Rob Cover

Sexual citizenship is a powerful concept associated with debates about recognition and exclusion, agency, respect and accountability. For young people in general and for gender and sexually diverse youth in particular, these debates are entangled with broader imaginings of social transitions: from 'child' to 'adult' and from 'unreasonable subject' to one 'who can consent'. This international and interdisciplinary collection identifies and locates struggles for recognition and inclusion in particular contexts and at particular moments in time, recognising that sexual and gender diverse young people are neither entirely vulnerable nor self-reliant. Focusing on the numerous domains in which debates about youth, sexuality and citizenship are enacted and contested, Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship explores young people's experiences in diverse but linked settings: in the family, at school and in college, in employment, in social media and through engagement with health services. Bookended by reflections from Jeffrey Weeks and and Susan Talburt, the book's empirically grounded chapters also engage with the key debates outlined in it's scholarly introduction. This innovative book is of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality, health and sex education, and youth studies, from a range of disciplinary and professional backgrounds, including sociology, education, nursing, social work and youth work.

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.

'Vulnerability and Exposure: footballer scandals, masculine identity and ethics' presents a critical investigation of contemporary masculine team sports and football scandals and their relationship with gendered cultures, institutions and identity norms. Drawing on reports of Australian Rules football off- field scandals over the past decade, the book critically examines cases of sexual assault, illicit drug use and binge drinking, homophobia, violence and other controversial behaviours that have become norms in the reporting of sportsplayers' off-field lives. Using a range of approaches to unpack some of the ways in which these scandals are produced and understood, and how they impact on reputations (of players, clubs and the game itself), Cover identifies the cultural factors significant in the production of the contemporary footballer identity, and the ways in which these identities are constructed, performed and reported on. IIn utilising scandal to develop ways in which off-field behaviour in sport can be re-made as a relatively harmless event for women, bystanders and players, this work develops an approach to ethics by showing that footballers are well-placed to see the vulnerability of others through their own vulnerability to injury, career breaks and loss of reputation.

"In a world of increasing mobility and migration, population size and composition come under persistent scrutiny across public policy, public debate, and film and television. Drawing on media, cultural and social theory approaches, this book takes a fresh look at the concept of 'population' as a term that circulates outside the traditional disciplinary areas of demography, governance and statistics - a term which gives coherence to notions such as community, nation, the world and global humanity itself. It focuses on understanding how the concept of population governs ways of thinking about our own identities and forms of belonging at local, national and international levels; on the manner in which television genres fixate on depictions of overpopulation and underpopulation; on the emergence of questions of ethics of belonging and migration in relation to cities; on attitudes towards otherness; and on the use by an emergent alt-right politics of population in 'forgotten people' concepts. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, geography and media and cultural studies with interests in questions of belonging, citizenship and population"--