See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/325357828

Sexting, Intimate and Sexual Media Practices, and Social Justice

Chapter · May 2018

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-97607-5_6

CITATION READS

1 246

1 author:

Amy Dobson
Curtin University
35 PUBLICATIONS   409 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Young people and sexting View project

Queer Visual/Digital Stereotypes: Combatting Minority Stereotypes in Digital Search Images, Stock Photography and their End Users View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Amy Dobson on 25 May 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 1

Sexting, intimate and sexual media practices, and social justice

Amy Shields Dobson

Introduction
Sexting is one of several digitally mediated intimate and sexual practices that have attracted
much attention in recent years. Such practices have generated often intense public debate
about the risks of using digitally networked mobile devices and social media platforms for
intimate and sexual communication, self-expression, and image production, especially for
young people, girls, and young women (Karaian, 2012; Hasinoff, 2015)1. Panic around such
media relates more broadly to a history of risk discourse about the publicisation of sex and
sexuality via media (Attwood, 2006; McGlotten, 2013). The common worry about various
intimate and sexual media practices usually defined as ‘sexting’, especially as they involve
youth and girls, is precisely their digitally mediated nature — the concern that textual
exchanges relating to sexual acts, intimacy, desire, sexuality, and the body, and images or
videos featuring bodies, flesh revelation, sex acts, and their textual description, can be
circulated easily around digital networks, consensually or not, contextualised or not.
Definitions of, and panic around sexting, while commonly invoking ‘bra-and-cleavage’ shots
featuring young women or ‘dick pics’ featuring young men, potentially involve a very wide
range of media practices (Albury, 2015; Ringrose & Harvey, 2015; Salter, 2017) centred
around sex, intimate relations, and the body. It is in this broad sense, then, that I want to
conceptualise sexting as part of intimate and sexual digital media communications; as media
practices which may or may not be intently ‘sexual’ or pornographic in nature (Albury,
2015), and which have various possible functions, intentions, and ethics, rather than narrow
or pre-determined good or bad ones. I employ Couldry’s (2012) description of ‘media
practices’ to indicate the everyday, often routine or mundane things people do with and
around media. A ‘practice’ approach is concerned with regularities more so than with
idiosyncracies and ‘chance occurrences’ (Couldry, 2012, p. 33-34). Couldry suggests that a
practice approach is concerned with what is possible and impossible, with what people are
likely and unlikely to do with media (2012, p. 33-34), and with social processes ‘enacted

1
Other such media practices include using hook-up apps, dating websites, and pornography viewing and sharing
(see Mulholland, 2013; Race, 2015; Hobbs, Owen, & Gerber, 2016).
 2

through media-related practices’, more so than with the production of media texts and their
interpretation (2012, p. 44).

Following Couldry and van Dijck’s (2015) cogent call to research social media ‘as if the
social mattered’, I suggest that research and public interventions into sexting and intimate and
sexual media practices more broadly must orient more explicitly around power and social
justice. Such an orientation proceeds from an understanding of sexting, and intimate and
sexual media practices more broadly, as potentially valuable forms of social and cultural
capital (Harvey and Ringrose, 2015; De Ridder, 2017; Dobson, Carah, & Robards, this
volume), as well as economically valuable for social media platforms and individuals (Salter,
this volume; Cover, this volume). Panicked interventions in schools and public health
campaigns addressing mainly girls’ participation in intimate and sexual media practices have
primarily highlighted the potential social exclusion or loss of social capital sexting youth may
face (Dobson and Ringrose, 2016), and some warnings point to the economic value of girls’
images for online pornographers seeking to exploit them (May, 2013). However, the social,
cultural, and economic value of intimate and sexual media practices remains under-
emphasised, as do digital ‘positive sexual rights’ (Albury, 2017), meaning that often the
inequalities of participation involved are also obscured. Through conceptualising the value of
intimate and sexual media practices we can better conceptualise power and inequality, I
suggest.

Along with this, there is a need for carefully nuanced understandings of ‘agency’ and
‘resistance’ in relation to sexting and other kinds of intimate and sexual media practices.
Studies of girls’ and young women’s media cultures have focused particularly on girls’
agency and resistance, with good reason, but often with limited analytical purchase, as I
explain engaging particularly with Amy Hasinoff’s suggested reframing of sexting as ‘media
production’. In this chapter I argue that framing sexting as ‘media production’ must do more
than simply advocate individual agency. To understand self and media production as an
individual act is to ignore the ways in which it is socially and technically conditioned.
Lessons from girlhood studies may be helpful in illustrating the necessity of a material-
discursive orientation around the social, and around distributions of value, rather than
individual capacities and agency. Such an orientation is imperative, I suggest, in a techno-
social context where intimacy and personal relations have been rapidly monetised through
digital media platforms in ways that work to propose a new version of ‘the social’ centred
 3

around quantification, and quantified hierarchies of visibility, status, and value (Andrejevic,
2011; Bucher, 2012; van Dijk, 2013; Skeggs & Yuill, 2015; Couldry and van Dijk, 2015;
Dahlberg, 2015; Cheney-Lippold, 2017).

