More than an "Unhappy Object": The Ethical, Relational and Pedagogical Possibilities of Talking with Young People about Pornography

Despite its ubiquity, online pornography has retained its status as an unhappy object (Ahmed, 2008) that is taken-for-granted as uniquely and inherently harmful for viewers, for participants, and for society in general. This is considered particularly true for young people, who are constructed as incapable of engaging with pornography in critical or nuanced ways; assumptions that have resulted in pornographys continued omission as a topic in contemporary sexual health education curricula. But what happens when we actually talk to young people about their relationship to pornography? What do we learn about how young people engage with pornography, and how might these conversations challenge the things we think we know about youth, sexuality, pornography, and about the point and purpose of education altogether? This dissertation draws on data from four focus groups undertaken with undergraduate students at a Canadian university around the topics of online pornography and sex education to consider the value of addressing pornography in our pedagogies. Using narrative thematic analysis and case-centred analysis methodologies (Riessman, 2008), this dissertation argues that discussions around pornography provide insights into young peoples thick desires (Fine & McLelland, 2006)their desires for relations and conditions of equity, dignity, justice and care. At the same time, these discussions also point to the complexity and opacity of young peoples psychosocial subjectivities (Jefferson & Hollway, 2013) in that pornography often emerged as a limit object in terms of what participants could or would say about it in relation to their sexualities, identifications, needs and desires. This limit suggests the impossibility of developing a traditional curriculum around concepts such as sexuality or pornography at all, but rather indicates the need to embrace ambivalence, uncertainty and vulnerability in our pedagogies; a move that might better enable young people to engage in more compassionate and hopefully more ethical relations with themselves, with others and with the world. To that end, the focus groups discussed in this dissertation serve as a potential model for thinking about and educating around difficult and complex topics of all kinds.