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Tiny little gestures

Rachel Thomson

Just back from Leicester University on the hottest day of the year where we held an event on ‘Making & Using Sociological Archives’ supported by the British Sociological Association’s early career network fund. I was lucky to work with Laura Fenton and John Goodwin to shape the event – which brought together great speakers and included two hands-on workshops, one from the Mass Observation and Archive and one by the RAD team. Preparing for the event I knew that I had just 1 hour. Influenced by reading Hannah Charnock’s (2025) Teenage Intimacies and her interest in the gestures and practice of the erotic life of youth, I thought why not gather together material on Dancing for this exercise in data sharing and secondary analysis? A few word searches later I had enough material – a diverse set of extracts from data capturing different experiences and levels of maturity as well as capturing the moment of 1989.

DANCING EXTRACTS from FAYS archive

At first you think he’s quiet but once he gets going he’s actually quite … not wild, but he’s very outgoing. You know, he likes clubs and things and he doesn’t mind dancing on the dancefloor on his own, sort of thing but he doesn’t look like that when you look at him. Fatima 20-1, British Turkish, mc 1989

A. I’d known him for a couple of years, for the same time I’d known my boyfriend, and I was ever so close to him, such good friends; like I’d tell him everything if I was having problems with my boyfriend, he’d tell me about his life and that, and we were always close, we mucked about and whenever we went out together, us two’d slide off and have chats and laugh and joke. And one night we had a party, we both had a little bit to drink; we weren’t absolutely out of our heads, just very very relaxed, and he started to – it – it just sort of happened, he started to stroke my arms and we were dancing, and then we all stayed at this person’s house, and it just carried on. He started to kiss me when everyone had gone to sleep, and we just went outside and it happened. It was like really – it just happened. It wasn’t like planned or anything. Claire LJH40 18, white British, lm 1989

No, but in his own way he’s got looks. And at the disco on Saturday there were all the girls staring at me, no not at me, at him, well they were looking at me because I was going out with him right, and I goes “why you …and so aren’t you going to do something like go and chat them up or something”, because some boys do do that, and he goes to me “look there is only one girl I’m going out with, and the only girl I’m going out with is you”, and he goes and “you’re not moving and I’m not moving”. So I said “alright then”, and he goes “what are you looking at” and they are all looking at me and giving me dirty looks and I’m giving them a smile and he goes, “the only girl I want to go out with is you and no one else”, and he is quite good looking. Rachel LSFS1213 16 white wc

A: – Well, it affects your brain, you feel completely different in, you know like, like if you dance or something you can’t feel – like say if I ran down the road now, I’d get to the end of the road and I’d be puffed, you know, I’d be going (gasp), my legs might hurt or something, I could feel all my bags, but when you’re like on an E you an’t feel the – your heavy bags, and you can’t – so you could run like – that’s – that’s why it’s associated with the dancing, ‘cos you could dance all night and not feel it until the next morning when your muscles are killing [..] like they say the music’s got nothing to do with the drugs, but it has; the drugs and the music, the rave music, like even some of it’s in the charts, makes your heart wanna go – you know, your heart goes at the same speed as the music so that’s why you really really enjoy it Lucy LSFS36 18-19 wc 1989


it was just a trip one night into the gay strip cos it was all like on the one street and it was quite sort of spectacular and exciting compared with, sort of, life in the suburbs. And a bloke at school … cos I sort of had a girlfriend at school at the time and he, you know … he was an enemy of mine at the time and he’d been watching me, you know, with this woman and he saw that we were getting quite close and then at school camp we sort of came out together in a little tiny gesture and we were dancing together at the school dance and things like that. We got loads of flack and ridicule and he came over to me, sort of on the quiet, and sort of said, you know, ‘Come out with me one night’. So he took me and this girl out in his car and we drove away and he showed me the gay bars and I never looked back from there. I think I went every night after that – it was just brilliant!
Justine LJH7 20-21, Australian, mc 1989