Girls and young women, and intimate and sexual media practices
Amy Hasinoff (2015) suggests reframing sexting as ‘media production’. This reframing of
sexting requires that we conceptualise girls’ and young women’s agency in particular, and not
assume that sexual self-imaging for girls equates with victimhood, a lack of agency, and a
lack of morals or ‘self-esteem’ (as many pedagogical interventions imply—see Dobson &
Ringrose, 2016). Hasinoff suggests conceptualising sexting as a form of media production
might help to shift how we conceive of girls’ and young women’s media practices, and might
serve to highlight the gendered nature of discourses of risk and blame when it comes to youth
sexting. I have argued something slightly distinct to this in relation to girls’ and young
women’s digital self-representations via social media. I suggest that young women’s online
self-representations are often viewed in neoliberal social contexts through a ‘premise of self-
production’ (Dobson, 2015). That is, regardless of how we understand ‘agency’ and people’s
capacity to ‘produce themselves’ via media representation, and regardless of whether or not
young women actually created the representations specifically in question that can be found
on their phones and social media profiles, young women’s digital representations are viewed
as if they are self-produced, as if girls are ‘free agents’ of their own representation. Digital
self and sexual representations are then praised or condemned on this basis. For instance, we
might keep in mind that it is not uncommon for devices and profiles to be shared, ‘hacked’,
or ‘pranked’ in fun, social bonding, and/or maliciously (Ringrose et al., 2013; Burkett, 2015).
‘Self-productions’ online can be constructed by more than one person, and function in
broader terms of social relationality (Kanai, 2015). It is in part the assumed framework of
agentic ‘self-production’, rather than a more complex, nuanced, or distributed
conceptualisation of ‘self-production’ that precedes dichotomous judgements of girls as either
victims or empowered.

We need to take young women seriously as media ‘producers’ so as not to redraw simplistic
binaries between agents and victims of culture, and producers and consumers of media;
binaries that have historically served to reinforce unhelpful attitudes towards women and
their engagement with culture (Dobson, 2015), and that limit our understanding of the
 4

complex, non-dichotomous relationship between agency and coercion (Madhok, Phillips, and
Wilson, 2013). In relation to sexting, selfies, and other potentially ‘sexy’ images posted on
social media profiles and in mobile conversations, there are numerous ways in which to
semiotically decode the representations themselves that appear in self-representational
contexts, and numerous reasons why young women might create or share particular images of
themselves, of celebrities, and various other kinds of sexual images or images of bodies
(Albury, 2015; Burns, 2015). Some of these reasons include desire and sexual ‘attention
seeking’, play, aesthetics, and socialisation within gendered visual cultures that laud the
‘heterosexy’ (Ringrose et al., 2013; Dobson, 2015; De Ridder, 2017). There are serious social
consequences in assuming a lack of agency on girls’ and young women’s part when it comes
to sexting. Further, it is not an intellectually strong line for scholars to take given the history
of feminist work around the politics of women’s sexual self-representational strategies
(Dobson, 2015, p. 73).

While I agree that it is important to conceive of sexting as a form of ‘media production’

(Hasinoff, 2015) for the above reasons, some of the qualitative research that has now been
conducted on sexting with young people gives cause to reconsider the centrality of a ‘media
production’ framework. I make this argument because the media production framework
orients us toward primarily researching and conceptualising individualised capacities,
potentially at the expense of a thorough engagement with the socio-technical conditions
within which production takes place. For example, Hasinoff suggests further research into
some of the more hopeful outcomes of girls’ sexting. These include challenging the sexism of
commercial media via sexting, or using mobiles to express sexual needs more assertively and
confidently (2015, p. 118). These practices are yet to emerge as prevalent themes in the
qualitative interviews and focus group research that has been conducted with youth in the
UK, USA, and Australia that either touches on or directly explores young people’s own
experiences of sexting, rather than the quantitative survey research Hasinoff mostly refers to
in this discussion.

