Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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    How do youth, parents, and educators use discursive sexual scripts to make sense of youth engagement with internet pornography?
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2022-12) Healy-Cullen S; Morison T; Ross K; Taylor JE
    In this article, we explore how culturally available sexual scripts are drawn on to make meaning of young people’s engagement with internet pornography (IP). We draw on a version of sexual scripting theory developed by feminist discursive scholars to perform a critical thematic analysis of 24 interviews with parents, educators, and young people. We identify three main scripts commonly drawn on by participants to make sense of youth engagement with IP, namely: a script of harm, a heterosexual script, and a developmentalist script. These scripts, often interweaving with one another, were deployed in various ways, firstly, as ‘risk talk’ and, secondly, as ‘resistant talk’. While both adults and youth engaged with dominant (‘risk’) and alternative (‘resistant’) talk, adults primarily positioned youth within ‘risk talk’. We show how alternative ‘resistant talk’ disrupts common, scripted ways of accounting for youth engagement with IP in a way that demonstrates more nuanced sexual subjectivities – particularly among youth – than the traditional media effects paradigm acknowledges. Importantly, our findings show how, within discursive restraints, essentialized gender constructions can be resisted to position youth as agentic sexual subjects.
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    What does it mean to be ‘porn literate’? Perspectives of young people, parents and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 5/04/2023) Healy-Cullen S; Morison T; Taylor J; Taylor K
    Porn literacy education is a pedagogical strategy responding to youth engagement with pornography through digital media. The approach is intended to increase young people's knowledge and awareness regarding the portrayal of sexuality in Internet pornography. However, what being 'porn literate' entails, and what a porn literacy education curricula should therefore include, is not a settled matter. Recognising the importance of end-user perspectives, 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents, teachers and young people in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and analysed via critical, constructionist thematic analysis. Participants drew on a developmentalist discourse and a discourse of harm to construct porn literacy education as a way to inoculate young people against harmful effects, distortions of reality, and unhealthy messages. In addition to this dominant construction of porn literacy education, we identified talk that to some extent resisted these dominant discourses. Building on these instances of resistance, and asset-based constructions of youth based on their agency and capability, we point to an ethical sexual citizenship pedagogy as an alternative approach to porn literacy education.
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    Muted resistance: The deployment of youth voice in news coverage of young women’s sexuality in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (SAGE Journals, 1/02/2020) Morison T; Herbert S
    Youth sexuality is typically constructed as a social problem, and associated with a range of negative consequences for larger society and for young people themselves—especially young women. The media play a role in perpetuating this dominant construction, but may also offer a space for resistance. In this article, mainstream news media reportage on youth sexual and reproductive issues in Aotearoa are discursively analysed to identify instances of resistance to oppressive discourses. Taking a feminist poststructuralist perspective, the aim is to connect news reporting, as a representational practice, with broader relations of power. The focus of the analysis, therefore, is on whether and how young people are allowed a voice in news reportage, and to what effect their voices are deployed. The analysis demonstrates not only that youth voice is relatively muted in comparison to experts, but also that it is frequently used to reinforce the dominant constructions of youth sexuality (as problematic and risky). Yet, instances of resistance are also evident. These are assessed in relation to their impact on gender power relations and possibilities for amplifying resistance are discussed.