Matching Items (2)
Description
Based on the Foucauldian understanding that sexuality discourse operates as a powerful instrument for the regulation of societies and individuals, this research considers how internalized gender and sexuality discourses affect young women's embodied experiences of masturbation, and more broadly their sexual subjectivity and health. Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist perspectives on gender, sexuality, health, and embodiment, I examine female sexual health within a positive rights framework. That is, I view the rights to both sexual safety and pleasure as essential components of female sexual health, and conceptualize girls and young women as potential sexual agents. By asking young women about their lived experiences of self-pleasure, this research challenges not only the historical legacy of pathologizing female desire and pleasure, but also scholars' tendency to construct female sexuality solely in a heteronormative, partnered context. Based on focus groups, interviews, journals, and questionnaires collected from 109 female college students from diverse ethnic, religious, and sexuality backgrounds in Arizona and Michigan, I employ grounded theory to analyze individual feelings and experiences in the context of larger societal discourses. My findings indicate that when girls internalize negative discourses about masturbation (e.g. as sin or secular stigma), general heteronormative sexuality discourses, and a silence around female self-pleasure, there are severe negative consequences for how they understand and experience masturbation. I argue that they engage in sexual self-surveillance that often results in emotional and physical struggles, as well as the re-inscription of hegemonic cultural discourses on female masturbation, bodies, desire, and pleasure. By illustrating how even the most private and `invisible' behavior of masturbation can become a site for regulating female sexuality, this research provides important evidence of the power of increasingly covert mechanisms to govern gendered bodies and subjectivities through self-surveillance. Alternatively, this research also highlights the potential of normalizing self-pleasure for increasing girls' and young women's capacity for resisting oppressive gender and sexuality discourses and behaviors, developing an agentic sexual subjectivity, and feeling sexually empowered. Thus, this research also has practical implications for conceptualizing sexual health for girls and young women in a way that includes the rights to sexual safety and pleasure.
ContributorsFrank, Elena (Author) / Weitz, Rose (Thesis advisor) / Katsulis, Yasmina (Committee member) / Fahs, Breanne (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Sexual satisfaction has been positively linked to both individual and relational wellbeing (Christopher & Sprecher, 2000; Davison, Bell, LaChina, Holden, & Davis, 2009). Further, sexual communication has demonstrated positive impacts on sexual satisfaction (Byers, 2005); yet, research by MacNeil and Byers (2009) found that most people in romantic relationships do not share their sexual preferences with their partner. According to Tolman (2002), women seem to be especially reluctant to communicate sexually, due to the particular societal restrictions placed on expressions of female sexuality and desire. This study aims to understand how emerging adult women communicate with their sexual partners in order to increase pleasure, what barriers exist to sexual communication for these women, and how gendered social norms are expressed in the process. Based on interviews with 19 women between the ages of 20-29, the findings of this study suggest that emerging women often place more weight on social expectations of appropriate female sexual expression than relational context when choosing whether or not and/or how to sexually self-disclose. Further, the women in this study were at varying stages of renegotiating their internalization of the prioritization of male sexual pleasure over female pleasure.
ContributorsFarnworth, Megan Jacobs (Author) / Waldron, Vincent R. (Thesis advisor) / Feinstein, Brian A (Committee member) / Mean, Lindsey (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019