The qualitative research that has been conducted with young people tends to point to the
ways in which gender appears to structure vulnerabilities and victimhood in predictable,
long-standing ways, and over-determines the meaning of intimate and sexual media practices
for girls and young women (Ringrose et al., 2013; Albury et al., 2013; Albury, 2015; Burkett,
2015; Dobson, 2015; Dobson and Ringrose, 2016; Salter, 2016; Powell and Henry, 2017).
 5

This is perhaps unsurprising. Young people do talk about the possible pleasures and fun
associated with sexting, such as jokes and peer bonding in both sexual and non-sexual ways,
flirting, and relationship maintenance (Albury et al., 2013; Burkett, 2015), as well as
masturbation material (Salter, 2016). However, it seems that the possibilities to discuss and
potentially experience sexting in these more pleasurable, positive ways are largely available
to heterosexual boys and still more off limits to girls. As Burkett finds, even in the context of
intimate heterosexual relationships sexting is not always experienced as positive by young
women: pressure or coercion are sometimes concerns for them within their relationships
(Burkett, 2015). Albury (2015, p. 1738-9) notes that girls’ body images are overdetermined
as ‘sexual’ in a way that boys’ are not: girls in her study expressed their awareness of this
predetermined reading of their images in a social context where their bodies and actions are
policed by adults for signs of ‘inappropriate sexualisation’. Other qualitative work with
young people has also highlighted the limited ways young people themselves, both male and
female, perceive images of girls’ bodies (Dobson, 2015; Ringrose et al., 2013; Salter, 2016).
Couldry’s conceptualisation of media practices, then, in the case of intimate and sexual
media, usefully points towards social processes (Couldry, 2012, p. 44) around media, as well
as towards regularities and likelihoods (2012, p. 33).

Complicating ‘agency’ in relation to media practices

It remains more of a challenge, then, for girls and young women to experience intimate and
sexual media production as fun, pleasurable, or even liberating in both sexual and non-sexual
ways, rather than as something more ‘serious’, more straightforwardly sexual, and more
potentially consequential. It also perhaps remains much more difficult for girls to admit to
themselves or to each other the possibilities of fun, pleasure, politics, and sexual liberation
that may arise from sexting and other intimate and sexual media practices, let alone to
express such possibilities to adult researchers. The problem lies, then, in how to make the
necessary cultural space for more sex-positive and desire-oriented articulations from girls and
young women. This has been expressed in the call for more focus on ‘positive sexual rights’
(Petchesky, 2000; Albury, 2017). But, second, there is the problem of how to access or get to
more positive articulations of desire from girls and young women via research with them in
the postfeminist cultural context (Tolman, 2002; McClelland and Fine, 2008; Lamb and
Petersen, 2012). As feminist scholars have suggested, there is a missing discourse of desire in
relation to girls’ sexuality, even in more recent hyper-sexual postfeminist popular discourses
 6

and media representations (McClelland and Fine, 2008), and girls often lack the basic
language with which to express feelings of embodied sexual desire (Tolman, 2002). The
rarity of accounts of pleasurable sexting experiences for girls and young women, and the
repeated risk discourses (Dobson & Ringrose, 2016; De Ridder, 2017) emerging from
qualitative research is perhaps unsurprising in this context.

At the same time, I would suggest that in postfeminist socio-cultural conditions, it is neither
particularly legible nor attractive for young women to identify themselves as ‘victims’ of
gendered oppression, or social oppression of any kind (Baker, 2010; Burkett and Hamilton,
2012; Harris and Dobson, 2015; Scharff, 2013). Young women often clearly articulate
gendered inequalities, but in generalised terms, or point to other young women rather than
themselves as effected by those inequalities (Scharff, 2013). As Harris and Dobson (2015)
argue, a language of personal suffering from oppression is not something that is currently
open to or easily taken up by many young women via postfeminist and ‘post-girlpower’
cultural discourses. The current socio-cultural context in which strong, sexually ‘up for it’
and invulnerable feminine subjectivities are so heavily celebrated and visible in popular
culture (Gill, 2012; Kanai, 2017) makes it unsurprising that pressure or coercion are rarely
identified by young women themselves as reasons why they might engage in sexting
practices in surveys and other kinds of research (such as the work that Hasinoff cites — 2015,
p. 122). Hasinoff asks researchers to ‘pursue questions about the unique opportunities that
technology affords’, such as:
When girls use mobile phones to produce their own pornography, how are they challenging the sexism
of the commercial media industries and how are they reproducing it? Could mobile phones help girls
be more assertive and confident in expressing their sexual needs and desires? How do girls produce
their sexualities by producing social media? (2015, p. 118).
The research mentioned in my discussion so far does take these kind of questions seriously.
But the problem of how to make the cultural, psycho-social, and material-discursive space
necessary for girls’ and young women’s more overt expressions of sexual desire and agentic
challenges to the gender order, and how to get at these expressions via research, remains.2

2
One possibility I have suggested elsewhere is to critically question further the articulations of girls’ ‘sexual
attention seeking’ that seem to arise repeatedly in discussions with young people about sexting and other kinds
of digital sexual media and self-production (Dobson, 2015, p. 92). Seeing as this is one of the limited ways it
appears girls’ desire and sexual agency is discussed, could sexual and appearance-related ‘attention seeking’ be
further explored, and reframed somehow in our discussions with youth and adult stakeholders as
normal/acceptable/positive rather than shameful or ‘slutty’ ?
 7

