The invaded/invading body: putting culture and context centre stage
Starts: 5 July 2013
Friday 5th July 2013, Committee Room 1&2, Glamorgan Building, Cardiff University
There has been an increasing recognition, across the social sciences, of how sexual violence mediates the ways in which children and young people experience their bodies and relationship cultures. However, existing resources, responses and guidance often tend to isolate experiences of sexual violence, through individualising (e.g. the bullying literature), generalising (e.g. the sexualisation literature) or marginalising the phenomenon in ways that neglect the wider sociological context of social power relations (e.g. the child protection literature).
This seminar foregrounds culture, context and relationality in understanding young people's experience of sexual violence. From these situated beginnings, each presentation will draw upon a range of theories (e.g. queer, new materialist, psycho-social) to explore how power flows in, on and between bodies in ways that control and regulate, shame and pathologise, invade and hurt. Thinking about bodies as 'invaded' and 'invading' at the physical, discursive, symbolic and affective level is perhaps a starting point to help us reconfigure what counts as sexual violence and how such reconfigurations can inform future policy and practice in this field. Collectively, the presentations will thus complicate commonly held assumptions embedded in sexual bullying, sexual health, sex education and wider debates in child protection.
Prof Emma Renold and Dr. Gabrielle Ivinson (Cardiff University) foreground class, place and history to explore how everyday sexual violences are mediated by and embedded in specific gendered historical community legacies.
Expert in young queer cultures, Dr. Mary Lou Rasmussen (Monash University, Australia) foregrounds religion to explore the sticky affects that collect on non-normative or queer bodies under the hegemony of heteronormativity.
Dr Jessica Ringrose (Institute of Education, London) and Professor Rosalind Gill (Kings College, London) foreground race and ethnicity to examine the fragmentation, commodification and exploitation of digitised bodies through the phenomenon of ‘sexting’. In particular, they address the hijacking of body parts distributed through cyberspace.
Christine Barter, University of Bristol, will share findings from the ground-breaking research project, "Partner exploitation and violence in teenage intimate relationships".
Naomi Holford (Open University) will join Dr Renold and Dr Tuija Huuki (University of Oulu) to problematise the gendered and sexual dynamics of conflict and power in young children’s relationships.
Professor Debbie Epstein (Cardiff University) and Jan Pickles (NSPCC) will act as academic and practitioner discussants for the day and draw out the theoretical, methodological, policy and practice implications for each of the presentations. They will be accompanied by a panel of three SRE educators across the young life course (e.g. early years, primary and secondary years).
Contact
For more information about the event please contact Emma Renold using the details below.
Email: Renold@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone: 029 208 76139
Other information
Open To: Staff Only