Sexual Narratives Research Articles

Canvassing Taboo: African Sexuality as Post-Cultural Discourse in the Kenyan Disconnect 2 and Nafsi Films

Sexuality narratives in the Kenyan film industry play a crucial role in directly and indirectly shaping narrative interests, addressing stakeholder concerns, and delivering effective messaging. Locally, these narratives are closely monitored, regulated, and classified due to their sensitive nature, compounded by their evolving nature as newer sexuality concepts integrate with traditional paradigms. This study aims to explore the social conceptualization of African Sexuality as a Post-Cultural Discourse in the Kenyan films Disconnect 2 and Nafsi. Utilizing film analysis and key informant interviews with industry professionals, the research reveals that post-cultural sexuality narratives are presented as non-threatening sexual ideals and practices that can coexist harmoniously with traditional sexual paradigms. Recommendations include establishing a structured hierarchy for sexual narratives in film production to depict both traditional and post-cultural themes effectively. By incorporating consequences within the post-cultural discourse, audiences can better engage with and understand the complex sexual ideologies presented in these films.

Sensate focus: addressing potential preconceived notions of black sexuality

As researchers of African Americans, we realized there are few studies on Black sexuality and pleasure. Most do not focus on how stigmas and stereotypes regarding Black sexuality have influenced self and relational narratives associated with sex. Yet as seen in modern day Black American and mainstream culture, sex is often highlighted in the Black community, sending performative messages and unrealistic expectations on physical anatomy that limits expansion of mutual sexual pleasure. Using phenomenology and the Feedback Informed Treatment (FIT) Outcome assessment, we interviewed 10 African American participants, 7 female, 2 male, and 1 male-identifying. The focus was on participants understanding of good and meaningful sex to determine if any internalized stereotypical narratives of Black sexuality was present and the influence of a culturally sensitive workshop exploring the sensate focus approach. Through thematic analysis, five themes were found: (a) healthy communication, (b) mindfulness, (c) education and unlearning, (d) emotional connection, (e) mutual pleasure. Although identifying a limited amount of internalized racial and sexual stereotypes among the participants, researchers were able to determine a significant influence in participants understanding of what good and meaningful sex is following their experience attending a sensate focus workshop. Implications and future discussions to further understand internalized assumptions of Black sexuality is recommended for both clinical and research perspectives.

“To Become a Warrior and a Son to My Father”: Aleksandr Aleksandrov’s (Nadezhda Durova) Notes of a Cavalry Maiden (1836) as Transgender Autobiography

ABSTRACT: Transgender autobiographies have been a subject of narratology since the 1990s. Most of these studies have focused predominantly on twentieth- and, later, twenty-first-century texts, guided by the increasing availability of primary sources and the temporal limitations of transgender history. And yet, as Jay Prosser argued in his influential 1998 work Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Sexuality , “even without the official discourse of sex change, the plot lines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transgendered subjects are remarkably consistent with those of contemporary transsexuals” (133). This article expands the chronology and geography of narrato-logical analysis of this genre through reading Notes of a Cavalry Maiden [Zapiski kavalerist-devitsy] (1836) by Aleksandr Aleksandrov (Nadezhda Durova) (1783–1866), a Russian-Ukrainian hero of the Napoleonic wars, as a transgender autobiography. This reading brings into consideration new forms, affects, and narrative structures as constituent elements of trans narratives and has the potential to expand anglophone trans imaginaries past the confines of their current locations and temporalities.

The traumatic narratives of sexuality in Taiwanese writer Shao-Lin Chu’s trilogy

Abstract This paper explores the narratives of the Taiwanese woman novelist Shao-Lin Chu’s trilogy to see how the problem of female sexuality and resistance to parental wedlock tragedy becomes a traumatic experience. The traumatic symptoms in the narratives are taken as Peircean signs for tracing the negative influences of traumatic experiences on the formation of personal identity and the associated depressive disorder. The scenes portrayed in Chu’s traumatic narratives of female and male sexuality are implications and representations of how sexuality is conceptualized and confined by the traumatic events while backgrounded with regulations and restrictions of a traditional society. The stories of Chu’s female narrators reveal the persistent and resisting feminine power. This paper adopts the concept of feminist narrative to analyze the traumatic and sexual events in Chu’s trilogy. The decoding and re-encoding of resistance and sexuality in the traumatic narratives prove that the narratological textual analysis and semiotic reading strategy together offer a solid approach to the discovery of the persistent traumatic impacts of the secret veiled in the narratives and reveal the probable strength of compassion that has its roots derived from deplorable trauma but later transforms itself to stimulate a positive reconstruction of the traumatic survivors’ identity.

