Based on empirical research with 17-19 year olds, this article explores young people's understandings of themselves as sexual in relation to dominant discourse of (hetero)sexuality. It is concerned with providing empirical evidence of resistance in young people's constitution of their sexual subjectivities. The research findings suggest that young people generally draw upon dominant discourses of (hetero)sexuality in their talk about themselves as sexual. However some took up subject positions that involved more resistant conceptions of the sexual self. For some young people this took the form of simultaneously accommodating and resisting subject positions offered by traditional discourses of (hetero)sexuality. It is argued that the potential to take up more resistant subject positions was partly contingent upon young people's location in contexts that offered access to, or opened space for, other ways of constituting themselves as sexual.

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Displays of hegemonic masculinity within research contexts are often perceived to inhibit the collection of ‘good’ data and present a problem which the researcher must overcome. Instead of being seen as hindering the research process, this article takes such moments as ‘data’, which provide first hand insights into the way male sexuality is made within focus group settings. This environment is seen as constitutive of male sexual subjectivities in the way that it provides a public forum for young men's presentation of self. Through their talk about sexuality young men engage in the management of their own sexual identities, fashioning these through what they reveal and conceal about their sexual selves. In order to meet the objective of the focus group and discuss sexuality ‘seriously’ yet also preserve masculine identity, young men deploy discursive constructions in complex ways. Such demands render the maintenance of an identity which conforms to traditional constructions of masculinity precarious, so that constant slippage between projections of ‘hard’ and ‘softer’ versions of male sexuality occur.

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