One of the young women who took part in this project was Sophia Rosen-Fouladi. For Sophia, taking part in the reanimating data project was personally and professionally transformative, offering her the opportunity to talk about topics that she rarely had the opportunity to explore.
‘The Reanimating Data Project helps encourage discussions that are so open and encouraging for young women to see they aren’t alone in their circumstances….Sophia’s involvement in [the reanimating data workshops] has gone on to define parts of her career as well as her own confidence in her personal life. She was struck by how little she had previously talked about sex and sexual experiences before the workshops. The workshops offered her a space to learn, grow and discover tools that have improved her personal relationships and her confidence as an adult in many aspects of her life.‘
Several years later, Sophia dreamed up the idea of recreating similar kinds of creative and transformative spaces for others. Together with friend and fellow creative Ottilie Nye, Sophia founded Sexy Pigeons – A sex positive collective hosting workshops for women and non binary people in London. Sexy Pigeons first venture has been to develop the Cum on Down workshop series – imagined as a series of playful, creative spaces where women and non-binary people could come together to be creative, find new communities, build confidence and learn together about sex and sexuality.
Cum on Down!
Between April 2024 and January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons hosted 5 creative workshops in London. You can read about each of them in their own words on the Sexy Pigeons website.
Workshop one: The start of something special…
In April 2024, Sophia and Ottilie facilitated their first workshop with 15 women and non-binary people at the Albany Theatre in Deptford, South London. The focus of the workshop was VIRGINITY, which was explored using a mix of silly games and energisers, focussed discussions, mind maps, exploring WRAP data extracts, creative exercises and zine making.
This was an opportunity ‘to experiment with ideas. To try things out, be bold, and see what sticks’. You can read more about this workshop here in Sexy Pigeon’s own words: Focus Group: Virginity.
Workshop 2: The Sex Education System
A few months later, and now with a little financial support from the University of Sussex, Sexy Pigeons hosted their second workshop: The Sex Education System. Located at the Music Rooms in New Cross, South London this workshop also featured ice breakers, focussed discussions, zine making and creative world building exercises – this time in the form of acrostic poems. The struggle for this workshop was recruiting participants. The event was open to all and marketed online but Sexy Pigeons were disheartened by the small numbers of sign ups. In the end seven participants turned up and took part in what ended up being an intimate workshop with time and space for everyone to explore and express their thoughts and ideas.
We were inspired by the idea of the anonymous question box you might have at the end of a sex ed class, and encouraged participants to write down as many questions they could think of, either that they wished would have been answered during their time at school, or that would be beneficial to someone going through school right now. We then turned a question each into an acrostic poem. We had ‘discharge’ ‘contraception’ and ‘masturbate’ [and] the Ten ‘Cum’andments was a highlight of this workshop. 10 self love and educational points to wholeheartedly stick to. And of course we were proud of the name! (Sexy Pigeons 2024)
In November 2024, Sexy Pigeons hosted their third creative workshop in the Palmer studio at Hoxton Hall in East London. This time, the workshop took on a different structure using different creative exercises to gradually construct a timeline that hung across the workshop space. We had a solo participant turn up, however ended up being able to try out material in a really personal and honest way. We had some really cathartic moments reading out free writing material we’d written to our past selves, and got to know the women from the archive in greater depth.
By the end we had a huge variety of materials hanging on the timeline: questions, segments from the interviews, data poems and free writing to name a few. Circling back to the idea that multiple times are existing at once, we wanted to round the workshop off by making personal time capsules. Participants were allowed to deconstruct the timeline however they wished and add material to their time capsules. We focussed on the ‘message in a bottle’ idea using glass bottles which could be filled up and decorated on the outside. (Sexy Pigeons, 2024)
When developing the RAD project the project team were inspired by Elizabeth Freeman’s work on queer time. Freeman talks about the need to make visible the ‘imperfect sutures between past and present’ (p.111). Freeman highlights the example of artist and film-maker Elizabeth Subrin’s work, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands’. Here, Subrin shows two reels of silent footage of the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, taken nearly a decade apart, and sutured together. The first is taken in the weeks following the New York September 11th attacks and the second nearly a decade later. In suturing two times together like this, Freeman argues, we can see the anachronisms at play. This is how we can ‘‘unsituate viewers from the present tense they think they know, and to illuminate or even prophetically ignite possible futures in light of powerful historical moments’. (Freeman, 2010).
