Kyra Clarke

Popular film and television hold valuable potential for learning about sex and sexuality beyond the information-based model of sex education currently in schools. This book argues that the representation of complicated—or "messy"—relationships in these popular cultural forms makes them potent as affective pedagogical moments. It endeavours to develop new sexual literacies by contemplating how pedagogical moments, that is, fleeting moments which disrupt expectations or create discomfort, might enrich the available discourses of sexuality and gender, especially those available to adolescents. In Part One, Clarke critiques the heteronormative discourses of sex education that produce youth in particularly gendered ways, noting that "rationality" is often expected to govern experiences that are embodied and arguably inherently incoherent. Part Two explores public intimacy, contemplating the often overlapping and confused boundaries between public and private.

This book provides a contemporary review of the social practices and representations of flirting. In the wake of #MeToo, flirting has become entangled with stories of harassment and abuse that have generated both outrage and confusion. Nevertheless, this book argues that negotiating intimacy has always been an ambiguous social practice that can be risky and fraught, and examines how the presiding perception of flirting is constructed in contemporary cultural media. The book interrogates the relation between flirting and scandal, the kinds of scripts available in popular culture, and relations to feminism and other current social theories around gender and sexuality. It asks the questions; how can desire be declared? How can playfulness be understood? And what kind of language is available to speak about these complexities? Drawing from a range of media forms such as public scandal, reality television, and teen film, Flirting in the Era of #MeToo argues that contemporary flirting is both provocative and conservative in its negotiation of an assemblage of shifting values, and considers possibilities for social innovation and change in light of these competing tensions.

Popular film and television hold valuable potential for learning about sex and sexuality beyond the information-based model of sex education currently in schools. This book argues that the representation of complicated—or "messy"—relationships in these popular cultural forms makes them potent as affective pedagogical moments. It endeavours to develop new sexual literacies by contemplating how pedagogical moments, that is, fleeting moments which disrupt expectations or create discomfort, might enrich the available discourses of sexuality and gender, especially those available to adolescents. In Part One, Clarke critiques the heteronormative discourses of sex education that produce youth in particularly gendered ways, noting that "rationality" is often expected to govern experiences that are embodied and arguably inherently incoherent. Part Two explores public intimacy, contemplating the often overlapping and confused boundaries between public and private.