What some of the qualitative work on sexting also demonstrates is that in peer high school
and young adult social contexts, as in the broader social world in these Anglophone cultures,
social relations are often heavily structured by assemblages of various kinds of social and
cultural capital: popularity, coolness, family and cultural background, educational and
cultural knowledge, and individuals’ perceived and actual ability to mobilise their value, or
not. The ways in which popularity can be accumulated and mobilised in practice are heavily
structured by gender, sexuality, and also race and class (Ringrose et al., 2013; De Ridder,
2107; Salter, 2017). Images of sexed bodies can become a part of these broader social
circulations of power and capital within peer groups, especially in the relatively isolated geo-
social context of the high school or local neighbourhood. The conflicting social contexts
youth have described of peer care and support, along with distinct gendered pressures and
judgments (Dobson, 2015; Ringrose et al., 2013; Salter, 2016) are thus unsurprising and
longstanding. However, social media platforms afford quantified measures of popularity and
social ‘recognition’ (Harvey and Ringrose, 2015) in ways that intersect with, and potentially
intensify, existing social hierarchies. As Harvey and Ringrose state, ‘likes’ and comments on
social media platforms are ‘sites of struggle over meaning – to be “recognised” as
appropriately gendered, classed, racialised, requires access to knowledge (both locally
specific and more globalised cultural norms), and for this to be authorised through
interactions with others.’ (2015, p. 360). Such research helps us better conceive of flows of
social and cultural capital via intimate and sexual media practices, as well as the generation
of profit for media platform owners via intimate digital relations and peer interactions.

Overvaluing agency in relation to media ‘production’?

The more salient and important point Hasinoff makes regarding sexting as media production
is that media production as a form of ‘resistance’ or ‘agency’ is currently ‘overvalued and
idealised’ (2015, p. 125). Adult stakeholders and academics often focus on youth media
production as a fruitful response or ‘antidote’ to the perceived effects and ideologies of
commercial, sexualised, ‘bad’ media. As Hasinoff notes, they often have quite specific kinds
of media production in mind, and ‘Arguments about the benefits of media production and
participation rarely consider banal, complicated, and even harmful forms of media production
and distribution’ (2015, p. 123). Many kinds of media practices in digitally networked
societies require ‘media production’ of some kind, and girls and young women are often at
the forefront of digital media production such as social network site profiles, selfies, blogs,
 8

zines, and YouTube videos, from banal to creative and innovative to overtly politicised,
feminist content (Keller, 2016). ‘Agency’ can be seen as something enacted in all kinds of
media production and consumption, by actors pursuing pleasure, connection, political aims,
social challenge, social acceptance, and malicious harm to others. Agency is also often under-
theorised as simply the capacity to act autonomously and independently, a capacity that
women have historically been denied (Madhok, Philips, & Wilson, 2013). In some accounts,
as Coffey and Farrugia (2013) note, agency comes across as something subjects inherently
and internally possess outside of any existing social order.

Poststructuralist theorists have argued for a conceptualisation of agency not as inherent or

internal but as social and relational. Coffey and Farrugia (2013), along with others, have
argued that it is too simplistic to conceptualise agency as a capacity that relates specifically to
practices judged as somehow socially or politically ‘resistant’, or ‘subversive’ of cultural
norms, when these ideas shift so rapidly and are colonised and re-appropriated in complex
flows of power. Relatedly, a range of problems have been identified with the meaning of
‘resistance’ (Harris & Dobson, 2015). As Madhok, Phillips, and Wilson (2013) note,
coercion remains under-theorised in the ‘turn to agency’. They argue that a focus on agency
and resistance to social structures alone is misplaced if it means, as it often appears to, that
agency is conceptualised ‘in a binary relationship of presence/absence’ with coercion
(Madhok, Phillips, & Wilson, 2013, p. 2). As they suggest, ‘It is a mistake to see agency as
the antithesis of coercion, as if the measure of how much agency we have is how little
coercion has been exercised. […] If we can have only one or the other, then repudiating
patronising images of the oppressed and powerless — a concern in most contemporary
feminist writing — requires us to deny, or at least obscure, the extent to which social
relations of inequality and domination continue to structure our lives’ (2013, p. 3). Gill and
Donaghue (2013) suggest that ‘the turn to agency’ within media and cultural studies of sexual
media has meant a turning away from inequality to some extent, and an ‘evacuation’ of the
social (2013, p. 248) in explanations of girls’ and women’s media use.