In this workshop, the Sexy Pigeons take up these themes, playing creatively with time and making spaces to make multiple times present.
‘What makes the concept of Reanimating Data so exciting for us is the idea of multiple timelines being in conversation with one another. By exploring a selection of interviews from the WRAP Project Archive we are reanimating these words within the context of the present day and giving them a liveness upon which to create new work and initiate new discussions.’ (Sexy pigeons, 2024)
On the 25th January 2025 the Sexy Pigeons facilitated their 4th and 5th workshops at the Palmer Studio at Hoxton Hall – ‘experimenting with structure and pace through trialling two hour-long workshops this time round.’ The groups – each with 10-12 participants – worked with extracts from the Women Risk and AIDS Project archive, creating body maps and discussing the homophobia and biphobia that surfaces in the interview and talking about the politics of sex education, before finishing up with a letter-writing exercise. You can read all about these workshops here: The Past, Present and Future
‘We wanted to round off the workshops with a letter-writing exercise to bring in an element of the future, looking towards a brighter future of sex education, and our relationships with our sexual identities. We love the wind-down/reflective time this gives participants to chat with us and amongst each other about any topics explored in the workshop, as well as promoting individual creativity. We encouraged participants to write a letter to their future selves, with the aim of opening it in 2 hours/days/weeks even years!!! We wanted to draw an invisible thread between the women from the interviews in the 1980s, the participants in our workshop in 2025, and whoever those participants may become in the future, to span decades of sex education. It brought a lighter feel to the end of the workshops after some fairly heavy content, and brought an atmosphere of peacefulness into the space.’
New directions…
After 10 months of experimenting with the structure and length of the workshops, trialling different venues, materials, activities and ways of advertising and recruiting participants, the sexy pigeons decided to try some new directions… more coming on their interactive exhibition and reanimating data filming day soon!
A collaged image with quotes from WRAP interviewees about virginity loss that captures something of growing up in London in 1989
The current moment, framed largely by Covid-19 and its many (necessary) restrictions, poses many difficulties for undergrad and Masters’ students who might have been thinking about conducting empirical fieldwork as part of their dissertations and are now left wondering what they might want to explore instead. In this blog I want to introduce a newly available digital archive of qualitative interviews, conducted with young women in London and Manchester in the late 1980s and to suggest that this might be a valuable resource for research students looking to carry out original feminist research. Now completely anonymised and easily accessed through our digital archive, these interviews, conducted as part of the Women, Risk and AIDS Project, have been relinquished from attics and floppy disks and are waiting to be revisited, reimagined and reanalysed through contemporary thought.
My own PhD project utilizes the WRAP data to (in a nutshell) interrogate how meanings of virginity have changed for young women and what this might be able to tell us about gendered sexual social change. ‘Virginity’ was the thing that really pulled me into the archive –the thing that ‘glowed’ (see Maggie MacLure’s work on The Wonder of Data for more on this). My own narrative of ‘virginity loss’ was a defining moment in my first foray into feminist thinking about gender and power (though I didn’t realise that that’s what it was at that time) and there was something really powerful about seeing some of myself in the archive, within the folds and contradictions of these young women’s stories. What was really interesting was that it felt like it could have been me and my friends discussing our own sordid tales of virginity loss as teenagers in the late ‘noughties’ (it had to be before we turned 16) – nothing seemed to have changed much in the interim. Of course, taking place over 15 years earlier, the experiences of WRAP interviewees were totally different. The interviews needed to be situated in the particular time and place that they were conducted to get a sense of what sexual stories could be told in 1989 and what aspects of these might ‘stick’ across generations.
