Her Sexual Self: Joy Townsend

I’m afraid the audio of this episode isn’t as good as usual because we had to rely on the back up recording. Sorry about that. I’m also going to give you a content note here in particular for Natalie’s story where there is a description of a rape. There aren’t graphic details and in the story Natalie has ambivalent feelings about it, but I just wanted to give you a heads up in case you want to skip it. It’s around 28 minutes in and if you skip ahead for 2 minutes from when you first hear Joy mention Natalie’s name then you will miss it. Her Sexual Self: A narrative investigation of young women’s sexual subjectivities Listeners to this show will know that we have always tried to grapple with questions of the personal and the political, the structural and cultural messages that we receive, and the possibilities for agency and freedom to choose within this. It’s hard to articulate and sometimes it means that we have to treat them separately or as things happening in parallel, or by simply just pointing out that in a neoliberal world built on scarcity that our capacity to choose, or to be embodied is unevenly distributed. Joy’s thesis Her Sexual Self, really gets to the heart of this dichotomy and shows how actually our everyday experiences might be sites of valuable understanding where our self has the capacity to be drawn and redrawn. Sexual subjectivity the background and rationale of her sexual self Foucault and the technology of self (why his later work is important to reflect on) The subjects of the interviews and how they panned out Navigating normal Accommodating norms: ‘virginity’ ‘loss’ Managing norms: slut surveillance Being sexual but not too sexual - practices of constrained agency Resisting norms: The affirmative slut Resisting norms: the rampage Becoming her sexual self Defining the process Learning from experience The risky business of learning