ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we theorize methods to study teen women’s sexual desires. Our title stems from a concern that young women’s desires come to be laminated in cellophane. We see layers of cellophane being produced by: a market economy that rushes to commodify young female bodies; sociopolitical, moral, and heteronormative panics that obsess over young women’s sexualities; racist imagery and institutional practices that vilify the sexualities of women of color; and by schools increasingly kidnapped by the policy of teaching abstinenceonly-until-marriage curricula in place of serious sexuality education (see Fine and McClelland, 2006, 2007). In this chapter, we are particularly interested in methods to study sexual desires as they are narrated, embodied, and enacted by young women in this political context. Wrapped in a kind of collective discursive cellophane, we believe it may be difficult for them to speak as their tongues are weighed down with dominant assumptions and panics; and, similarly, our ears may be clogged with our own dominant (feminist) discourses for their desires.
