Laura Harvey

Teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: Gendered value in digital image exchange:

This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered.

Spicing it up: Sexual entrepreneurs and The Sex Inspectors

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the emergence of a new feminine subject who we call the ‘sexual entrepreneur’. We will argue that the ‘modernization’ of femininity over the last two decades in the wake of the ‘sexual revolution’ and women’s movement, alongside the acceleration and intensi-fication of neoliberalism and consumerism, has given rise to a new and contradictory subject position: the sexual entrepreneur. This ‘new femininity’ constitutes a hybrid of discourses of sexual freedom for women, intimately entangled with attempts to recuperate this to (male-dominated) consumer capitalism. This makes this figure difficult to read, and helps to account for the familiar polarization between those feminists who appear hopeful and optimistic about the spaces that have opened up in recent years for female sexual self-expression and sexual pleasure in Western societies, and those who interpret the same phenomena as merely old sexual stereotypes wrapped in a new, glossy postfeminist guise. Contextualizing our argument in discussions about the ‘mainstreaming of sex’ (Attwood, 2009), we seek to develop notions of ‘sexual subjectification’ (Gill, 2003) and ‘technologies of sexiness’ (Radner, 1993, 1999) to explore the rise and proliferation of discourses of sexual entrepreneurship, and suggest a way of reading this that does not — or at least tries not to — fall back into the old binaries (e.g. either unproblematic liberation or wholesale recuperation).

Swagger, Ratings and Masculinity: Theorising the Circulation of Social and Cultural Value in Teenage Boys’ Digital Peer Networks:

This paper seeks to disrupt sensationalist racialised and classed media accounts of the youth looting in the 2011 London riots. It draws upon research on young peoples uses of mobile digital technology, including social networking sites like Facebook and Blackberry Messenger to understand the performance of contemporary teenage masculinities. Developing the work of Beverly Skeggs, we demonstrate how value circulates in young peoples digital peer networks. We analyse how images of designer goods and labels that signify wealth are used on social networking sites to embody cool masculine ‘swagger’ and attain popularity ‘ratings’, which we theorise as forms of social and cultural capital that circulate in the peer networks. Interview narratives also illustrate that the construction of online value must be verified in boys’ offline lives; and we show how teenage boys are negotiating power relationships and peer hierarchies online, at school and in their neighbourhoods. We argue that an analysis of symbolic value in digital contexts and in embodied everyday life helps in understanding new regulative formations of gender and masculinity in late-modern, globalised contexts of youth identity construction. In this way, our findings and analysis directly challenge the simplistic public discourses of ‘feral’ and ‘mindless’ youthful masculinities depicted in the UK media representations of the London riots, providing more complex insights into the construction of contemporary teenage masculinities.

Characterisation of gunshot residue from three ammunition types using suppressed anion exchange chromatography

Gunshot residue (GSR) is commonly analysed in forensic casework using either scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX) or gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Relatively little work has been reported on the post-discharge GSR content of non-metallic inorganic or low molecular weight organic anions to distinguish between different ammunition types. The development of an analytical method using suppressed micro-bore anion exchange chromatography (IC) is presented for the analysis of GSR. A hydroxide gradient was optimised for the separation of 19 forensically relevant organic and inorganic anions in <23min and sensitivities of the order of 0.12-3.52ng of anion detected for all species were achieved. Along with an optimised extraction procedure, this method was applied to the analysis of post-ignition residues from three selected ammunition types. By profiling and comparing the anionic content in each ammunition residue, the possibility to distinguish between each type using their anionic profiles and absolute weight is presented. The potential for interference is also discussed with respect to sample types which are typically problematic in the analysis of GSR using SEM-EDX and GC-MS. To the best of our knowledge this represents the first study on the analysis of inorganic anions in GSR using suppressed ion chromatography.

Engaging with the Bailey Review: blogging, academia and authenticity

This article reproduces and discusses a series of blog posts posted by academics in anticipation of the report on commercialisation, sexualisation and childhood, ‘Letting Children Be Children’ by Reg Bailey for the UK Department of Education in June 2011. The article discusses the difficulty of ‘translating’ scholarly work for the public in a context where ‘impact’ is increasingly important and the challenges that academics face in finding new ways of speaking about sex in public.