Mud, mermaids and burnt wedding dresses: mapping queer becomings in teen girls’ talk on living with gender and sexual violence

Emma Renold; Gabrielle Ivinson

doi:10.1057/9781137353399_15

Mud, mermaids and burnt wedding dresses: mapping queer becomings in teen girls’ talk on living with gender and sexual violence

Emma Renold, Gabrielle Ivinson

Cardiff University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

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)

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation
Editors	Emma Renold, Jessica Ringrose, R. Danielle Egan
Place of Publication	Basingstoke
Publisher	Palgrave Macmillan
Pages	239-258
Number of pages	20
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-137-35339-9
ISBN (Print)	978-1-349-55581-9
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353399_15
Publication status	Published - 9 Jun 2015

Bibliographical note

This publication is based on research supported by the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant number: RES-576-25-0021) and the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales. The main research team included: Gabrielle Ivinson, Emma Renold, Kate Moles and Mariann Martsin. All place names and participants’ names are pseudonyms.

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Access to Document

10.1057/9781137353399_15Licence: Unspecified

Cite this

Mud, mermaids and burnt wedding dresses: mapping queer becomings in teen girls’ talk on living with gender and sexual violence. / Renold, Emma; Ivinson, Gabrielle.
Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation. ed. / Emma Renold; Jessica Ringrose; R. Danielle Egan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. p. 239-258.

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter

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Mud, mermaids and burnt wedding dresses: mapping queer becomings in teen girls’ talk on living with gender and sexual violence

Abstract

Bibliographical note

UN SDGs

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