Hasinoff asserts that sexting may still offer girls ‘unique forms of resistance and agency’
(2015, p. 125), and I agree that for some girls this may be a lived experience or at least a
potential, depending on social and relational factors. However, it seems unlikely in the
current postfeminist cultural context and techno-social context (discussed further below), that
this kind of sexual media practice could function to offer most girls, across intersection of
 9

race, ethnicity, sexuality, social status, and body size/shape/ability, a pathway to some kind of
sexual or political liberation. If agency and resistance are understood as social and relational,
this would require, at least to some degree, that girls’ sexual images could be easily read by
those around them as ‘resistant’, ‘agentic’ or, politicised: current discourses around girls’
media practices tells us this is not the case (Thiel-Stern, 2014; Dobson, 2015). We come
back, then, to a familiar issue in relation to gender and sex, where the focus is kept on girls’
and women’s practices, actions, and responsibilities, when it is the social world around them
that needs to change to facilitate their safety and liberation (Gill, 2012).

It seems just as inappropriate to position sexting for girls in Anglophone cultures as a source
of resistance and/or agency (presumably only if framed and practiced in certain ways) as it
does to suggest the refusal to sext as an expression of agency or resistance. Further, the goal
of locating or somehow producing sexting and other kinds of intimate and sexual media
practices as forms of agency and resistance seems just as misplaced as the goal of somehow
educating girls to ‘resist’ media messages about the value of women’s bodies as primarily
sexual (Gill, 2012). The point is that media production as a form of agency is, indeed, as
Hasinoff states, overvalued and idealised. But further, conceptualising media production as a
desirable kind of ‘agency’ keeps the focus of change and intervention on the individual and
their capacities, rather than the social. This is just as true for less socially sanctioned kinds of
intimate and sexual media practices as it is for the forms of youth media production most
often lauded by adult authorities and teachers of ‘media literacy’; that is, for more overtly
political, critical, and/or intentionally creative media content. Equating media production
practices simplistically with agency also obscures the place of media platforms and
algorithms as ‘actants’ (Race, 2015), as I discuss further below.

Re-orienting towards social justice

As I have suggested in the discussion so far, questions of power, (in)equality, and social
distribution are too easily side-stepped in the turn towards agency and resistance that has
been particularly prevalent in studies of girls’ and young women’s media cultures. The
capacities of the individual are often here foregrounded at the expense of better
understanding the materiality of social and technological systems and infrastructure that
shape and co-constitute relations and experiences of agency, coercion, power, pleasure, risk,
benefit, and value. This is an important lesson from the case of moral panic over, and
 10

research into girls’ and young women’s digital media use that I suggest is productively
applied more broadly. I propose a re-orientation of research into intimate and sexual media
practices more explicitly in terms of social justice. Such a re-orientation necessarily proceeds
from an understanding of sexting and other kinds of intimate and sexual media practices not
as crime, pathology, or inherently ‘risky behaviour’; as practices that may or may not be
‘resistant’ to dominant ideologies and discourses related to sex and gender, but are potentially
valuable socially, culturally, and economically. Inquiry about the social can and is happening
through research centred around the social distribution of intimacy and sexual rights, as well
as social media platforms logics, and the kind of social structures and ethical relations they
propose and constitute, as I explain below.

An orientation towards social justice in studies of sexting and other kinds of intimate and
sexual media production involves asking questions such as: how are the risks and benefits,
the ‘positive sexual rights’ (Albury, 2017), and the potential values of sexual media practices
— economic, social, cultural — structured by gender, but also by sexuality, race, body shape
and size, ability, social status, class, and cultural background? For whom are intimate and
sexual media practices currently available, and possible as pleasurable? Some scholars have
begun to unpack such questions of social distribution, particularly in relation to gender
(Ringrose et al., 2013; Albury, 2015; Burkett, 2015; Dobson, 2015; Salter, 2016; Powell &
Henry, 2017), sexuality (McGlotten, 2013; Albury & Byron, 2014; Duguay, 2016; Race,
2015; Rubin & McClelland, 2015), and also in relation to race and social class (McGlotten,
2013; Harvey & Ringrose, 2015; Pitcan, Marwick, & boyd, 2018). People’s social location
and cultural background effect their ability to tap into valuable forms of intimate digital
connection and sexual self-representation (Lambert, 2016; Pitcan, Marwick, & boyd, 2018;
Dobson, Carah & Robards, this volume). For example, Pitcan, Marwick, and boyd (2018)
find in research with low socio-economic status young people in New York that
‘respectability politics’ centrally shapes the kind of online sexual and self-expression they
construct via social media platforms. We have much more to learn about how such processes
of digital inclusion and exclusion operate in relation to intimate and sexual media practices in
classed and raced contexts and communities. We might also ask: for whom are sexual and
intimate media practices available as potentially political statements and/or liberating
practices? For whom is this not within the field of possibilities or not currently available for
mobilisation? A social justice research agenda, in sum, might begin by mapping how the
 11

pleasures, politics, rights, and value potentially available in practices of intimate and sexual
media production are socially distributed, in particular techno-social contexts.