I was dancing with my friends the girls, I mean I don’t particularly need anyone to dance with me, I was dancing away. I was Acid dancing; I don’t like Acid dancing music! I cringe if it comes on the radio or the television, I cringe. My mum loves it. And I was Acid dancing, I think I was, if there’d have been a competition, I’d have won. I was doing the lot. And at the end of the night, this, I think he was Arabian or Asian, man, and when I say ‘man’, I say 40-45, like my dad’s age, he just grabbed me. And swinging me around, I’ve got my chin on his
shoulder.. And this lad that, this lad had been smiling at me all night, and I’d been smiling back…. dancing away and he’s smiling again. And I wasn’t having no go with this lad. I mean it just didn’t click with me what he was actually smiling at me for, because it never entered my head, anything like that. It didn’t click with me that he’d actually like to, you know, treat me as a come-on! It was a come-on what he was doing now…dancing away. So this lad’s got me in a grip like this, this fella. And this lad’s sat down, just next to the dance floor, and he says – Come here, come here. I couldn’t hear him. I said – Excuse me? I disentangled myself, you know. And I went, he said – Sit down here and wait until that fella’s gone. What for? He said – Do you want to dance with him? I said – No, you’re alright. He goes – Alright. And when this fella had gone, he said – Right, would you dance? I’ve been smiling at you for nearly two hours and you’ve not asked me to dance. I said – Why would I ask you to dance? He said – Haven’t you heard of women’s lib? I said – No, I don’t believe in that. EDD135 Michelle, white British wc 20.


It did not take me long to gather together some images from the pages of City Life (one of the other archives consulted to complement the WRAP data). Armed with coloured paper, glue and scissors I sincerely hoped that I would be able to deliver a meaningful yet speedy workshop with the help of Kate Watson and Niamh Moore. The first 10 minutes were dedicated to the approach. Then participants sitting together at tables were invited to create their own collages using data extracts and images shared. As ever, the workshop helped us understand the method and I wanted to use this blog to capture some of the learning:

Dancing as a topic was a breath of fresh air. Approaching the data side on – rather than through the focal themes of sexuality, sexual health and power in relationships allowed us to be playful and to see the original young women at play. It also encouraged us to see the what the space of the dance floor might have meant to these young women in 1989 – a space of erotic possibility and excitement. A space of display and of being watched and watching other. But also a dynamic and contingent space where norms move quickly or where we need to find those other dance floors that might be more welcoming and fulfilling.

Tearing data: We found we didn’t have enough pairs of scissors. The group all needed the scissors at the same time so some participants resorted to tearing their transcripts to capture their chosen words and phrases. One who had previously taken part in a similar RAD workshop explained that tearing the transcript made her feel more involved and connected to the material. It seems that breaking the wall of formality around ‘data’ is essential for this method. Whether that involves throwing pages of data into the air or tearing, re-voicing or rearranging – some kind of physical entanglement with the words of others brings liveliness to the process. Another participants reflected that she underlined and cut out words that captured the tone of the data extract. Yet when she rearranged these on the page she began to also tell her own story. This is something we see happening often with reanimating practice.


The time bind is something that we explain during the introduction to the workshop, but which came alive in our discussions. The time bind is a felt connection with the material. We don’t know what that will be in advance. It is almost as if the research questions only emerge in the encounters that are staged between data and participants and that these may be diverse and personal. For example, for one of the participants this day, the date 1989 could only mean the Tiannamen Square demonstrations and he worked with words cut from the text to write a poem to connect his feelings about this historical juncture.

For another participant it was the name ’Fatima’ that drew her to the material and the idea that she could have so easily known this young women, arriving in Manchester the following year. Perhaps they moved together on the dancefloor. Her collage spoke of a longing for a friendship missed – using contextual material yet none of Fatima’s words.


Titles: As part of the workshop we ask people to name their collages. We have found this to be a valuable stage in the process of collaborative analysis as participants reflect on and condense meaning for what has been an exploratory – and often rather hurried – process. In this collage a word is taken from the text used, yet in doing so sensitises us to something particular – the sensation of being synchronised or at the ‘same speed’ as others – a prerequisite for intimacy and for dancing together.

The title ‘Slide off’ also sensitises us to the embodied and relational dimensions of romantic and erotic interaction – as the young couple ‘slide off’ the dance floor to find somewhere quiet to be together. Something that both chimes and undermines the loud and brash.


The title ‘Hip Joints’ appears to play with the language of the popular culture (with certain club nights characterised as hip joints rather then ‘hoover halls’) while also directing our eyes and minds to the literal hip joints of dancers and exercisers as they move their bodies. I can’t help thinking about how those dancing with ecstasy in 1989 may well be suffering for sore hips joints in 2025.

It is interesting to look at the collages together and to ask what they tell us as a body of material. We might focus on the specificity of the participants – for example ‘the work produced by a group of academic researchers interested in active methods’. Looking at this selection I was interested in how queer dimensions of the archive were amplified in the re-use with several picking up in the idea of coming out.

I was also struck by questions about how and where the erotic potentialities of the dance floor have moved within youth culture if the dance floor is not long what it was. We spoke in the room about where it might have gone – online, into fan cultures, gaming intimacies, sports, gym culture…?

