Mud, Mermaids and Burnt Wedding Dresses: Mapping Queer Becomings in Teen Girls’ Talk on Living with Gender and Sexual Violence

Abstract

In her chapter on ‘geographies of desire’, Deborah Tolman (2002: 172) argues how the significance of where girls live and the histories of sexualities in place is a key mediating feature of how girls come to embody and experience their sexed bodies and sexuality. This was certainly true of our longitudinal ethnographic research with young people (aged 12–14) living and growing up in an ex-mining semi-rural community in the South Wales valleys (UK). Here, ‘growing up girl’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001) and the subject position of girlfriend and mother loomed large (Ivinson & Renold, 2013a). Girls’ talk was infused with tensions that seemed to bear the signs of industrial legacies of what girls and women were expected to do and be. This was most noticeable in their talk of sexual safety and danger. Often, sexual violence was never far away from talk about coupledom and being ‘in relationship’, as the following two examples go some way to illustrate: Kayleigh (age 13): Dafydd… he pushed me on the track before, he did, coz I wouldn’t go out with him … and then he chucked a glass bottle at me . ER: Because you wouldn’t go out with him? Kayleigh: Yeah … and I just chased after him … ER: Did you? Do you fight back if someone does something like that? Kayleigh: Yeah … when somebody gets the bad side of me, I tell you what, I hit the roof (Individual photo-elicitation interview transcript, school classroom, Cwm Dyffryn) These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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