ABSTRACT
In opposition to views of teenage girls as naïve dupes of power and porn, this chapter demonstrates how girls contest and challenge pornographic depictions. Their engagement with porn occurs within a complex mixture of playfulness, hostility, inquisitiveness, revulsion, and disgust, as they fit pieces of the porn puzzle together. By drawing on sexuality-assemblages and using an intersectional lens through which power relations manifest, the chapter shows that teenage girls’ encounters are at once an experimentation—a way of sensing and making sense of sex as the girls explore “what bodies can do and feel”—and a way of shifting the boundaries of sexual innocence and expanding what it is possible to know about teenage sexuality. The chapter focuses on teenage girls’ objection to porn’s representational economy as they address “unrealistic things,” systems of hetero-patriarchal domination, and gendered bodily standards. While lamenting the lack of intimacy in performances of porn, the girls idealise romantic love in the pursuit of relationships (both real and imagined). In so doing, they refuse to be drawn into narrow and normative understandings of gender and sexuality; rather, they show how they are embroiled in it as desiring heterosexual subjects.
