Adolescent Sexuality and Positive Well-Being: A Group-Norms Approach

The link between adolescent sexual activity and psychological well-being is a controversial issue in developmental psychology. This cross-sectional study investigated the association between three aspects of teenage sexuality (genital sexual experience, age of sexual onset, and number of sex partners) and positive well-being (hedonic, eudaimonic, and overall) in a sample of 475 high school seniors (48% female; 89% White) from a single school district in a rural upstate New York community. Based on a group-norms perspective, we expected higher well-being in adolescents whose sexual behaviors followed group-normative patterns. As expected, sexually experienced and on-time (at age 16) students reported higher well-being than sexually inexperienced or late-onset (17 or older) students. Contrary to expectations, a high number of sex partners and an early sexual onset (15 or younger) were not related to lower well-being. Early-onset girls reported higher levels of well-being than normative-onset peers. Findings are discussed in relationship to theoretical perspectives and past empirical findings of teenage sexuality as a developmental asset versus risk.     

Sexuality

No abstract available for this article.     

Sexuality and Succession Law: Beyond Formal Equality

This article endeavours to open up a dialogue between succession law and the field of gender, sexuality and the law. It presents a detailed analysis of five cases concerning inheritance disputes relating to lesbians or gay men. The sexuality of the parties in the cases is ‘doctrinally irrelevant’ but the analysis demonstrates the significance of sexuality in the resolution of the legal disputes. In doing so it identifies how legal discourse remains a critical site for the production of societal norms and in particular how lesbian and gay perspectives reveal the gendered assumptions underlying a number of key succession law doctrines. It emphasises the importance of taking difference seriously and the limits to formal legal equality.     

Special Issue: Gender,Sexuality and Human Rights

This brief article introduces a special issue of Feminist Legal Studies addressing gender, sexuality and human rights, and comprising papers drawn from an E.S.R.C.-funded workshop held at the University of Kent in June 2004 on the theme of “Gender-Auditing the Human Rights Act”. The article begins by situating the themes of the special issue within the broader context of feminist engagement with rights discourse. It goes on to consider the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998 into the U.K. with a view to assessing its implications in terms of engendering a positive legal and political culture for equality-seeking initiatives. The article concludes with a survey of the contributions to the special issue, highlighting the possibilities for feminist theory and strategy posed by a wider intersectional engagement with rights issues.     

The Mythology of Female Sexuality: Alternative Narratives of Belonging

Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, £25, £6.99 pbk. (1999). Annie Coombes, Re‐Inventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, £40.00.     

Adolescent fears: Some Caribbean findings

A total of 657 adolescents (12–15 years) in Barbados provided responses to the question, “Is there anything you are really scared or afraid of?” Most frequently named fears were of three main types: fear of injury or death of self or loved ones, sexual concerns, and fears associated with school failure. However, certain other fears usually reported as relatively infrequent among adolescents in industrialized countries, such as fear of the dark, fear of walking lonely roads, and fear of animals, were also prominent, and reflect local geographical and cultural conditions. The influence of the media was also evident: many students were concerned about nuclear war, or held somewhat exaggerated fear of certain threats to personal safety (for example, being killed) given actual local incidence levels. From a guidance and counseling perspective, the data particularly highlight the need for improved sex and family life education.     

An honest human body : Sexuality and the continuum of resistance

Theories of resistance have informed ethnographic research over the last two decades. Researchers have been concerned to document the significance of counter-cultural acts of resistance and have highlighted intersections of class, gender and “race” within the processes of resistance. However, questions of sexuality have been largely silenced. This paper focuses on the experiences of six women who identify themselves as lesbian and attempts to assert the importance of sexuality within debates on resistance and accommodation. The experiences of these women reveal that lesbians are willing and able to use a conscious collage of bodily signifiers to resist the discourse of compulsory (hetero)sexuality. The “continuum of resistance” illuminated in this paper can encompass both the lesbian who wears her sexuality on a t-shirt and the lesbian who “passes” in a heterosexual frock.