Platforming positivity: Young people's negotiations of sex and body positivity in digital and everyday life

<p><strong>Sex positivity has roots in liberatory, feminist sexual politics and the movement has gained cultural momentum in recent years. In the context of #MeToo, the re-popularisation of feminism, a rise in overt misogyny, and the tremendous presence of body positivity on social media, sex positivity has re-emerged as people seek to understand what it means to be a sexual subject in this turbulent socio-political context. Sex positivity has flourished on online, and research suggests it disrupts heteronormative representations of sexuality, women’s bodies, and centers the pursuit of pleasure. Overall, scholarly understandings of sex and body positivity have shifted in relation to contemporary feminist values, affective norms, and emergent youth sexual cultures. Further, although sex and body positivity share common political origins, they have largely been considered as separate movements, and our understandings of how they overlap are limited. For young women and gender diverse people, social media platforms are a key site for negotiating norms and practices to do with sex, bodies, and gender. And, as everyday life and digital worlds become increasingly convergent it is important to understand how sex, bodies, and sex positivity are constructed on Instagram, and how young people consume and interact with this content.</strong></p><p>In this thesis, I use multimodal and feminist critical discourse analysis to extend current understandings of how sex, bodies, and sexuality are constructed on social media and in everyday life. Chapter 5 examines content posted to one body positivity and three sex positivity Instagram accounts. My analysis of advertorials posted by these creators shows how sex and body positivity take shape in relation to Instagram’s aesthetic and monetisation affordances, and the predominance of postfeminist logics on the platform.</p><p>Consequently, the movements become depoliticised, presenting the ideal sex and body positive subject positions as attainable through consumption, psychic transformation, body-work, and embracing an empowered, confident femininity. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 present analyses drawn from interviews with nine young women and three gender diverse people, exploring how these participants made sense of sex and body positivity—both on social media, and in their everyday lives. Young people made sense of sex positivity in terms of five imperatives: to be pro-sex, to be open, to be autonomous, to engage authentically, and to be body and sexually confident. The imperatives cohere into a discourse of sex positivity and produce a particular kind of ideal sex positive subject who knows their own mind, accepts diversity, and engages positively, openly, and confidently in sexual situations. This creates conditions of everyday, disruptive possibility—enabling young people to straightforwardly accept asexuality, talk openly about sex, feel confident and sexy, and entitled to make decisions about their bodies. However, tensions and complications emerged as participants negotiated intersections between sex positivity and dominant discourses of heterosex, compulsory sexuality, normative beauty-ideals, and postfeminist notions of sexual subjectivity. Sex positivity’s imperatives may also create conditions of social coercion, requiring young people to be adventurous and confident sexual subjects in ways that reinforce victim-blaming narratives. Analysis of young people’s responses to Instagram prompts provided during interviews demonstrate how the platform’s visibility and aesthetic affordances tend to reproduce broader cultural dictates around sex, bodies, and gender which shape—and often limit—the transgressive potential of sex and body positivity.</p><p>Overall, my findings demonstrate how the liberatory promise of the sex positivity movement is negotiated on platforms and in practice. The multiple and conflicting demands placed upon young people usher them into spaces of impossibility where getting confidence, autonomy, or authenticity right is virtually unattainable. By inculcating young people in the individual pursuit of empowerment, choice, and bodily confidence, contemporary sex positivity operates to divert attention from the oppressive systems of power that sustain gendered inequities in everyday life.</p>