‘This Sex Thing Is such a Big Issue now’: Sex Talk and Identities in Three Groups of Adolescent Girls

Abstract

In this chapter, I shall demonstrate that the sex talk of adolescent girls can constitute a rich resource for the discursive construction of identities that transcend sexuality and highlight the complex interplay between gender, ethnicity and social class. I will present results from a study analysing informal talk about a wide spectrum of sexual experience from three friendship groups of British girls from different ethnic, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. My linguistic analysis of the girls’ talk has a twofold aim. Firstly, it examines the construction of heterosexuality from a cross-cultural perspective, combining foci on both local and extralocal dimensions of identity.1 Secondly, it seeks to Investigate sex and sexuality In relation to gender norms and practices and, therefore, shows how the girls in my study use their sex talk not only to identify as heterosexual or to signal varying degrees of sexual experience, but also to carry out important gender work. In fact, even talk about desire, which, according to Kullck (2000: 270), ‘makes sexuality sexuality’ Is used by the Bangladeshi and white/mixed British girls In my study to position themselves In relation to dominant discourses about gender from their respective sociocultural backgrounds.2 Although Kullck (2000: 270) warns that research should not ‘vaporize sexuality Into gender’, Kullck’s more recent collaboration with Cameron (2003) acknowledges the strong link between sexuality and gender.