While traditionally framed through marriage and
religion, the 1980s replaced traditional understandings of ‘virginity’ with new
meanings of sexual knowledge, experience and pleasure. Brought into
conversation with teen girl magazine problem pages from the late 80s, the WRAP
interviews help provide a glimpse into the everyday of this new sexual culture
and what it might have meant to grow up in a time more usually defined by
Thatcherism, the AIDS crisis and widespread youth unemployment (Brooke, 2014). One
particular quote from an interview with Danielle (aged 18-19, Caribbean, lower
middle class, no religion), living in London, really captures how things were
changing for some young women:
“‘I called him a chauvinist, I said, “you’re a chauvinist; you believe that when women have children they should give up work to look after them”. I said oh, I said, why can’t the man do that? I said, why can’t you have an equal partnership where you both go out to work’… ‘Marriage is a piece of paper. I don’t wanna have kids till I’m about thirty-five. When you’re mature you can actually enjoy them a lot better rather than having them young.”
Danielle (LSFS32)
And on ‘virginity loss’ specifically:
“Q. Yeah. Cos sometimes, I mean like you were saying about that first relationship where … that you had when you were very young, that it included everything but not sex. You must have made some decisions there that it wasn’t going to include … A. Yeah, I think we both did to a certain extent because we were both quite young schoolkids. It was just sort of an unspoken rule – you don’t go all the way.
Justine (LJH17)
While Justine (LJH17) doesn’t mention penetrative sex here – what we might typically think of as virginity loss – her acquisition of sexual experience without ‘going all the way’ points to new understandings of ‘what counts’ and what is allowed to be talked about, in comparison to earlier generations of women.
Through secondary analysis of the WRAP archive I aim to find out more about how these young women are able to talk about ‘virginity loss’. To locate these findings in their wider context, I’ve first gone back in time to the earlier part of the 20th century to understand how the changing relationship between love, sex and marriage allowed for the slightly more permissive society and sexual politics of the 80s. Teen girl magazines from 1989 are also undergoing some secondary analysis – the problem pages I’ve read so far, in Jackie, J17 and Mizz, don’t seem to have any qualms with their readers having sex – so long as it’s within the confines of a steady, stable relationship and framed by love, trust and good communication. At some point this new look at old materials will be used to form participatory virtual workshops with young people today to try and gain a further sense of what ‘virginity loss’ might mean now, eventually (hopefully) culminating in some sort of online open access resource on using the WRAP interviews as a pedagogic tool.
While my research focuses primarily on themes of
desire, respectability, femininity and social change, there are loads of ways
into the archive and so many different questions you can ask it.I
read each interview at least twice when preparing the dataset for digital publication
and I’m sure if I read them all again now, I’d find something new to think
about!
Exploring the relationship between location and sexuality would be a great place to start – there are striking differences between the stories told by WRAP interviewees in London and in Manchester, despite the diversity of young women that were interviewed in each place. Many in Manchester had totally different, more traditional aspirations than those living in the capital. This is highlighted even more by WRAP London interviewees who had moved to the city from somewhere more rural or Northern and reflect on their experiences of a more cosmopolitan lifestyle.
This word cloud shows you just *some* of the
keywords that you can search in Figshare to pull up different interviews that might
pique your interest:
You could, for instance, look at the different forms of contraception that young women were (or not) using and their experiences of these. There were many health-related fears around the contraceptive pill at this time, for example, and many WRAP interviewees used birth control to regulate their periods rather than to protect against pregnancy. Some accessed contraception through family planning clinics while others visit their GP. Sex education is another key feature of the interviews – how was it different to now, and where did these young women find alternative means of sex education outside of formal schooling? How did young women from typically othered cultural or religious backgrounds, usually here as second-generation migrants, navigate their own sexual subjectivity in late 1980’s UK? What were some of the cultural tensions and contradictions they were facing, and are these the same or different today?
Another way into the archive would be to strip
back the interviews even further and think about where the WRAP study sits
within a historiography of feminist sexualities research or girlhood studies.
