Pubic hair removal, now common among women in Anglo/western cultures, has been theorised as a disciplinary practice. As many other feminine bodily practices, it is characterised by removal or alteration of aspects of women's material body (i.e., pubic hair) considered unattractive but otherwise "natural." Emerging against this theorisation is a discourse of personal agency and choice, wherein women assert autonomy and self-mastery of their own bodies and body practices. In this paper, we use a thematic analysis to examine the interview talk about pubic hair from 11 sexually and ethnically diverse young women in New Zealand. One overarching theme – pubic hair is undesirable; its removal is desirable – encapsulates four themes we discuss in depth, which illustrate the personal, interpersonal and sociocultural influences intersecting the practice: (a) pubic hair removal is a personal choice; (b) media promote pubic hair removal; (c) friends and family influence pubic hair removal; and (d) the (imagined) intimate influences pubic hair removal. Despite minor variations among queer women, a perceived norm of genital hairlessness was compelling among the participants. Despite the articulated freedom to practise pubic hair removal, any freedom from participating in this practice appeared limited, rendering the suggestion that it is just a "choice" problematic.
Response to commentaries on "Functionalism, Darwinism, and the Psychology of Women: A Study in Social Myth" is organized around three themes and a question. The first theme is the importance of knowing the history of the study of women, gender, and sexuality. Second is the importance of what might be called "positive gatekeepers," those in our field who have some degree of power or who may be better positioned to support our endeavors or be in a position to open doors to professional advancement. Third is a core feature of feminist psychology: The importance of acknowledging the ways in which social values are inherent in the research process. Taken together, these themes raise for me an important question to reflect upon: Where do we, as feminist psychologists, wish to have influence?
It is a decade and a half since Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell's (2001) "Jekyll and Hyde: Men's constructions of feminism and feminists" called scholarly attention to men's discursive splitting of feminism and feminists into good and monstrous variants. In this article, we ask whether this double vision persists and how it operates in a cultural moment when feminism and feminist issues are (re)entering the mainstream. We draw from data collected in the course of a New Zealand study exploring how young people were making sense of sexism, feminism and gender (in)equality. Our analysis of participants' accounts suggests a binary discursive formulation of feminism is alive and well: "unreasonable feminism" damns and dismisses feminism, while "fair feminism" affirms it, aligning it with equality. Where previous research has shown how such pejorative and affirming accounts are worked together in ways that dilute or depoliticise feminism, we explore how teenagers who explicitly adopted a feminist identity drew on these discourses to justify a more politicised feminist position. Many participants adopted a practice of "reasonable feminism", embodying and evidencing feminist reasonableness through their rhetorical and performative devices.
Intimate partner violence is often known to a wider social network. Still little research exists on the experiences of social networks, how they respond and how women and children experiencing intimate partner violence perceive these responses. This article draws on 16 qualitative interviews with women victims of intimate partner violence, intimate partner violence-exposed children and their relatives in three kin networks. The overall aim of this article is to study responses to intimate partner violence from a multivocal perspective where the possibly concurring and conflicting perspectives of both the victims and the networks are heard. More specifically, the article explores what responses are perceived as possible/impossible to end violence and create safety for women and children. The article shows how masculinity, in intersection with kin position and age, figures both as an obstacle and a possibility to end intimate partner violence. Moreover, the article shows that responses are shaped from intersections of age, kin and gender in victims, more specifically understandings of maturity and adulthood of female victims and how this linked to responsible motherhood. The study provided insights into responses to intimate partner violence as co-constructed in a wider social network and how a focus on multivocality may be useful for understanding the multidimensional character of responses to intimate partner violence.
