Abstract

As a result of failures in the healthcare profession, and perhaps also in sexual health education, women are facing barriers when attempting to express, control, and explore their own sexuality. In response to the constraints of medical and educational discourses of sexuality and the disregard of female perspectives in traditional forms of health communication, some women are seeking out alternative sites for communicating about sexuality. This major research paper focuses on the expression of knowledge and experience regarding women’s sexuality, sexual practices, and sexual health in online spaces. To evaluate the potentially beneficial and damaging effects of exchanging knowledge online, the construction, negotiation, and legitimization of expertise will be considered through a theoretical lens focused on sexual storytelling and dominant feminist and health discourses. This study provides an inductive qualitative discourse analysis of three publicly available websites: girlonthenet.com, carasutra.co.uk, and sluttygirlproblems.com. The discourses of both authors and readers are analyzed through a coding scheme derived from a number of sources from the relevant literature. The broader categories of coding allow for an understanding of how expertise is constructed, while the subcategories within these headings enable analysis of the ways in which expertise is legitimized, enforced, and policed between experts and non-experts. This particular categorization of expertise is considered through a perspective that prioritizes the personal sexual narrative as a valid form of sexual knowledge exchange, while assessing the validity, value, and influence of this knowledge on women and their individual sexuality, sexual practices, and sexual health.

Highlights

  • IntroductionFeona Attwood (2009) asserts that “blogging about sex is dominated heavily by women” (p. 6)

  • Women are facing barriers when attempting to express, control, and explore their own sexuality in part because of failures in the healthcare profession, and perhaps in sexual health education. First among these failures may be that women’s perspectives of sexuality and sexual health continue to be devalued in healthcare settings. This suggests that the constraints of medical and educational discourses of sexuality and the disregard for female perspectives in traditional forms of communication may have led some women to seek out alternative sites for communicating about sexuality

  • Method of analysis I have conducted an inductive qualitative discourse analysis, as my primary purpose in this major research project is to contribute to the development of “a model or theory about the underlying structure of experiences or processes that are evident in the text data” (Thomas, 2006, p. 238.) I am seeking to understand the process through which women establish expertise in these online spaces through the ways in which they produce and exchange this knowledge, while gaining insight into their positive or destructive sexual experiences

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Summary

Introduction

Feona Attwood (2009) asserts that “blogging about sex is dominated heavily by women” (p. 6). First among these failures may be that women’s perspectives of sexuality and sexual health continue to be devalued in healthcare settings This suggests that the constraints of medical and educational discourses of sexuality and the disregard for female perspectives in traditional forms of communication may have led some women to seek out alternative sites for communicating about sexuality. Women are using these sites to obtain what they have been denied in medical or educational environments: “validation...from communicating in public” If the growing prevalence of online sex communities is challenging the marginalization of women in discourses of sexuality, it is important to take a closer look at the knowledge that women are producing and receiving in these spaces

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