Abstract
This chapter explores how a feminist posthuman and new materialism research framework can help us to rethink and rework sexual regulation and harassment in secondary schools. We consider two case studies from our joint research project ‘Feminism in Schools: Mapping Impact in Practice’. Drawing on theoretical and methodological insights from Deleuze and Guattari, Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad, we outline our ideas of enacting ‘posthuman feminist intra-activist research assemblages’. Using a diffractive lens to bring disparate moments of our research data together, we explore the fleshy materialism of phallogocentric touch, sound, and space. Politically, we engage with Barad’s notion of researcher ‘response-ability’ to consider what can and cannot be spoken about, and what is blocked, re-routed, and transformed in relation to sexualities research in secondary schools.
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Notes
- 1.
The initial funding was a Cardiff University Research impact fund, which paid for the time of one final year undergraduate student to gain experience of qualitative methods and engagement work. We have since received support for web visibility and networking activities from GEA, through a project called GELS, Gender Equalities Leadership in Schools Network http://www.genderandeducation.com/6462-2/
- 2.
The academic team included Jessalynn Keller (University of East Anglia), Andy Phippen (Plymouth University), Emma Renold, Victoria Edwards, Gianna Tomassi (Cardiff University), Jessica Ringrose, Victoria Showunmi, and Hanna Retallack (UCL IOE).
- 3.
To date, ten diverse secondary schools across England and Wales, including mixed, single-sex, and fee-paying institutions and from a range of religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. In this chapter, we consider the original pilot project which generated qualitative data with 75 young people, five academics, and five teachers, using a combination of semi-structured group and individual interviews (see Ringrose and Renold 2015 for further details). All young people’s names presented throughout this paper are pseudonyms.
- 4.
Indeed, this area features in the sensationalist sexpose reality MTV show ‘The Valleys’ http://www.mtv.co.uk/the-valleys.
- 5.
‘Meet’ is particularly apt here, as in the valleys, ‘meet’ means ‘deep kissing’.
- 6.
The word–image–affect maps began with young people furiously scribbling all the events that happened to them in school which they wanted to stop. Jackson Pollock ‘drip painting’ style (see Renold 2016) the blank sheets were soon populated, and the group added new words, phrases, and illustrations during each session, including attaching their feelings in discourse or image to each experience (e.g. angry, upset, crying—see Figs. 31.1 and 31.2). We call them ‘affective’ because it draws attention to the spontaneity and unarticulated, unspoken affective intensities that were circulating during the process of producing the maps.
- 7.
Vicky introduced the group to the poem, ‘Daughter’ by Phoebe Struckes’ to show young people that poems do not have to rhyme. This seemed to give them the confidence to develop their own poem from their word-maps.
- 8.
- 9.
The researchers in this school were Jessalynn Keller and Jessica Ringrose.
- 10.
At the end of the six weeks, we also held a feminist Saturday at HTH with three of the other research schools, where we continued larger group workshops on blogging, social media awareness, and intersectional feminism.
- 11.
Boner is commonly slang for an erect penis.
- 12.
Referring to the ‘haptic’ quality of the image (i.e. the boner) conjured through discourse enables us to emphasize the ways in which the materiality of image touches us—how it is physically felt.
- 13.
For more on Twitter, Instagram, and other forms of social media feminism and digital activism emergent from the Feminism in Schools’ project, see Retallack et al. (2016) and Ringrose and Renold (forthcoming).
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Renold, E., Ringrose, J. (2017). Pin-Balling and Boners: The Posthuman Phallus and Intra-Activist Sexuality Assemblages in Secondary School. In: Allen, L., Rasmussen, M.L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sexuality Education. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40033-8_31
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