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The Other Side of Girls Gone Wild: the Emotional Labor of College Women's Sexual Decision-Making

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The Other Side of Girls Gone Wild: the Emotional Labor of College Women's Sexual Decision-Making Syracuse University SURFACE Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses School of Education 8-2013 The Other Side of Girls Gone Wild: The Emotional Labor of College Women's Sexual Decision-Making Leah A. Flynn Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/cfe_etd Part of the Education Commons Recommended Citation Flynn, Leah A., "The Other Side of Girls Gone Wild: The Emotional Labor of College Women's Sexual Decision-Making" (2013). Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses. 58. https://surface.syr.edu/cfe_etd/58 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Education at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cultural Foundations of Education - Dissertations & Theses by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ABSTRACT This research concerns the process of college women’s emotional labor in sexual decision-making and how women talk about their sexual decisions via their negotiation of dominant social discourses. The study seeks to determine how the college experience nurtures women’s sexual subjectivity; how it affects their negotiation of sexual messaging and social dominant discourse; and how it impacts the emotional work involved in the process. The study was conducted at three college campuses that vary relative to institutional type (i.e., public vs. private), social class, and race. The research was conducted in fall 2006 at Center State University, and in the spring and summer 2010 semesters at Northeast University and Upper Lake Community College. The qualitative study involved eight focus groups and 20 in-depth interviews and a total of 48 participants. Out of those 48, three women identified themselves as lesbian, three as bisexual, two as asexual, and one as queer. Two women chose not to identify. In regard to racial make-up, 36 women were white and the remainder identified as African American, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Latina, Korean, and Southeast Asian. All participants were of traditional college age (18 to 21), except for three women in their late 20s and early 30s. The forms of emotional labor that emerged were (a) how women understood and talked about the regulatory expectations and social norms of women’s sexuality and how regulation shapes subjectivity, (b) how women’s negotiation of those regulations in juxtaposition with their sexual desire demonstrates sexual subjectivity (c) how college served—and was perceived as—a “bubble” for women to more fully engage in acts of resistance and agency in response to gendered social expectations within a space that nurtured sexual subjectivity. Ultimately, the study focuses on young women’s negotiation of sexuality and the emotional work that their talk reflects; it exposes ways in which women are thoughtful and reflective in their sexual decision- making while engaging with their sexual subjectivity. THE OTHER SIDE OF GIRLS GONE WILD: THE EMOTIONAL LABOR OF COLLEGE WOMEN’S SEXUAL DECISION-MAKING By Leah A. Flynn B.A. Nazareth College, 1998 M.S. Syracuse University, 2003 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Cultural Foundations of Education in the Graduate School of Syracuse University August 2013 Copyright 2013 Leah A. Flynn All rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions, time, and support in making this study possible: First, Sari Knopp Biklen, my dissertation advisor, for her guidance, knowledge, and patience throughout my academic career here at Syracuse University; the story I tell in this paper has been shaped by all that I have learned from her. I thank Cathy Engstrom and Gretchen Lopez, who are not only members of my dissertation committee, but also two women who gave me their unwavering support and guidance as a student and as a person. I also owe deep gratitude to my peers and colleagues, especially Julie Rawls White, my mentor and dear friend; Carrie Grogan Abbott, my best friend and confidante; and Jeff Gallant, my partner in life who has taught me more than there is space to write. They offered support and encouragement throughout my time as a doctoral student; they were my personal “cheerleaders,” who motivated me to pick up the pen every day. I want to recognize my family and friends for all of their love, support, and patience, especially when I had to sacrifice spending time with them in order to spend time with this study. I love you all. Most importantly, I thank the women who volunteered their voices to this study. Without their willingness to be open with me about such a private topic, this dissertation would not have been possible. Although many thanked me for giving them an opportunity to talk about sex, the thanks goes all go to them. You are all beautiful and powerful women! Agentic and honest during a time when it is difficult to ask questions and be heard about female sexuality. This work is dedicated to you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .........................................................................................................v TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW .....................................................................................24 CHAPTER 3. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: THE FOCUS GROUP, THE INTERVIEW, AND THE EXPLORATION OF THE THREE SITES OF STUDY .....................................53 CHAPTER 4. THE REGULATION OF FEMALE SEXUAL SUBJECTIVITY VIA SOCIAL DISCOURSES AND GENDERED SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS; THE MAINTENANCE OF THE “GOOD GIRL” IMAGE ................................................................................................82 CHAPTER 5. NEGOTIATING SEXUAL DESIRE AND THE POWER OF SEXUAL AUTHORITY .........................................................................................................................155 CHAPTER 6. EXERCISING SEXUAL AGENCY WITHIN THE “BUBBLE” OF THE COLLEGE EXPERIENCE; NEGOTIATED WORK OF RESISTANCE AND EXPLORATION .....................................................................................................................214 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................264 EPILOGUE ..................................................................................................................................281 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................283 APPENDIX A ..............................................................................................................................290 APPENDIX B ..............................................................................................................................292 APPENDIX C ..............................................................................................................................294 vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION I’m not gonna lie. When I came to college, I had this perception, probably from TV shows or movies, that you go to college and life is good . and you’re powerful if people are sexually attracted to you, and you can have sex with anybody you want and it’s no big deal. Guess what I did? The first two weeks of school, I did that and it fucked me up. Like I came [to college] thinking that it’s really okay to just hook up with somebody and I realized that it’s not. You know, for some women, maybe it is. Getting men to wanna have sex with you, it doesn’t mean you’re powerful, it doesn’t mean that you’re even respected. But, I’m also frustrated because it’s true, some women, it’s almost like that because they want to have sex all the time, somehow that means that they’ve got a loss of control or they’re just too emotional, or they’ve got some quality about them that’s negative. Although that’s fine for a guy, a woman is supposed to have more composure, she’s supposed to have more self-respect . that somehow, by having sex, it’s like you [as a woman] lose that. I’m not going to lie, I love sex, sex is fantastic. I can have sex whenever I want with whomever I want. However, I know from personal experience, since I’ve been in college, that it [sex] is a much more fulfilling experience when it’s with someone you actually care about, you know? —Eva, 19 years old, straight, white Eva, the college sophomore quoted above, was working to negotiate her sexual subjectivity in college. She understood the social-regulatory expectations that are placed upon a woman’s sexuality and that there are consequences to being a sexually active woman in our 2 society; any feeling she might have had of being “powerful” is now diminished because of these standards, set by dominant social guidelines. In this study, I draw on Tolman’s (2002) definition of sexual subjectivity as “a person’s experience of herself as a sexual being, who feels entitled to sexual pleasure and sexual safety, who makes active sexual choices, and who has an identity as a sexual being” (pp. 5–6). In her research on young women and sexual desire, Tolman found that when her participants talked
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