This article explores the ways in which lethal intimate partner violence perpetrated by both men and women is made sense of in news reports in Finnish tabloids. An analytical approach drawing upon critical discursive psychology, complemented with tools from membership categorization analysis, was adopted for distinguishing recurring patterns in accounting for violence and use of gendered categorizations in the news. Two recurring interpretative repertoires of violence were identified. The first constructs violence as originating from interactional or relationship problems, while the second relies upon characterizations of the perpetrators as pathological or deviant to explain violence. The analysis accords particular attention to the ways in which the ideal of gender-neutrality that is prevalent in Finnish society is drawn upon in these repertoires, and how this ideal entwines with the circulation of gender-specific assumptions. The analysis also illustrates how categorizations often work in the reports to preserve the normality of men as perpetrators of lethal intimate partner violence while attaching deviance and moral questionability to women both as victims and as perpetrators, thus maintaining the taken-for-grantedness of gendered differences in relation to violence.
Eating disorders are currently often approached as biopsychosocial problems. But the social or cultural aspects of the equation are frequently marginalised in treatment – relegated to mere contributory or facilitating factors. In contrast, feminist and socio-cultural approaches are primarily concerned with the relationship between eating disorders and the social/cultural construction of gender. Yet, although such approaches emerged directly from the work of feminist therapists, the feminist scholarship has increasingly observed, critiqued and challenged the biomedical model from a scholarly distance. As such, this article draws upon data from 15 semi-structured interviews with women in the UK context who have experience of anorexia and/or bulimia in order to explore a series of interlocking themes concerning the relationship between gender identity and treatment. In engaging the women in debate about the feminist approaches (something that has been absent from previous feminist work), the article examines how gender featured in women’s understandings of their problem, and the ways in which it was – or was not – addressed in treatment. The article also explores the women’s evaluations of the feminist discourse, and their discussions of how it might be implemented within therapeutic and clinical contexts.
This study examines the influence of patriarchal ideology on women's beliefs about wife beating. A convenience sample of 701 married Palestinian women from Israel was obtained, and a self-report questionnaire was administered. The findings revealed that large percentages of Palestinian women expressed some tendency to justify wife beating in certain instances. In addition, some of the participants expressed some tendency to blame battered women for violence against them, and to believe that they benefit from beating. As hypothesized, endorsing patriarchal ideology was found to influence all three beliefs about wife beating held by Palestinian women in Israel, over and above the amount of variance in the women’s socio-demographic characteristics (e.g. age, education, employment, place of residence, and religion). The limitations of the study as well as the implications of the results for future research are discussed.
How young women negotiate sexual agency in first sex is contingent upon the specific social construction of female and male sexuality and the sexual double standards in a particular local context. Within Philippine Roman Catholicism, a strong religious moral discourse equates virginity with a woman’s honor, making first sex or virginity loss a source of shame. This has implications for women’s experiences of sexual agency. We report on research in which a group of eight young Filipina women wrote their memories of first sex and collectively analyzed these memories. Using thematic analysis, we derived five themes about why they engaged in first sex: (1) "giving in," (2) "nadala" or "carried away," (3) love, (4) self-expression, and (5) coercion. Avoiding sexual agency in giving in and nadala is linked to the experience of pain, loss, and shame. Recognizing sexual agency by articulating first sex as a need for sexual self-expression is tied to the experience of pleasure. The absence of sexual agency is seen in the experience of coercion and subsequent trauma. Despite variations in these women’s constructions of first sex, each can be seen as ways of preserving a woman’s social status and maintaining a "good girl" position.
Positioned at the heart of psychology’s theory and practice, as well as at the core of the so-called feminist ethic of care, empathy is nevertheless a matter of ambivalence for feminist psychology. This paper describes two symptoms of a failure of advanced Western-style democracies to get empathy right in terms of gender justice: the first is described here as the phenomenon of ‘empathism’; the second as the ‘female empathy tax’. Difference feminists (in psychology and elsewhere) have advocated a politics of recognition directed towards the celebration of the superiority of female and maternal empathy. Intended to enhance women’s status, this is likely to backfire from the point of view of sexual equality unless complemented by a politics of affective redistribution between the sexes. Relinquishing the feminist attachment to the lopsided ‘feminization’ of empathy, in favour of its ‘androgynization’ as a fundamental human capacity, allows for the formulation of a post-patriarchal account of empathy.