I am also struck by how the WRAP project was itself an intervention into a culture where doing/being rather than saying /explaining was the norm. As a feminist sexual health project the study incited a ‘speaking out about sex’ that was part of a wider belief in talking that can be see in the advice of agony aunts and health educators (Gahnstrom et al. 2024) Could sex education do a better job of engaging with the gesture, the euphemism, the look-taking seriously the non verbal dimensions of sexual cultures? But should we draw our attention back to the potentialities of the dancefloor – could these be reanimated. What would that look like and whose work would it be?


References
* Gahnstrom, R., Robinson, L., & Thomson, R. (2024) Is sex good for you?, reward, and responsibility for young women in the late 1980s’ in Froom, H., Loughran, T., Mahoney, K, & Payling, D. (eds) Everyday Health, Embodiment, and Selfhood since 1950. Manchester University Press.


* Charnock, H. (2025) Teenage Intimacies: Young Women, Sex and Social Life in England 1950-80. Manchester University Press.

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Collaging data and learning under lockdown

A few weeks ago we posted a blog by Charlotte Bagnall who shared how she and her colleague had used data from the WRAP archive as teaching materials for a series of sessions on thematic data analysis. Since Charlotte and Claire delivered these sessions, Corona Virus has arrived in the UK. We are in lockdown and educators across all sectors are working out how to facilitate teaching and learning online and from a distance. In these unfamiliar times we are realising that digital archives of sociological studies, like the WRAP, offer new possibilities for students and educators who want to research, teach and learn during lockdown. There are possibilities for students to do secondary data analysis, comparative historical work and data reanimation and possibilities for educators who may want to use the data, as Claire and Charlotte did, to guide students through more structured programmes of learning about research methods, feminist sociological research, sexuality studies, creative methods, Relationships and Sexuality education and much more. With this in mind we are sharing details of a session we ran in September last year with a group of students at Manchester Metropolitan University, when we had never heard of Corona virus and could sit and talk, learn, think and create together. In the session we used collaging as a method for engaging with and exploring the WRAP data and thinking about sexuality and social change. Although this was an offline, group session its simple creative methods of reflect, free-write, read, think, stick, paste and share could be transferable to different spaces and contexts.

Collaging sexual learning

On the 30th September 2019 lecturer and former youth worker Jayne Mugglestone, Ali Ronan and I facilitated a workshop for third year undergrad students studying on an Early Years and Childhood Studies programme undergraduate programme at MMU. Ali and I met Jayne early in the morning in the teaching room to set up for the session. Jayne had been feeling concerned that our decision to do a workshop on sexualities in week two of the module was not a good idea. In week two students wouldn’t know her, or each other, very well or have got used to working together as a group. The previous week Jayne had introduced the topic and let students know what would be happening. A few of the students had come to talk to her after the session to say that they were concerned about the topic, because of their religious values – some Christian, some Muslim. Jayne was feeling nervous about doing the workshop and concerned that some of the students wouldn’t turn up. This mirrored the nervousness of another of the youth workers we have worked with in this project who was concerned about how the young women in her group – from ‘strict’ Muslim and Christian backgrounds – would respond to the WRAP material. As we were setting up for the session however some of the students who had approached Jayne the previous week turned up and she could relax.

What jars you?

We started with an activity called What Jars you? (Taken from the AGENDA resource created by Emma Renold). We hadn’t planned to do this but decided to as Jayne noted some nervousness the previous week about talking about sexuality. The task was to write ‘what jars you about talking about sex and sexuality’ on post it notes and stuff these into a jar. There weren’t enough jars so the students had to share. This was a large group of over twenty students – all female except one and all born between 1997 and 1999 (We know this because our intro-starter involved talking about the year you were born!). The group is mixed in terms of race and ethnicity.

I went round and spoke to two tables at this point. At the first table the students told me that nothing jars them. They said they are very open about the topic and they are happy to talk about it. They talked about the importance of RSE and of talking about these issues both as students and young people and as future youth and childcare practitioners. On the other table two of the girls talked about the fact that they don’t talk about sex and sexuality at home or with friends. The silence around sex and sexuality was referred to in relation to upbringing and family. It took a while for us to name culture and religion as important factors. There was reference to the protests in Birmingham at the time around the teaching of LGBT relationships to Muslim children. I wasn’t quite clear if these were evoked as an example of why its difficult to have these conversations or as a polite message to me that we shouldn’t really be having these conversations anyway.

