ReVisioning Sexuality: Relational Joy and Embodied Flourishing

Sexuality and relationships are a major aspect of teen development. Youth Ministry programs that embrace relational joy and embodied flourishing promote healthy, holistic sexuality for the teens they serve. Yet, many youth ministry programs treat sexuality as a risk (or sin) to be reduced or about which to remain completely silent. Sexuality is part of our created goodness that youth need help to understand and embrace. Faith leaders can influence how teens understand their sexuality and relationships, either as a positive dimension of joy and flourishing or as an inhibitor to health and thriving. In addition to this theological conversation, this article describes increased risks to adolescents who experience high levels of disapproval from families and faith leaders with regards to their sexuality and suggests specific ways to integrate healthy and holistic approaches to faith-based sexuality education that cultivates joy and flourishing related to teen sexuality and relationships.

Tom Holloway’s Love Me Tender

Australian dramatist Tom Holloway’s adaptations of ancient tragedy reflect both the way that dramatists can structure scripts with an ‘open dramaturgy’ that provides directors with the opportunity to realize text through postdramatic strategies, and the way that the classics can be used to investigate the Australian psyche. The 2010 première production of Love Me Tender, Holloway’s Iphigenia at Aulis reinvention, situated the tragedy in an Australian bushfire season, and reinvented it in the form of unattributed lines on a page. The absence of characters is a postdramatic strategy, and in performance numerous other postdramatic techniques were added to the script to create an affective, image-driven investigation into the theme of sacrifice. Chapter 3 argues that Love Me Tender embodies a politics of form, and that the play compounds an investigation into the idea of sacrifice with a focus upon societal tensions surrounding pre-teen sexuality and raunch culture. It suggests that Love Me Tender provides a key example not only of the way that this new dramaturgical style can be realized through postdramatic performance, but also of the political use of the classics in postdramatic theatre.

After School Special Education

In her analysis of ABC’s After School Specials (1972–1995), Julie Passanante Elman argues that disability was central to television's "turn toward relevance" and its construction of the "teen viewer." The Specials represented coming of age by consistently linking heterosexuality with able-bodiedness and metaphorically representing adolescence as a process of “overcoming disability.” Simultaneously, they redefined both teen television viewing and teen sexuality as productive rather than damaging. Articulating insights from disability studies to television studies, Elman demonstrates how the Specials’ disability narratives negotiated the complex terrain of teen sexuality, representations of disability, and an assertion of commercial television’s educational value.

Lines of flight in sex education: Adolescents’ strategies of resistance to adult stereotypes of teen sexuality

Can school-based sex education (SBSE) that reproduces structural inequalities simultaneously hold possibilities for meaningful and transformative experiences? In this article, we situate students’ perspectives on stereotypes encountered in their school-based sexual education classes in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s work . The analysis is based on 63 interviews with high school students at two schools in the same district in the USA, one high-poverty/low-ranked, and the other, low-poverty/high-ranked. Our analysis reveals how adolescents attempt to resist stereotypes in SBSE while simultaneously creating meaning in their encounters. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts ‘lines of flight’ and ‘deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ allow us to examine resistance in a way Foucault’s interpretation of power and discourse does not. We expand on these concepts and how they are significant in explaining adolescents’ resistances in our analysis.