Bad boys telling sexist stories?

Abstract

In a response to our paper on drinking stories, published recently n IJDP (Tutenges & Sandberg, 2013), Radcliffe and Measham (2014) rgue that there is something missing in our study. They write hat, although we “discuss the way in which acts of public sex, tripping and the commercial sex industry feature in the transressions recounted and celebrated by young people in their story elling, the analysis is starkly silent regarding the relations of gener, sexuality and the taken for granted heteronormativity that haracterise many of the stories” (Radcliffe and Measham, 2014). hey note, moreover, that the stories in our paper suggest “complex nd unequal gendered and racialised relations” in certain drinkng cultures and parts of the night-time economy – something our nalysis fails to address. The drinking stories we have collected over the years (Tutenges Rod, 2009; Tutenges & Sandberg, 2013), and those collected by thers (e.g. Workman, 2001), do indeed often include sexist, homohobic and also racist elements. As Radcliffe and Measham suggest, he stories may be used to study the contested position of women n the night-time economy, which in many parts of the world feaures vast numbers of female sex workers, strippers and semi-nude artenders. Generally speaking, the night-time economy caters for he desires of the heterosexual man (or some stereotypical version f the heterosexual man), while commodifying and capitalising on emale bodies (Andrews, 2009; Tutenges, 2012). We agree that it is time to explore the sexual, gendered and acialised dimensions of narratives (e.g. Grundetjern & Sandberg, 012; Sandberg, 2009; Sandberg & Pedersen, 2011). One way to roceed would be to draw on fashionable theories from gender tudies (Butler, 1990) or post-colonial studies (Said, 1978) and mploy the familiar binary and hierarchically arranged concepts