational social-material event, we sketch a range of kissing assemblages across four vignettes – ‘the kissing hut’, ‘the classroom kiss’, ‘the kissing line’ and ‘the dinosaur kiss’ – mapping the enabling or restriction of a range of gendered and sexual becomings. Each vignette foregrounds the complex, contradictory nature of children’s gendered and sexual cultures which we argue are vital to map in a socio-political terrain where discourses of denial, silence and (over)protection dominate accounts of how young children are doing, being and becoming ‘sexual’.

New materialist social inquiry: designs, methods and the research-assemblage

“…However, all 30 studies we reviewed used qualitative designs, with ethnography the favoured methodology (Blaise, 2013;Dyke, 2013;Henriques, 2010;Holford, Renold, & Huuki, 2013;Ringrose, 2011;Saldanha, 2002;Youdell & Armstrong, 2011), sometimes with an auto-ethnographic element (Lambevski, 2005;McCormack, 2003;Whitaker, 2010). Others used exclusively in-depth qualitative interviewing (Cole, 2013;Masny & Waterhouse, 2011;Mazzei, 2013;Potts, 2004), while some combined qualitative approaches (Fox & Ward, 2008a;Ivinson & Renold, 2013;Renold & Ringrose, 2008, 2011Ringrose, 2011).…”

Crush: mapping historical, material and affective force relations in young children's hetero-sexual playground play

“…Coming to know and un-know children's cultures, and be attuned to the unpredictable flows in the micro-worlds of everyday life in school, the first author, Tuija, created a wide-range of research encounters across playgrounds and classrooms, including talk-based methods, walking-tours, video-recorded observation, photographs, and a range of creative child-focused activities. This methodology sought to make visible the 'awkward, messy, unequal, unstable, surprising and creative qualities of encounters and interconnection across difference' (Stewart, 2007, p. 128; see also Olsson, 2009, Lenz-Taguchi, 2010MacLure et al, 2011, Coleman andRingrose, 2013;Holford et al, 2013;Osgood, 2014;Holmes and Jones, 2013). For the video footage that focuses this paper, we (Tuija and Emma) then spent an intensive week, and subsequent sessions, over a 3 month period, viewing and re-viewing the footage: pausing, rewinding, slowing down and speeding up the data in a process which nurtured the 'qualitative multiplicities' (Braidotti, 2006) we felt vibrate and ripple across each pileup/crush.…”

‘Feel what I feel’: making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters

“…Much of this work is generating new methodologies to capture affects and percepts that enable us to see, think and feel differently about the past-present-future gendering of young lives, bodies and imaginings, including research on young sexual violence. 10 Attending to the more-than-human dynamics of gendered and sexual force relations in young people's lives has been pivotal in shifting to a post-individual and less anthropocentric understanding of 'sexual violence' (see Holford, Renold & Huuki, 2013;Huuki & Renold, 2016;Ivinson & Renold, 2013a;Renold & Ivinson, 2015;Renold & Ringrose, 2016a, 2016b. This posthumanizing of sexual violence connects to and captures the emerging configurations of human and more-than-human power relations -what we might call, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari (1987), 'sexual violence assemblages' (see Fox & Alldred, 2013Huuki & Renold, 2016;Renold and Ringrose 2016b).…”

“…Each card was sealed with a lipstick kiss, (an incredible moment of gender fluidity as boys, men, girls and women took part in this practice), personally addressed to every politician in Wales, and hand delivered to the National Assembly for Wales at the Senedd in Cardiff Bay. Indeed, the kiss connected our local action to the global Violence Against Girls and Women campaign, Red My Lips and an additional reminder of what else a kiss can do (see Holford et al, 2013).…”