What is this?

 Thanks for stumbling upon my writing project for this year! I'm doing this blog for a credit in a women's studies directed studies course. Rather than work on a 50 page paper for a few months, I proposed writing an "academic" blog with shorter, less serious posts between the more formal ones. Quite obviously, the idea went through, so now I'm officially paying 500 dollars to write a blog. Anyway.

Throughout the year, I'm going to begin to tackle the broad topic of "kids and sex" from a social constructionist perspective. This means I'm not going to take identities, practices or anything, really, as impermeable fact. I'll recognize that identities, (both voluntary and involuntary) are fluid as they change through time, context, space and with social expectations. I'm constantly going to push and challenge the limiting categories people are thrust into, in hopes of deconstructing their meanings. Everything, and I'm insistent when I say everything, is socially constructed through our biased knowledge or ourselves and other, as well as by norms that penetrate our society so deeply that they seem natural. This is the very short explanation and introduction to this blog.

Like I started to say before I interrupted myself, this blog is going to talk about "kids and sex"- something that comes up a lot in contemporary North American conversation. There are so many directions I can and will go with this, but as a (half-arsed) promise to myself to actually write about these things, this is a preview of expected topics:
-Intergenerational sex vs. Pedophilia
-Sex education
-Social panic about kids and sex
-"Raunch culture"
-Popular culture's representations of sex
-What is "sex", anyway? 
-Sex in the media
-Historical and contemporary understandings of both "kids" and "sex"
-The deconstruction of sexualities, heteronormativity and bi/homophobia