Following Couldry and van Dijck (2015), the version of ‘the social’ proposed by the owners
and designers of popular social media platforms deserves more attention for the way it
potentially shapes and co-constitutes digital sexual cultures and subjectivities, and cultures of
digital intimacy more broadly. Reference to a ‘past social’, they suggest, must guide
inquiries; here, about how intimate and sexual media practices, and the social processes and
relations that configure around these, are shifting in new digital terrains shaped largely by
commercial algorithmic logics. Media scholars have begun to unpack broader cultural shifts
towards quantification (of everything/anything) that emerge in relation to the ubiquitous
presence of digitally networked devices and the ‘big data’ they generate. They are mapping
both pragmatic and symbolic ways in which human identities and cultures are now
quantifiable as data, and as such, can be hierarchically ordered and assigned a rank and
‘value’ (Andrejevic, 2011; Bucher, 2012; van Dijck, 2013; Dahlberg, 2015; Cheney-Lippold,
2017; Attique, 2017; Carah & Angus, 2018). Couldry and van Dijck make a powerful
argument for holding on to memories of ‘older versions of the social as a reference point
against which to judge the hegemonic role in hosting social life now played by digital
platforms that barely existed a decade ago’ (2015, p. 2).

In terms of intimate and sexual media practices, taking platform logics into account as central
‘actants’ (Race, 2015) involves asking about how media platforms, and the algorithms and
protocols used to determine hierarchies of visibility, undermine or further intensify existing
politics of culturally visible sexuality, intimacy, and desire, identified in earlier pioneering
work on the cultural hierarchies of sexuality (Rubin, 1984; Berlant & Warner, 1998). For
example, Carah and Dobson (2016) explore how algorithmic protocols on social media, in
combination with the imagined (Bucher, 2017) algorithmic protocols of human cultural
intermediaries, intensifies the visibility and value of ‘heterosexiness’ on social media. De
Ridder argues that social media have become a ‘battleground’ for sexual politics. He finds
that the value judgements of young people about self-representations often veer towards
sexual conservatism as a way of dealing with the complexities of real and perceived online
risks, and rapidly, continuously transforming social media ecologies (De Ridder, 2017, p. 8).
More work grounded in platform logics is needed to explore what kind of sexual practices,
desires, and intimate exchanges are sanctioned and what remains invisible via image-sharing
 12

cultures and algorithmically-determined hierarchies of visibility on social media. As Couldry

and van Dijck (2015, p. 2) suggest, researching ‘the social/media relation today’ must involve
asking how users go on to ‘enact’ the version of the social proposed via media platforms,
geared economically towards profit generation, and socio-culturally towards broad-ranging
quantification and hierarchy.

Further to this, as several scholars have suggested, the ethics of media sharing and consent
seeking processes need to remain front and centre of discussions about and interventions into
sexting and other intimate and sexual media practices (Hasinoff, 2015; Albury, 2017).
Hasinoff (2015) has outlined in detail the kind of legal and policy, as well as technological,
changes that could be implemented towards this end. However, as she notes, ‘None of these
technological or legal solutions can shift attitudes about privacy or resolve complex social
problems’ (2015, p. 152). Structures of inequality mean that some people are positioned as
more easily and obviously the recipients of ethical and consensual treatment, while some are
structurally more vulnerable to unethical treatment, abuse, and limited opportunities for
meaningful consent (Croeser, 2016; Elliot, this volume; Salter, this volume). For example,
through a comparison between media discourses related to the Ashley Maddison hack of
2015, the Fappening of 2014, and youth sexting, Albury (2017) illustrates how new
modulations of ethics and sexual rights specific to the digital era are emerging in relation to
these highly public data breaches; but progressive digital sexual ethics are still more easily
imagined and articulated publicly in relation to adult heterosexual male subjects rather than
girls and women and young people more broadly. Salter (this volume) outlines the ways in
which social media platform logics work against ethics based around consent, towards
maximum exposure and publicisation of ‘private’ lives and images with minimum protective
measures, in a social context where some bodies are more commodified and fetishised for
publicisation than others. Emphasising social justice helps us keep in mind that ethics and
consent are not things that can simply be ‘taught’ to young people or old people with a magic
pedagogical formula, but must also be facilitated and enabled by the wider socio-technical
structures and conditions in which we live. Both in pedagogical and other kinds of
interventions, and in research, power must stay central as the lens that enables us to think and
talk about the axis of inequality that currently over-determine and predisposition some
subjects over others to ethical treatment; to the opportunity to give, withhold, or make legible
their consent; and, to gain various forms of value from intimate and sexual media practices.
 13

Power is not distributed equally when it comes to intimate and sexual media practices that
potentially generate social, cultural, and material value, and nor are ‘ethics’ and ‘consent’.