While the original project was a response to the AIDS/HIV crisis and widespread
anxiety around the sexual health and safety of young people, there was other
feminist work on ‘desire’ happening at the same time. Where does WRAP fit in
with this? What methods were able to be used and which questions were able to
be asked? ‘The Male in the Head’, a publication from the original WRAP research
team that came out of the project, offers a way of thinking about how youth sexuality
and identity was constructed at this time, and would be high up on my list of
recommended reading for anyone interested in the study.
The Reanimating Data Project offers both tools and inspiration for using the interviews in participatory group work with young people, which could be easily adapted. You can go big, like Ester did with the Women’s Theatre Society at the University of Manchester, where she facilitated workshops using data from three of the WRAP interviews that resulted in an incredible, intergenerational performance. Emphasis in these workshops was to be messy with the data to see what might happen – from re-asking each other questions from these original interviews and using the data to write songs and powerful personal moments (for more on these methods check out Ester’s blog here. Niamh’s work with Sapphormation and subsequent work by Ali Ronan with a youth group at the Proud Trust demonstrate how generative just small chunks of interview can be. You can read Ali’s blog about this here.
Image from a Women’s Theatre Society RAD workshop
With previous experience of both youth work and
conducting creative, participatory research on youth sexualities and sex education
with young people, I’m a big fan of using these sorts of ideas to engage young
people in critical thinking and discussions. There is a real sense of how
useful these activities are, or could be, in helping to create the right sort
of space for this research. And they might not work with your own group of
young people – which, of course, provides useful and reflexive insight in
itself.
I hope what I’ve managed to convey through this post is that there are a number of ways of using the WRAP interviews outside of the more traditional archival sense and I hope that others – from sociologists, to social historians to youth practitioners, and everyone in between – can utilise the value in these young women’s now-historical accounts. There are so many fascinating ways into the archive and so many interesting discussions that can come out of it. I was lucky enough to find my thing that ‘glows’ fairly early on, and I hope that someone else might find their own wonderous lightbulb moment in the WRAP archive, too. Let us know what you find and feel free to get in touch with any questions. You can follow us on Twitter at @ReanimatingData
The idea of working with a group of drama students came about when re-encountering the original data set and finding and remembering an interview (MAG50) with a young woman studying drama at Manchester University. MAG50 was eager to talk about her own complicated emotional life as well as the ‘false and forced intimacy’ of the drama scene. She shared stories of non consensual sex as well as intense relationships with powerful older men. She also articulated her understanding of the sexual politics of the theatre industry where women may need to be sexually available in order to get work.
Reading this
interview in a new historical moment framed by the #metoo movement and the exposure of predatory men within the
entertainment and creative industries encouraged me to take this material to todays
drama students at Manchester University. I wanted to find out if they would be
interested in the material and in collaborating in a project of reanimation
that would help us think about social change and continuity. We began by making
contact with Alison Jeffers in the drama dept at MU who put us in contact with
Elena and Lea – two third year students who had recently taken over the
stewardship of the Women’s Theatre Society – a student led theatre society for
women.
The work began. We shared two further transcripts with the group – both interviews with young women who were drama students at UM in 1989. After 6 weeks of workshopping the material I was able to join them.
Before leaving for
Manchester I gathered some memorabilia to take with me – objects from my life
at the time the research was done; an old diary, photographs and a copy of my
handwritten Masters dissertation on Women and AIDS, which lead to me being part
of the WRAP project. I also read MAG50 again on my way to Manchester as well as
reading my dissertation. Through these objects I tried to remember my 23 year
old self. When I met the young women that evening they jumped, as if they had
seen a ghost. I understood that they had got to know a version of me in the
interviews and that meeting the 53 year old me was strange for them. I tried to
explain that it was strange for me too.
I shared my memorabilia and to began a Q&A session that lasted over an hour where we did the work of weaving feminist webs between our shared relationship with this interview and our shared co-presence, uncannily in the very building where the original research had taken place. There were a number of moments in this conversation when connections were made between the old me and the new me, between the young women and MAG50, between 1988 and 2019 in that building. I felt like we were doing a collaborative analysis.
