Exploring Audiences' Responses to Sexuality Education Videos on YouTube

• In Event: 77.032 - Rape Culture in Public Education and Online: Exploring Current Realities and Solutions

Abstract

Objectives: Canadian sexuality education programs remain in a fragile state, with public backlash and political discourse influencing provinces and schools’ decisions regarding how, when, and if they should teach about sexuality topics. Meanwhile, YouTube is growing as a medium to provide sexuality education, with some young YouTubers taking it upon themselves to educate others (Johnston, 2017; Manduley, Mertens, & Sultana, 2018). Yet, we still know little about how they approach sexuality education in their videos, or the responses they engender.

This work examines how 4 young celebrity YouTubers teach about sexual consent and sexual violence, and explores audiences’ reactions to their videos. I first identify the themes and discourses that emerge within the videos and their comments sections, then study the relationships between the types of text produced (e.g., genre, media strategies, content), the producers’ identities (e.g., gender, race), and audience responses. The presentation concludes with my reflections about the pedagogical potential and challenges of using YouTube for sexuality education.

Theoretical Framework: In this study, I propose that YouTube videos and comments are sites of public pedagogy (Giroux, 2000), where everyday practices such as watching and commenting on YouTube videos lend to informal education. I draw from Fiske’s (2010) Multimodal Social Semiotics framework to analyse the discourses and production strategies in YouTube videos. Further, I turn to feminist literature around sexual violence to tease out the ideologies circulating within the YouTube videos and comments feeds.

Methods/Data Sources: This study is part of a larger dissertation project, where I use a combination of constructivist grounded theory methods and qualitative content analysis to study 26 YouTube videos on sexual consent and sexual violence. For this presentation, I isolated the four most popular YouTubers in my study and perform a qualitative, inductive content analysis of 400 audience responses. I identified the audience stance, style of comment and when applicable, ideological discourse of each responses. I also referred to the multimodal, qualitative content analysis of the videos and vloggers’ YouTube space that I conducted for my larger study to examine the relationships between these videos, the producers, and audience reactions.

Findings: The preliminary findings reveal that the sample of popular YouTubers largely reflect feminist ideologies, employ appealing strategies like humor and visual effects, and demonstrate thoughtfulness in their content and approach. This suggests that videos themselves attempt to provide sex-positive education. Audiences’ responses vary widely depending on the videos. The comments feed generally reflect a mix of positive and negative comments about the video content and the YouTuber, with individuals expressing their opinions and emotions about the topics discussed, and their support/dislike for the vlogger. Audience responses consist of a mix of post/feminist and misogynist discourses.

Study Significance: While we know that YouTube is a popular resource for young people exploring sexuality and gender topics, few studies examine sexuality education videos on YouTube and audience responses to these videos. This paper addresses this gap, and further contributes to growing literature around the relationship between YouTube and public pedagogy.

Author

• Chloe Krystyna Garcia, McGill University