Conclusion
In this chapter I have positioned intimate and sexual media practices as valuable — as a
source of profit, but also of social and cultural capital. I have discussed research on girls’ and
young women’s media cultures in particular to point to the need for nuanced
conceptualisations of ‘agency’ in relation to intimate and sexual media practices. Following
Couldry and van Dijck (2015), I have argued for the importance of research and interventions
in sexting and intimate and sexual media practices focused on social justice, and the
distribution of value in techno-social contexts, and I have pointed to the kind of research
questions this might involve. People engage in intimate and sexual media practices that are
meaningfully shaped, contextualised, and made more or less visible by strategically
engineered platform algorithms and other protocols. The version of ‘the social’ proposed by
social media platforms is one, in short, geared towards quantified hierarchies of sociality,
visibility, and exposure (Salter, this volume). Keeping our attention focused on social justice
and on the value and social distribution of intimate and sexual media practices is vitally
important in this techno-social context.

Acknowledgement: Sincere thanks to Nicholas Carah and Michael Salter for reading and
providing astute suggestions on this chapter.

References
Albury, K. (2017). Just because it’s public doesn’t mean it’s any of your business: Adults’
and children’s sexual rights in digitally mediated spaces. New Media & Society,
19(5), 713-725.
Albury, K. (2015). Selfies, sexts, and sneaky hats: young people’s understandings of
gendered practices of self-representation. International Journal of Communication,
9(2015): 1734-1745.
Albury, K., & Byron, P. (2014) Queering sexting and sexualisation. Media International
Australia, 153(November): 138-147.
 14

Albury, K., Crawford, K., Byron, P., & Mathews, B. (2013). Young people and sexting in
Australia: Ethics, representation and the law: ARC Centre for Creative Industries and
Innovation/ Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales,
Australia.
Andrejevic M (2011) Social network exploitation. In: Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A Networked
Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Athique, A. (2017). The dynamics and potentials of big data for audience research. Media,
Culture & Society, 40(1), 59-74.
Attwood, F. (2006). Sexed up: theorizing the sexualization of culture. Sexualities, 9(1), 77-
94.
Baker, J. (2010). Claiming Volition and Evading Victimhood: Post-Feminist Obligations for
Young Women. Feminism & Psychology, 20(2), 186-204.
Berlant, L., & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547-566.
Bucher, T. (2017). The algorithmic imaginary: exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook
algorithms. Information, Communication & Society, 20(1), 30-44.
Bucher, T. (2012). Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on
Facebook. New Media & Society, 14(7): 1164-1180.
Burkett, M. (2015). Sex(t) Talk: A qualitative analysis of young adults’ negotiations of the
pleasures and perils of sexting. Sexuality & culture, 19(4), 835-863.
Burkett M & Hamilton K. (2012) Postfeminist sexual agency: Young women’s negotiations
of sexual consent. Sexualities, 15(7): 815-833. doi: 10.1177/1363460712454076
Burns, A. (2015). Self(ie)-Discipline: Social Regulation as Enacted Through the Discussion
of Photographic Practice. International Journal of Communication 9.
Carah, N., & Angus, D. (2018). Algorithmic brand culture: participatory labour, machine
learning and branding on social media. Media, Culture & Society, 40(2), 178-194.
Carah, N., & Dobson, A. (2016). Algorithmic Hotness: Young Women’s “Promotion” and
“Reconnaissance” Work via Social Media Body Images. Social Media + Society,
4(2).
Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017). We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves.
New York: New York University Press.
Coffey, J. & Farrugia, D. (2013). Unpacking the Black Box: The Problem of Agency in the
Sociology of Youth. Journal of Youth Studies 17(4), 461–474.
 15

Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice.
Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Couldry, N. & van Dijck, J. (2015) Researching Social Media as if the Social Mattered.
Social Media + Society, 1(2).
Cover, R. (2018). Chapter 7, this volume.
Croeser, S. (2016). Thinking Beyond ‘Free Speech’ in Responding to Online Harassment.
Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 10. doi:10.7264/N35Q4TC4
Dahlberg, L. (2015). Expanding Digital Divides Research: A Critical Political Economy of
Social Media. The Communication Review, 18(4).
De Ridder, S. (2017). Social Media and Young People’s Sexualities: Values, Norms, and
Battlegrounds. Social Media + Society, 3(4), 2056305117738992.
Dobson, A.S. (2015). Postfeminist Digital Cultures: Femininity, Social Media, and Self-
Representation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dobson, A.S., & Ringrose, J. (2016). Sext education: pedagogies of sex, gender and shame
in the schoolyards of Tagged and Exposed. Sex Education, 16(1), 8-21.
Duguay, S. (2016). Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer Visibility Through Selfies:
Comparing Platform Mediators Across Ruby Rose’s Instagram and Vine Presence.
Social Media + Society, 2(2).
Gill, R. (2012). Media, Empowerment and the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ Debates. Sex Roles,
66(11): 736-745. doi: 10.1007/s11199-011-0107-1
Gill, R. & Donaghue, N. (2013). As if postfeminism had come true: the turn to agency in
cultural studies of ‘sexualisation’. In: S Madhok, A Phillips & K Wilson (Eds.),
Gender, Agency, and Coercion. Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harvey, L. & Ringrose, J. (2015). Sexting, ratings and (mis)recognition: teen boys
performing classed and racialized masculinities in digitally networked publics. In: E
Renold, J Ringrose & RD Egan (Eds.), Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation. UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Hart, M. Chapter 11, this volume.
Harris, A. & Dobson, A.S. (2015). Theorizing agency in post-girlpower times. Continuum,
29(2): 145-156.
Hasinoff, A. (2015). Sexting Panic: Rethinking Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and
Consent. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and
the digital transformation of intimacy. Journal of Sociology, 53(2), 271-284.
 16

