Through the Looking Glass? Sexual Agency and Subjectification Online

Discourses of sexual agency have been seen as central to the development of new femininities, part of a broader shift in which older markers of femininity such as homemaking skills and maternal instincts have been joined by those of image creation, body work and sexual desire. This chapter examines debates about women’s sexual oppression and agency, with particular reference to their objectification and subjectification in popular cultural forms. It considers how useful these debates are in the contemporary Western context where media and communication technologies are developing very rapidly, offering women unprecedented access to new forms of cultural production, most obviously online in blogs, chat rooms and communities. It situates these technologies in the broader cultural context of sexualization and shifts in the way visibility and celebrity, sexual display and agency are conceived. It asks how these developments impact on the representation of women’s sexuality and what opportunities they provide for women to become involved in constructing and presenting their sexual selves. Focusing particularly on alternative pornography, it asks how we can develop an understanding of sexual agency in this context and how cultural and technological developments potentially make space for the representation of new constructions of sexuality and femininity.