Reframing Risqué/Risky: Queer Temporalities, Teenage Sexting, and Freedom of Expression

Lara Karaian and Katherine Van Meyl
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Lara Karaian: Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, C578 Loeb Building, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada
Katherine Van Meyl: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, B750 Loeb Building, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada

Laws, 2015, vol. 4, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: Canada recognizes young people’s constitutionally protected freedom of expression and consequently their right to engage in a narrow subset of consensual sexually expressive practices without being prosecuted as child pornographers. Nevertheless, numerous anti-sexting campaigns decry the possibility of voluntary and “safe sexting” let alone the affordances of adolescents’ self-produced and consensually shared sexual imagery. In this article, we argue that these actors have erred in their construction of youths’ risqué imagery as inherently risky and thus governable. We propose that anti-sexting frameworks—which conflate consensual and nonconsensual sexting and which equate both with negative risks that purportedly outweigh the value and benefits of the practice—rely on a calculus that is fundamentally flawed. This article consists of two main parts. In Part I, we map and trouble the ways in which responses to consensual teenage sexting emphasize the practice’s relationship to embodied, financial, intimate and legal risks. In Part II, we suggest that research examining consensual adolescent sexting and young people’s rights to freedom of expression consider alternative theoretical frameworks, such as queer theories of temporality, when calculating the risk of harm of adolescent sexual imagery.

Keywords: teenage sexting; adolescent sexuality; risk; queer time; queer temporalities; freedom of expression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 E61 E62 F13 F42 F68 K0 K1 K2 K3 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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