Girls debating penises, orgasms, masturbation and pornography

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a study of students’ writings about the erotic. These occurred in the form of graffiti and were scrawled on toilet doors for female students attending a higher education institution in Malta. The study explores how the erotic was defined and perceived by students, and how they attempted to create alternative spaces to explore their erotic selves through their writing. Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, which refers to spaces enacted for the Other, informs the analysis. Heterotopias subvert the order of spaces and mirror other dominant sites that make up the social fabric. This framework considers the lavatories as heterotopias, through which students broke silences and taboos about the erotic by challenging perspectives concerning sexual relatedness and erotic fantasy. In the absence of sexuality education in the curriculum of the institution in which the study took place, the study suggests that students may have sought out and constructed new ways of learning.