ABSTRACT
In recent decades, the study of young people has rapidly expanded and with it studies of gender and sexuality. The global research reflects a longstanding interest in – and concern with – youth as risk-taking and youth sexuality as risky (Kehily, 2004). Questions have been raised about young people’s burgeoning sexuality in relation to risky behaviour ranging from issues around the age of consent, teenage pregnancy, sex and social network systems, sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and vulnerability to sexual disease and HIV (Schalet, 2011). Solutions to address risky sexualities often rest on the identification of factors that protect against sex, or delay the onset of sex and are premised on abstinence. Dangerous sex remains a dominant backdrop to youth sexualities, with young women in particular constructed as needing protection, and a concomitant emphasis on dangerous sex as vital to developing healthy youth sexualities (Egan, 2013; Bhana, 2016, 2014). Against the over-dramatisation of danger in the examination of youth sexualities, there is now an upsurge in research about young people and the saliency of sexuality beyond its dangerous implications (Allen, 2005). Drawing from the sociology of childhood studies (James et al., 1998), young people are regarded as agents who are invested in sex and sexuality as they interact with each other and experience the social and sexual world. Youth sexualities are constructed through social and cultural processes involving young people’s active participation in sexuality, expressed through gender relations and as pleasure-filled and desirable. Young people build relationships which form an indispensable part of growing up and are not as fickle and frivolous as commonly assumed. This conceptualisation of youth sexualities as based in and motivated by sexual pleasure is controversial especially in the light of adult surveillance of young people’s sexualities. The challenge in the study of youth sexualities is to navigate between the dual concerns which pitch young people as vulnerable and facing sexual dangers – underpinned by an active male and passive female sexuality – whilst recognising their sexual agency, their investments in sexual relationships which are both potentially erotic and enriching experiences in their lives. The conundrum between the ‘sex as risk’ approach and ‘sex as normal’ in the study of youth sexualities produces the vexing question: Are young people allowed to have a sexuality? In addressing this question, many researchers worldwide have sought to explain the social construction of youth sexualities in ways that address vulnerability and agency, pleasure and desire,
as well as risk and enduring patterns of women’s subordination, albeit with contestation, within intimate and romantic partner dynamics.
