Her sexual self: a narrative investigation of young women's sexual subjectivities

In scholarship on women’s sexuality, there has been an increasing interest in sexual subjectivities – that is, how women make sense of and ‘story’ their experiences of sexuality. However, much of the literature presents an unhelpful dichotomy whereby young women are framed as either victims/cultural dupes or as radically empowered, always ‘up-for-it’ agents. Such a polarisation suggests that a more complex analysis of young women’s sexual subjectivities would be beneficial. This thesis aims to provide a nuanced examination of young women’s sexualities by exploring the ways young women’s sexual selves can be understood as both agentic (chosen and self-directed) and determined (i.e. constituted and constrained by forces outside of themselves). A narrative methodological design has been employed. Twenty-six life-history-style interviews were conducted with heterosexual and non-heterosexual women aged between 18 and 31 in order to explore the complex ways in which the young women’s sexual subjectivities are entangled with the (neo-liberal) Western culture in which they are produced. A post-structuralist approach utilises Foucault’s later work on ‘care of the self’ to identify some of the manoeuvres that the young women agentically employ to transform their sexual selves. An auto-ethnographic approach and a strong commitment to self-reflexivity leads to the identification of what is defined as an ‘unconscious agency bias’ – that is, the tendency for researchers in neo-liberal contexts to inadvertently over-emphasise agency, sometimes precluding visibility of other interpretations of a scenario. Finally, the thesis contains a number of ‘messy’ stories including young women’s accounts of intermittent sexual ‘rampaging’, as well as a fraught – yet critical – exploration of the complexities of consent, particularly with regards to the distinctions between non-consensual and unwanted sex. By integrating the empirical, the theoretical and the self-reflexive, this thesis aims to extend the extant literature on young women’s sexual subjectivities, by providing new case studies, a more finely grained and textured discussion of agency, and an exploration of the cultural imperative to experience sexual pleasure threaded throughout the young women’s accounts