VII. Discourses of Desire as Governmentality: Young Women, Sexuality and the Significance of Safe Spaces

Abstract

In this article I claim that, to some considerable extent, the emergence of a genuine discourse of young women's sexual desire has both already occurred and is not unproblematic. In many ways, young women are afforded more opportunities to speak, enact and display sexual desire than ever before. The impact of feminist and sexual liberationist paradigms has been felt across popular culture and public policy -- from Sex and the City to harm-minimization sex-education programmes in some curricula -- where we witness a proliferation of images and languages around young female sexual desire. While there is much to be celebrated in this, here I want to open up some questions about the regulatory elements of this public emergence of a discourse of desire. I pursue the lesser acknowledged but equally significant concept raised in Fine's paper, that of the 'safe space', to identify how and where some young women articulate desire for themselves, and to problematize a simple eliciting of discourses in light of the ways these can be appropriate and misused. (excerpt)

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