Students weren’t asked to share the contents of their jars. They could choose to take their jars with them or leave them on the tables if they were happy for us to read their contents. Most, if not all, left them. I read them after the workshop, expecting to find examples of what the students find difficult about talking about sex and sexuality in a classroom or professional context (as this was the context of our conversation prior to the activity). Students took up the activity in a different way, sharing examples of their own fears and concerns about sex and sexuality – their own ignorance, experience of abuse and fears of being touched, not enjoying sex or of getting pregnant. They also wrote what jars them about the politics of sexuality – the lack of education, social taboos around sex, restrictive religious and cultural norms, gender inequality.  

We used young people’s reflections on the activity, and what they find jarring about sex and sexuality to think about how we were going to create a safe space for working. We created a set of ground rules and talked about confidentiality and how we were documenting the session that day.

For Jayne this activity opened up thinking about what support childhood and youth practitioners need before they can go out and deliver RSE.

‘We expect people to go and work with young people/all ages, in different roles – teachers, community workers, family support, etc. and support them around RSE subjects and issues when they have had no information or support themselves. It’s challenge as there is so little space even in our quite open curriculum to work on this kind of thing. The rooms, the group sizes, the course fees and related pressure on assessment and jobs, all gets the focus and the students themselves get missed in it all.’

Jayne Mugglestone, Lecturer and youth worker

Partner discussion and individual free write

We started the creative work by asking students to talk to a partner about how and what they learnt about sex, sexuality and relationships (and also perhaps what they didn’t learn or wasn’t said). Once pairs had finished their conversations they were asked to individually speed write for 2 minutes about ‘sexual learning’. They could write about their own experiences or reflect on their conversation with their partner. The free writes were anonymous and confidential, although many of the students said they were happy to share them and let me take some photos. Together they capture what has been well documented in youth sexualities research – that young people learn about sex and sexuality from a range of different sources and that sexual learning starts long before children start school. We also see that young people are critical of the education they get at school, that conversations with parents are limited and many young people do not have a trusted or reliable source of information about sex and sexuality or a place to go to explore the topics that interest them in more detail.

Engaging with the WRAP data on sexual learning

Next we put the written reflections / speed writes to one side and then looked at some extracts from the WRAP study on sexual learning. Students were asked to choose an extract and read it several times, underlining things that stood out to them. Next they discussed the extracts with a partner and then with the wider group. There was a feeling that the extracts ‘could have been today’. One pair were confused because they thought that the extracts were from today, and not from the past. This has happened across the projects we have done in Manchester. Young women read the material as if it were from today. At first I saw this as our failure to provide enough historical context around the archive but I have since come to see this as what the WRAP material does. It glows and speaks to the young women who read it today. Rather than seeing the data as a historical document they see the data as an invitation to tell their own stories or to take advantage of a rare moment to hear another woman tell their story, with an intimacy they tell us they rarely hear. They don’t seem to see the interviews and the extracts as historical documents or ‘archive material’ but rather as a collection of women’s voices that they can often relate to, or that they feel inspired by. After this the task was to create a collage that captured their thoughts about what is changing for young people when it comes to learning about sex and sexuality. Students could use the extracts, their own free writes, or create new material. They were given coloured paper, glue, coloured pens, scissors and crayons.

Creating collages

Students worked quickly and creatively, responding to the invitation to explore sexuality and social change in different ways – one created paper jigsaw pieces to piece together the different ways that young people learn about sex, others created columns to show what has changed and what has remained the same. When I went around and talked to young people in their small groups two south East Asian young women told me that they only really learnt about sex and sexuality and relationships from social media – Instagram and snapchat – as they rarely discussed the topic with friends (and never with family). They said that they would see articles pop up on their news feed or in the discover / explore section of the app and would sometimes click on them. We looked at their phones to see what kinds of articles were there on that day. We saw two examples that appeared on their news feeds –   ‘How experienced are you really?’ and ‘things girlfriends do that secretly annoy their boyfriends’. The young women said they found these kind of articles useful and interesting as a way of learning about sex and relationships. We talked about the fact that they had no choice over what appeared in their news feeds but choice over what they clicked on, open and decided to read. This wasn’t the same at school, where they had no choice over whether they could take part in an RSE session or not.