Pornographic turning points in the life course: uses of pornography in sexual self-development

ABSTRACT With the ubiquity of pornography, the connection between the way individuals use pornography and the development of their sexual selfhood merits deeper qualitative analysis and exploration. The current study gathered sexual narratives from 50 participants and examined the way they claimed to use, or disregard, pornography, and the impact on their sexual self-development. Uses for pornography included educational purposes/constructing a sexual knowledge base, arousal, masturbation, learning sexual techniques, sexual exploration, and relationship enhancement. Regardless of the use, utilization of porn, or, in some cases, lack thereof, was determined to often act as a turning point in the trajectory of an individual’s sexual self-development over the course of one’s life.

Adolescents’ Remembering of Sexual Television Narratives and Their Relations with Positive Sexuality Components: A Biographic Resonance Perspective

ABSTRACT Little to no knowledge exists about television’s role in the sexual socialization of adolescents from the perspective of remembrance and resonance of narratives dealing with sexuality. The current study aims to fill this gap in the literature by using three-wave data of 703 respondents (51.5% assigned female at birth, M age = 15.44; SD = 1.43). We explored reciprocal relations between adolescents’ remembrance of resonating positive and negative messages included in sexual narratives on television and their positive sexuality components (e.g. sexual self-acceptance). Structural equation modeling showed that a respectful approach to different sexual expressions was related to the remembering of negative sexual television messages five months later. No other significant relations were found. Further, no differences were found based on adolescents’ sexual experiences. The findings are discussed in the realm of the potential of using the biographic resonance theory (BRT) of eudaimonic entertainment media to further explore the socializing potential of sexual television narratives.

Mbari and uncle Nicodemus: Male representations in the heterosexual discourse among female undergraduates in Nigeria

This paper examines the various labels ascribed to males in the heterosexual discourse among female undergraduates in Nigeria. Insights from Community of Practice and Sexual Script Theory were used to demonstrate the use of situated linguistic choices to establish the differentials in male sexual behaviours. Data for the study were generated through participant observation and unstructured interviews with the aid of audiotape recordings and field notes. The study involves a representative sample of 22 female undergraduates who served as participants and research assistants. The findings reveal that situated language practices stimulate heterosexual discourses where female undergraduates creatively ascribe labels to the different males’ sexual scripts. The labels include those related to male sexual performance, body size and size of sex organs, financial and marital status, familial and gatekeeping roles, and other routine sexual behaviours shown by men in sexual phases such as advances, arousal and intercourse. The scripts are also combined to re-enact the peculiar sexual narratives by the female students that show emerging sexual orientations. It is believed that the categorisation of such males’ sexual behaviours in the University social contexts, would provide a basis for comparison with the sexual practices of other young adults’ social groups across the globe.

Negotiating body, sex, and self-fashioning in Fújì music

A growing body of literature interrogating the voluptuous rendering of human sexuality in popular culture has focused on sex scripting in Western films and the commodification of women and their representations in popular media. However, exploration of how linguistic metaphors and innuendoes are deployed to affirm or contest expressions of desires that are sacred, sensitive, or taboo in Fuji music has received little scholarly attention. Of what significance is contesting social structure on sexuality to Fuji as a Nigerian popular musical genre? This empirical study explores this question while drawing on an ethnographic and interpretive literary analysis. Drawing from Hakim’s notion of ‘erotic capital’, the analyses and discussion operationalize the sexual scripting framework, Black feminist thought, and African/Black revolutionary art. I argue that sexual narratives and connotations in Fuji performance are often generated as powerful resources to contest sexual sensitivity and push back on silence on sexuality, negotiate and solicit artistic identity, and exact influence on public conversations on sexuality. By and large, this article affirms the engagement of sensual lyrical content as constitutive of revolutionary art and a social transformative site in which the body is negotiated as a catalyst for sexonomics in the contemporary ‘ear-tearing pant-and-bra’ musical evocations.

Iatrogenic necropolitics: forced anal examinations and state-sanctioned homophobia

In 2016, Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organisation, published a report on the use of forced anal examinations to identify and prosecute putative ‘homosexuals’. The report provided detailed descriptions and first-person accounts of these examinations in several countries in the Middle East and Africa. Drawing on theories of iatrogenesis and queer necropolitics, this paper uses these accounts and other reports of forced anal examinations to explore the role of medical providers in the ‘diagnosis’ and prosecution of homosexuality. The goal of these medical examinations is explicitly punitive rather than therapeutic, making them quintessential examples of iatrogenic clinical encounters which harm rather than heal. We argue that these examinations naturalise socioculturally derived beliefs about bodies and gender that construct homosexuality as ‘readable’ on the body through close medical inspection. These acts of inspection and ‘diagnosis’ reveal broader hegemonic state narratives of heteronormative gender and sexuality, both within countries as well as internationally as different state actors circulate and share these narratives. This article highlights the entanglement of medical and state actors, as well as contextualises the practice of forced anal examination within its colonial roots. Our analysis offers the potential for advocacy and holding medical professions and states accountable.

