Investigating young people's sexual cultures: an introduction

This special issue has grown out of a small British Academy-funded project in the United Kingdom that ran from 2008 to 2010 and aimed to examine ways of developing research on young people’s sexual cultures. Our backgrounds are in the area of media and cultural studies, and our own work focuses on a range of aspects of sexual culture; in particular, the production, characteristics, use and regulation of sexually explicit media texts and other sexual artefacts (see, for example, Smith 2007a, 2007b, 2010; Attwood 2009, 2010; Attwood and Smith 2010). We were interested in exploring ways of building on earlier work on young people, sex and relationships (for example, Holland et al. 1998) and more recent research (for example, Buckingham and Bragg 2004) that develops this focus in the context of a contemporary media-saturated and technology-focused culture