ABSTRACT

In youth studies, there is little talk about the erotic. Instead, the field is concerned with understanding teen pregnancy, the reduction of sexually transmitted disease and infection, the perils of masculinity and femininity, and the various manifestations of youth's sexual cultures. The concepts we bring to our study of youth work to constitute our object of study and the scope of our inquiry, and “the erotic,” if youth studies were to use that concept, pushes our understanding of sexuality past the current focus on identities, sexual practices, and either the management or liberation of youth's sexualities. Indeed, the erotic belies our attempts to pin down its essence, to circumscribe its scope, or to catalogue its effects. The term feels both specific and unwieldy: it envelops sexuality but not all sexual acts and it can include supposedly nonsexual experiences, ideas, and affects that brush up against pleasure and desire. The erotic is both profoundly subjective and highly social, made in the collision between selves and the world, and this ambiguity and movement, far from being a definitional failure, is constitutive of the concept itself. The erotic gathers its libidinal force from its capacity to reach out and touch anything. The world, including the world of youth-adult relations, is enlivened by its touch. It is exactly this fluidity and capaciousness that causes trouble for the field of youth studies.