Contemplating the Lived Theology of the Devadāsīs as Decolonial Epistemology in World Christianity

This paper will contribute to decolonial efforts that seek to address the role of power and colonialism in knowledge production in Christian theology, with particular focus on the devadāsīs of South India. It will look to the context of the devadāsīs, otherwise referred to as sacred sex workers, in South India, and argue that the hybrid religiosity and silenced epistemology of the subaltern women has the potential to challenge dominant ways of contemplating Christ in World Christianity. It suggests that such religiosity interrupts normalised notions of Christianity that have further marginalised the oppressed women, as the lived religiosity of the devadāsīs acts as a challenge to Eurocentric theology and mission that has systematised ‘the poor’ into deserving and undeserving based upon dichotomous notions of decency. Inspired by the indecent theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid, the paper suggests that an indecent epistemology shaped by the sexual narratives of the oppressed brings to the forefront intersectional narratives of struggle in Christianity that offer prophetic ways of contemplating Christ.

Engagement with Master and Alternative Narratives of Gender and Sexuality Among LGBTQ+ Youth in the Digital Age

Gender and sexuality are contentious political issues in the US, with a resurgence of traditional master narratives for gender following decades of advances for gender equality. To understand how today’s LGBTQ+ youth navigate this narrative landscape in a polymedia context, we conducted social media tour interviews with 20 LGBTQ+ adolescents (aged 16–19), recording audiovisual data as they guided us through important posts on their top three public social media platforms. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we found that our participants were engaging with both longstanding master narratives (e.g., traditional gender roles) and contemporary alternative narratives (e.g., gender as non-binary) using three key navigational strategies for engaging with narratives on social media platforms: seeking and sharing information, creating queer community, and making choices about visibility and permanence. The meaning and purpose of these strategies for participants, both individually and collectively, could not be fully understood apart from three key navigational contexts: the traditional gender narrative, white liberal community context, and platform affordances. Our results demonstrate that narrative engagement for contemporary LGBTQ+ adolescents is deeply influenced by personal polymedia environments, identity intersections, and power structures shaping possibilities for individual identity expression and collective cultural transformation.

Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo

Review: <i>The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging</i>, by Rebecca Wanzo

Rites of Passage to Patriarchy: Adolescent Boys’ Narratives of Sexuality and Fertility in Rural Northern KwaZulu-Natal

This article reports on a qualitative study that sought to examine understandings of sexuality and fertility among 18–19-year-old adolescent boys in rural northern KwaZulu-Natal. Adolescent boys’ constructions of sexuality and fertility in this study reflect a complex fusion of sociocultural processes, religion and unequal gender norms. How young men understand these factors tends to encourage risky sexual behaviour, and often leads to pregnancies among adolescent girls. In-depth individual interviews and a focus group discussion were conducted with six adolescent boys attending primary healthcare clinics in northern KwaZulu-Natal. Central to the adolescent boys’ discourses about sexuality and fertility was the desire to achieve the status of manhood. The findings suggest that adolescent boys were “inducted” into manhood as they learnt to wield gendered power in heterosexual relationships. In assuming patriarchal power and attaining the status of manhood, adolescent boys objectified girls and reduced them to unequal sexual partners whose role is to bear them children.

Spectacular remains: Black celebrity, death and the aesthetics of autopsy

ABSTRACT This article analyses two ‘famous’ dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman’s dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole’s description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women’s celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific ‘order’ of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time.