Making sense
of the boldness of the sexual discourse.
A burning
question for the group was how it was possible for the original conversation to
have taken place. It was so bold, intimate, open. At first I thought that they
were telling me that from their perspective the research was unethical, that
the questions too direct, transgressive. But over the discussion I began to understand
that they were curious about how such a discourse became possible. They wanted
to know about the staging of the interview and the lead up to the conversation (did
they know what would be asked?) and about whether I had supervision to prepare
me for the ‘heaviness’ of the discussion. It became evident that having a
conversation like this now would be very difficult, constrained by concerns
about safeguarding, consent and triggering. But rather than chastising me for
bad practice I discovered that the young women were eager to re-enact this way
of talking.
Rachel: I think that’s really interesting because I think now we would see a study like this through the prism of mental health and it absolutely wasn’t how we looked at it. So, we would now … I don’t know, tell me what you think, I think we would think about triggers things like that, is it triggering? Could you ask that because that might…? Whereas in a way this was the stuff that happened before that whole way of looking at the world came about, this was much more political I think in a straightforward way, well nothing is straightforward is it? But it was much more about trying to say, “That’s not fair.” Or, “Put that into words; what words does that…?” Because we didn’t really have any vocabulary to talk about sex, people didn’t know what to call bits of their body, they didn’t know how to name power, and I say ‘they’ I would speak of myself as well, you know, like we didn’t really have a vocabulary to describe any of these things so it was the basic work.
Together we
worked out the relationships between now (2019) and a time (1989) where
speaking out about sex and about power was a project of making the personal
political, naming the unnamed and developing a new vocabulary. As threads
connected the two moments in time the young women articulated that this formed
a necessary foundation for a future culture that is saturated in the knowledge
of sexual violence. Yet we also mused that something had been lost in the
reframing of sex from a political to a more psychological register. We realised
that there is a complicated new kind of silencing that reigns in the young
women’s worlds in which sex is both seen as casual and no big deal, as well as
too much trouble, too difficult and too important.
#metoo
At the end of the
session I asked them about the #metoo movement and about the sexual
politics of the drama world and the entertainment industry. Again the young
women told a story of unevenness and contradiction. In many ways things are
better for young women – there are pockets of feminist practice and areas of
the business dominated by women (documentary film was given as an example). Yet
elsewhere in the industry things are worse then they have ever been, with
market forces determining what it valued and valuable. An actress still has to
rely on her body and her youth. It is not sexism as such that is to blame, but
the laws of the industry and the preferences of the audience. We talked about
women withdrawing from exposed patriarchal spaces, deciding that it is just ‘too
much’ and not worth it. I began to understand what they were trying to tell me
about contemporary sexuality and to grasp how what came before is part of what
is now in a way that escapes the linear narratives of progress and decline that
stand in the way of generational connection.
Urgent mini
interviews
The evening culminated in an urgent series of mini interviews, with young women choosing fragments from one of the three interviews to revoice and discuss or simply asking me to ask them questions like I had asked the WRAP young women. The interviews were double documented – I recorded them as ‘data’ for our reanimating project and Elena recorded them as useful material that the group might use for devising a performance.
I learned a lot
from these conversations: that it was still hard to be a virgin; that it was
hard to find a ‘middle ground’; that the protection of men and families is
vital for many people still; that loving oneself can be harder than loving
someone else. It was an overwhelming and moving experience that I am in the
midst still of understanding. These
re-enactments were the frenzied culmination of a long slow process of
engagement which I would like to think of as a single method spread out in time
and space and certainly a kind of co-production that we both documented and
made our own.
Watching the
performance several months later I could see how strands of our conversations
in the workshop had been worked with creatively and brought to life through
performance. Although the performance did contain extracts from the three
interviews, reperformed by the young women, the focus was on the 2019 young
women’s stories. In the discussion after the show the young women told us that
engaging with the material gave them permission and a desire to tell their own
stories and to think that someone out there might be interested in listening.
Watch the live performance of The Reanimating Project.
