Reframing Risqué/Risky: Queer Temporalities, Teenage Sexting, and Freedom of Expression

Lara Karaian,Katherine Van Meyl

doi:10.3390/laws4010018

Abstract

Canada recognizes young people’s constitutionally protected freedom of expression and consequently their right to engage in a narrow subset of consensual sexually expressive practices without being prosecuted as child pornographers. Nevertheless, numerous anti-sexting campaigns decry the possibility of voluntary and “safe sexting” let alone the affordances of adolescents’ self-produced and consensually shared sexual imagery. In this article, we argue that these actors have erred in their construction of youths’ risqué imagery as inherently risky and thus governable. We propose that anti-sexting frameworks—which conflate consensual and nonconsensual sexting and which equate both with negative risks that purportedly outweigh the value and benefits of the practice—rely on a calculus that is fundamentally flawed. This article consists of two main parts. In Part I, we map and trouble the ways in which responses to consensual teenage sexting emphasize the practice’s relationship to embodied, financial, intimate and legal risks. In Part II, we suggest that research examining consensual adolescent sexting and young people’s rights to freedom of expression consider alternative theoretical frameworks, such as queer theories of temporality, when calculating the risk of harm of adolescent sexual imagery.

Highlights

The criminalization of consensual teenage sexting—defined here as the creation and distribution of nude, semi-nude and sexually explicit imagery via digital means—is well documented in the US and Australia 1
The media has highlighted the results of emerging studies which suggest that “the cause-and-effect link made by the media, politicians and parents between persistent bullying and the victim’s decision to end their life...oversimplifies teen suicide and cyberbullying at the expense of recognizing the complex set of mental health issues that are usually at play in many cases” [46,47]. While these collective risks have generated a great deal of concern as well as institutional responses [9,27,31], legislators and the courts have historically framed the key risks of child pornography as its facilitation of child sexual abuse
To the extent that consensual teenage sexting has been constructed by mainstream culture and law as on the margins of normative sexual relations and expressive practices and as a threat to young peoples’ future selves, we suggest that it can be reframed as enacting a “nonnormative logics and organization of community, sexual identity, embodiment and activity in space and time” ([23], p. 6)

Summary

Introduction

The criminalization of consensual teenage sexting—defined here as the creation and distribution of nude, semi-nude and sexually explicit imagery via digital means—is well documented in the US and Australia 1. The media has highlighted the results of emerging studies which suggest that “the cause-and-effect link made by the media, politicians and parents between persistent bullying and the victim’s decision to end their life...oversimplifies teen suicide and cyberbullying at the expense of recognizing the complex set of mental health issues that are usually at play in many cases” [46,47] While these collective risks have generated a great deal of concern as well as institutional responses [9,27,31], legislators and the courts have historically framed the key risks of child pornography as its facilitation of child sexual abuse. While these are important interventions, we suggest that any assessment of the “reasoned risks” of sexting requires legislators and courts to reconsider how the risks of sexting are given meaning and made real, as well as the value and affordances that may flow from the practice 17

Calculated Risk and the Role of Queer Time

Findings

Conclusions