The Fakes of Sexual Narrative in the Information Warfare

The proposed article is based on the report presented at the conference “The Days of Science at NaUKMA” on January 26, 2022, just one month before the Russian invasion. Back then it seemed impossible. The active phase of the previous military confrontation ended in 2015 and it transformed into a positional and hybrid warfare. Since then, some representatives of Ukrainian scientific community, under the guise of “science without politics,” continued to cooperate with Russia, from publishing their research in Russian journals to holding joint conferences and more. The author of the article, despite the rejection, did not see this as an intention but rather a misunderstanding of the objective reality. Therefore, the purpose of the report was to prove that hybrid warfare is a covert but real war in the context of post-truth.Post-truth as a mode of meanings functioning is a shift of boundaries between the real and the imaginary; it does not equal lie but rather is negligence, indifference to the truth, which entails uncertainty of positions and substitutions of concepts. Fake, on the other hand, is a specific form of misinformation which has accompanied hybrid warfare. However, on February 24, 2022, the war took the form of an open escalation, the planning of which was denied by Russia in accordance with the genre of hybrid warfare with its cortege of fakes.The choice of the topic focused on the sexual narrative is relevant, in particular due to the public joke of Russian President Putin towards Ukrainian President Zelensky at a press conference in Moscow on February 8, 2022, directly related to rape, which became widely known in the media. As it turned out later, it was not a joke but a certain affirmation, an intention of thinking, which turned into mass rapes of Ukrainian women and children by Russian soldiers in the new stage of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Embodying Difference: Critical Phenomenology and Narratives Of Disability, Race, and Sexuality

Book Review of Embodying Difference: Critical Phenomenology and Narratives Of Disability, Race, and Sexuality by Simon Dickel

COMIC SEX AND ‘FRAGMENTARY THINKING’: DAMOXENUS, FR. 3PCG

AbstractOur extant texts never give a fully comprehensive or representative impression of classical literature. Fragments are valuable because they tell—or hint at—a different story. They represent vestigial traces of a counterfactual alternative version of literary history, and they offer tantalizing glimpses of voices or varieties of human experience that were (accidentally or deliberately) excluded from the classical canon. To ‘think fragmentarily’ is to think beyond the canon and to question traditionally dominant modes of thought. This article uses a neglected fragment of Damoxenus (fr. 3 PCG) as a case study for ‘fragmentary thinking’. This extraordinary fragment reveals that Damoxenus’ comedy dramatized a homosexual love story, in sharp contrast to the familiar heteronormative marriage plots of Menander and other Greek and Roman comic playwrights. Careful examination of a single fragment can prompt us to re-examine conventional scholarly narratives of sexuality in New Comedy.

Sexual intimacy and aging: An integrative framework to promote intimacy resilience in couple therapy.

In our work at the Intimacies Project at The Ackerman Institute for the Family we became aware of a gap in attention about sexuality and aging in the couple and family therapy field. In this article, we provide an integrative framework to guide therapists on how to address problems of sexuality and aging in the therapy room. Starting from considerations about the social context of aging and the self of the therapist, we contend that when normative sexual challenges become entangled with stigma, misconceptions about sexuality, limiting gender narratives, vulnerabilities, and defensive postures, they often result in emotional and sexual shutdowns. Through a combination of the vulnerability cycle with an expansive definition of sexuality, we demonstrate how we deconstruct impasses, disentangle normative quandaries from reactive dynamics, and help couples transform their sexual narratives. We outline how we conduct individual sessions to obtain relational sexual histories, utilize Sensate Focus as a mindful touch exercise, and help partners expand their sexual menus beyond penetration and orgasms. We also describe relational skills that may need to be strengthened to help aging couples deal with the ebb and flow of intimacy, sustaining resilience over time.

Climax as Work: Heteronormativity, Gender Labor, and the Gender Gap in Orgasms.

Gender scholars have addressed a variety of gender gaps between men and women, including a gender gap in orgasms. In this mixed-methods study of heterosexual Canadians, we examine how men and women engage in gender labor that limits women’s orgasms relative to men. With representative survey data, we test existing hypotheses that sexual behaviors and relationship contexts contribute to the gender gap in orgasms. We confirm previous research that sexual practices focusing on clitoral stimulation are associated with women’s orgasms. With in-depth interview data from a subsample of 40 survey participants, we extend this research to show that both men and women engage in gender labor to explain and justify the gender gap in orgasms. Relying on an essentialist view of gender, a narrow understanding of what counts as sex, and moralistic language that recalls the sexual double standard, our participants craft a narrative of women’s orgasms as work and men’s orgasms as natural. The work to produce this gendered narrative of sexuality mirrors the gender labor that takes place in the bedroom, where both women and men engage in sexual behaviors that emphasize men’s pleasure to a greater extent than women’s.

Virgin Territories

AbstractIn this wide-ranging conversation, David Serlin (University of California, San Diego) and Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine) discuss questions of sexual consent and sexual violence in the visual culture of early Christian art as inspired by Betancourt’s recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (2020). Drawing on rare manuscripts and other objects of worship from institutional archives, Betancourt analyzes and contextualizes numerous Byzantine visual texts featuring often confounding representations of sexual acts or gendered behavior that later Christian interpreters would treat as conventional or settled. For Betancourt, early Christian authors and artists were far more open to troubling and experimenting with depictions of sexual and gendered narratives than many medievalists (and, importantly, non-medievalists) have been trained to see.