This article considers how the issue of rape in South Africa is discursively constructed by women who have not experienced it. Taking a feminist discursive analytic approach to data from 15 semi-structured interviews, the article identifies four interpretative repertoires which the women used in their talk of rape. These are the statistics repertoire, invoking putatively objective rape statistics; crime repertoire, locating rape within a crisis of crime; race repertoire, naming the racial Other as the rapist; and gender repertoire, explaining rape in terms of normal gendered dynamics and practices. The women chiefly deployed the statistics, crime and race repertoires. These repertoires intersected to construct rape as horrifically prevalent in South Africa yet concerning a classed, raced and spatially-distanced ‘Other’. They also elided a focus on the gendered scripts and power relations which South African feminists implicate centrally in what they deem a national rape crisis.
A heterosexual male reflects on his complex personal/intellectual journey as an investigator on a sexual assault resistance education intervention that trains women to resist sexual assault. Along the way, the author has confronted and worked through criticisms of the sexual assault resistance education program, his view of the everyday social world has changed radically and, perhaps most surprising, he has dealt with his own hurt feelings. Ultimately, his experiences have further strengthened his already strong commitment to stopping rape.
Social networking sites have emerged as spaces for both young men and women to portray themselves in sexualized ways, raising questions about how young men construct masculinity while embracing a kind of sexual self-objectification. In this case study analysis, a heterosexually identified male college student guides another male undergraduate on a tour of his MySpace profile in front of a video camera, supplementing the visual data with his own interpretations. The analysis focuses on how the young man takes up, or subverts, hegemonic masculinity in his sexual displays online. Data illustrate how irony is highly adaptive for perpetuating hegemonic masculinity on social networking sites, allowing men to collaborate using digital artifacts to socially construct an intractable kind of masculinity as they explore unconventional forms of sexual expression. The study also suggests that a heightened emphasis on public attention to the self is a critical lens for understanding shifting constructions of gender and sexuality in the millennial generation.
After lesbian couples have decided to become parents, their family-making journey entails a wide range of encounters with professionals in fertility clinics and/or in maternal and child healthcare services. The article presents the results of an analysis of 96 lesbian mothers’ interview talk about such encounters. In their stories and accounts, the interviewees draw on two separate and contradictory interpretative repertoires, the ‘just great’ repertoire and the ‘heteronormative issues’ repertoire. Throughout the interviews, the ‘just great’ repertoire strongly predominates, while the ‘heteronormative issues’ repertoire is rhetorically minimized. The recurrent accounts of health services as ‘just great’, and the mitigation of problems, are meaningful in relation to a broader discursive context. In a society where different-sex parents are the norm, the credibility of other kinds of parenthood is at stake. The ‘just great’ repertoire has a normalizing function for lesbian mothers, while the ‘heteronormative issues’ repertoire resists normative demands for adaptation.
In this paper, we document and theorise ‘ownership’ practices in young people’s intimate relationships and discuss the parallels with domestic violence. Ten young New Zealand women engaged in focus group discussions about their heterosexual partner’s ‘ownership’ practices or jealous, possessive and controlling behaviours. Using discourse analysis informed by feminist poststructuralism and critical realism, we identified three proprietary ‘ownership’ practices experienced by these young women: ‘ownership’ entitlement, surveillance and identity ‘ownership’. We discuss the parallels between these practices and those experienced by women subjected to men’s domestic violence, the possibility that such practices may be precursors to the development of domestic violence and the implications for prevention.
Although heteronormativity remains firmly in place in many contexts, challenges to a construction of heterosexuality as natural and superior increasingly emerge. However, despite increasing visibility of such challenges, bisexuality remains largely absent from such debates. Bisexual women occupy a potentially interesting position in discourses around heteronormativity and this paper explores how heteronormativity functions in the accounts of 13 South African bisexual women. Through a discourse analysis of interview data, a discourse of heterosexual marriage as normative and socially valued is identified as exerting a powerful influence on participants’ constructions of relationships and families. The findings further explore ways in which bisexuality is complicated by such a heteronormative marriage discourse and indicate a lack of integration of a bisexual identity in participants’ accounts. We suggest that drawing bisexuality into debates around heteronormativity can contribute to increased positions from which to challenge the coercive effects of heteronormativity.