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ABSTRACT
Novel forms of social media created ‘by-and-for’ women offer potentially new ways of communicating and constructing sex education. In this paper, we consider how Instagram is being used by sex educators to deploy discourses of resistance and erotics to educate about sex. Our method consisted of a combined critical discourse (CDA) and content analysis of Instagram posts (n = 200) from a small sample of influential feminist/queer sex education accounts that use informative text and illustration-based posts. Framed by Carmody’s concept of ethical erotics, we identify four discursive categories in such Instagram content: pleasure positivity; communication and dynamic consent; sex as an experience not a performance; and challenging heteronormative constructions of sex. We argue that the affordances of Instagram provide a platform for the promotion of sex education that centres pleasure and ethical erotics to rectify limited and harmful heteronormative representations of sexuality.
Acknowledgments
We thank the editors for their incisive and detailed suggestions and editing, the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article, and the Instagram artists who generously granted permission for their artwork to be reproduced here.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. We use the term feminine here rather than female, as we conceptualise femininity as not biologically determined, but a social construction and gender expression with which diverse subjects may choose to identify.
2. We use the term women as inclusive of trans-women and femme individuals.