Kanai, A. (2017 e-first). On not taking the self seriously: Resilience, relatability and humour
in young women’s Tumblr blogs. European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Kanai, A. (2015). Thinking Beyond the Internet as a Tool: Girls’ Online spaces as
Postfeminist Structures of Surveillance. In J. Bailey & V. Steeves (Eds.), eGirls,
eCitizens (pp. 83-106). Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
Karaian, L. (2012). Lolita speaks: ‘Sexting,’ teenage girls and the law. Crime, Media,
Culture, 8(1), 57-73.
Keller, J. (2016). Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age. New York: Routledge.
Lamb, S., & Peterson, Z. (2012) Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Empowerment: Two Feminists
Explore the Concept. Sex Roles, 66(11), 703-712.
Lambert, A. (2016). Intimacy and social capital on Facebook: Beyond the psychological
perspective. New Media & Society, 18(1), 2559-2575.
Madhok, S., Phillips, A., & Wilson, K. (Eds.) (2013). Gender, Agency and Coercion.
Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
May, R. (2013) Cybersexual Violence Series Part 3: "Respect Yourself". Retrieved from
http://jhruoftmag.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/cybersexual-violence-series-part-3-
respect-yourself/
McClelland, S., & Fine, M. (2008). Rescuing a theory of adolescent sexual excess: young
women and wanting. In A Harris (Ed.), Next wave cultures: feminism, subcultures,
activism New York: Routledge, pp. 83-102.
McGlotten, S. (2013). Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect and Queer Sociality. Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press.
Mulholland, M. (2013). Young people and pornography: Negotiating pornification. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Petchesky, R. (2000). Sexual rights: inventing a concept, mapping an international practice.
In: Parker, R, Barbosa, RM, Aggleton, P (eds) Framing the Sexual Subject: The
Politics of Gender, Sexuality and Power. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, pp. 81–103.
Pitcan, M., Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2018). Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability
Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World. Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication. doi: 10.1093/jcmc/zmy008

Powell, A., & Henry, N. (2017). Sexual Violence in a Digital Age. UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
 17

Race, K. (2015). Speculative pragmatism and intimate arrangements: online hook-up devices
in gay life Culture, Health & Sexuality, 17(4), 496-511.
Ringrose, J., Harvey. L., Gill. R., & Livingstone, S. (2013). Teen girls, sexual double
standards and ‘sexting’: Gendered value in digital image exchange. Feminist Theory,
14(3), 305-323.
Ringrose, J., & Harvey, L. (2015). Boobs, back-off, six packs and bits: Mediated body parts,
gendered reward, and sexual shame in teens' sexting images. Continuum, 29(2), 205-
217.
Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. In C
Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Kegan and
Paul.
Rubin, J., & McClelland, S. (2015) ‘Even though it's a small checkbox, it's a big deal’:
stresses and strains of managing sexual identity(s) on Facebook. Culture, Health &
Sexuality, 17(4), 512-526.
Salter, M. (2018). Chapter 3, this volume.
Salter, M. (2017). Crime, Justice and Social Media. London: Routledge.
Salter, M. (2016). Privates in the online public: Sex(ting) and reputation on social media.
New Media & Society, 18(11), 2723-2739.
Scharff, C. (2012). Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World. Farnham,
Surrey: Ashgate.
Skeggs, B., & Yuill, S. (2016). Capital experimentation with person/a formation: how
Facebook's monetization refigures the relationship between property, personhood and
protest. Information, Communication & Society, 19(9), 380-396.
Thiel-Stern, S. (2014). From the Dance Hall to Facebook: Teen Girls, Mass Media, and
Moral Panic in the United States, 1905–2010. Amherst; Boston University of
Massachusetts Press.
Tolman, D. (2002). Dilemmas of desire: teenage girls talk about sexuality. London: Harvard
University Press.
Van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

View publication stats