In another discussion with a West African and south east Asian young woman the West African young woman describe how she learnt about sex and relationships from her friends, her parents, school sex education and her church. For her these different sites were different, but complementary. She never had a burning question inside her that she couldn’t get an answer to because if church wasn’t telling her, she would ask her mum, if her mum couldn’t answer she would ask her friends. She said that all these different messages and information would bump up against each other and sometimes contradict each other but ultimately she would always come back to what her mum said. You always come back to where you lie at night. She explained that a teacher can’t slap you or punish you like your mum can – you live in her house so you ultimately have to listen to her rules and her way of seeing things. When I asked if that meant that the other messages and learning didn’t matter, she said no – that she heard them all, they passed through and lodged in her brain somehow, even if she settled for now with what her mum tells her. She later had a go at representing this through her collage. Her friend said that things were similar for her, even though her religion was different (Islam).  

When the collages were finished we stuck them on to the wall and asked the students to gather round and talk about their collage. Through their collages and the discussion, the students made the following points about sexual learning and social change:

Friends are still a key source of information about sex for some young people. There is more openness between friends for some young people but for others sex is never discussed. Or as one young woman commented – there are some friends I would say anything to and some I wouldn’t talk to about sex at all.

Relationships and Sex Education is still largely scientific – focussing on the biological aspects of sex and not discussing other areas such as emotions, relationships, consent and bodies. It is also still mainly heterosexual. It is still largely taught by female teachers.

The legal and policy framework around the teaching of homosexuality in schools has changed in the UK. There used to be ‘section 28’ and now there the Love is love movement. There is more openness around homosexuality now but it is still largely excluded from RSE which still focusses on heterosexual relationships. LGBT young people have to find out their own information. As M (young gay man) said – I felt like there was no space for me within RSE.

Parents still don’t really talk about sex to their children, although this varies between families and across cultures. One white young woman commented that her family would never talk about sex but that her boyfriend’s mum is really open. They all walk around naked! – she told us.

Gender.  It remains the case that women are judged more harshly than men for having sex.

Clinics. There are more sexual health services and charities to support young people and sexual health clinics are confidential for young people.

Media. One young woman commented that young people have always learnt about sex and sexuality from the media but we talk about this as if it is a ‘new’ phenomena. In 1989 young people were learning about sex from television adverts about HIV and AIDS and today young people learn from digital and social media, as well as television.  The range of media and the content of media has changed however. She commented that AIDS would no longer be talked about in the media as a ‘gay disease’, but that female pleasure is still side-lined as it was in the 1980s. There are more media sources for learning about pleasure now (previously just women’s magazines) but – she said – we don’t learn about it. In a patriarchal society it is more accepted that men have sex.

Others in the group talked about other ways in which young people learn through the media. For example, through documentaries and YouTubers. One young person gave the example of Stacey Douley’s documentary about brothels in Turkey where men visit sex workers because they don’t know where to put their penis when having penetrative sex with a woman. Here the sex workers are the sex educators. Shan Boody [Shan Boodram) was mentioned as a YouTuber that some young people watch.

The group reflected that now there is so much more media to learn from – particularly from social media. This can be a pressure but it is an important source of information. For some this is their only source (see above). There is more about female pleasure in the media now and so many more sources than previously (just a few women’s magazines). Porn is a source of education now for some young people.

Religion remains influential and important to how young people learn about sex, sexuality and relationships. Young people felt that things are changing within many faith communities, even though it can be hard to see this. One group said that a sexual health worker had started to come to their Mosque after lots of men started getting STIs from the extra-marital relationships they were having. The young women said that these men can’t talk to the Imam about these relationships or about condom use as the men shouldn’t be having these relationships in the first place.

After the session Jayne spoke with the students and asked them for feedback. She found that students had taken things away from the session for themselves and for their practice as future childcare / youth practitioners. In particular, the importance of access to information about sex and sexual health and the need to not be judgemental and understand difference. Students commented a lot on the creative methods we used, noting that they didn’t feel like they were taking part in research and rethinking what it means to do research with young people.

Six weeks later we returned to do another session using the WRAP data, this time exploring what we find in an archive and what we find missing. The students drew their ‘many selves’ and looked through the archive to think about what stories about women’s lives they wanted to be heard by future generations. Then some of them gifted us stories of their own.

‘The effects of both the sessions were felt throughout the rest of the time I worked with them and after that. Some of them told me that it had really helped to think more about it all and to be in a space where they felt that they could explore different views. It seemed to give them much more confidence in their ability to talk about issues and to feel taken seriously in their feelings and discussions was really important. Several said that they had previously thought about RSE as quite a narrow subject where they now thought that it was much wider and much more important for all ages than they had thought.’

Jayne Mugglestone, Lecturer and youth worker

Click here to explore the archive further and to use the selected extracts on sexual learning use the link above.