‘My friends would laugh at me’: embedding the dominant heterosexual script in the talk of primary school students
- Authors: Morison, Tracy , Macleod, Catriona I , Lynch, Ingrid
- Date: 2022
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/441186 , vital:73864 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2021.1929856"
- Description: The dominant ‘heterosexual script’ positions men as sexually desiring subjects who initiate sex and use active displays of power to attract women, and women as passive sexual objects who use indirect means to attract men (e.g. physical appearance). While much research has highlighted how this script is deployed in high school settings, less work has attended to primary schools. We demonstrate how the script operates in the talk of primary school students in low resource South African schools. Data were generated in group discussions conducted for a mid-term review of a school-based sexual violence prevention programme. We show how the heterosexual script is embedded in students’ accounts through the regulatory mechanisms of interpersonal and social risks: threats of being ‘dumped’, sexual coercion, violence, and humiliation. These risks are learnt from an early age and may outweigh sexuality education messaging provided later on, which has implications for such interventions. To address this we advocate for early engagement with young people using a dialogical approach that creates a relational context for resistance to inequitable sexual scripts.
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- Date Issued: 2022
Focus on ‘the family’? How South African family policy fails queer families
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Morison, Tracy , Lynch, Ingrid
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434398 , vital:73054 , ISBN 9780367777401 , https://www.routledge.com/Queer-Kinship-South-African-Perspectives-on-the-Sexual-politics-of-Family-making-and-Belonging/Morison-Lynch-Reddy/p/book/9780367777401
- Description: The most policy document is the White Paper on Families, which aims to facilitate the mainstreaming of a family perspective into all government policy-making from the national to the municipal level and across multiple departments. The irony is that less than a third of South African families actually conform to the two cisgender heterosexual biological parent model that is favoured in family policy. South African research has shown that children of lesbian parents learn open-mindedness and to be comfortable with the family in which they live, and that men in same-sex relationships challenge gendered divisions of household tasks. Promoting the two-biological-parent family as the preferred family structure creates an impossible ideal for the majority of South Africans to live up to. Because such a family structure is strongly connected to class, it is out of reach for the majority of citizens, let alone those who live in queer relationships.
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- Date Issued: 2019
From deviant choice to feminist issue: An historical analysis of scholarship on voluntary childlessness (1920–2013)
- Authors: Lynch, Ingrid , Morison, Tracy , Macleod, Catriona I , Mijas, Magdalena , du Toit, Ryan , Shivakumar, Seemanthini T
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , book chapter
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/434319 , vital:73048 , ISBN 978-1-78754-361-4 , https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/978-1-78754-361-420181002/full/html
- Description: Existing reviews of research on voluntary childlessness generally take the form of narrative summaries, focusing on main topics investigated over time. In this chapter, the authors extend previous literature reviews to conduct a systematic review and content analysis of socio-historical and geopolitical aspects of knowledge production about voluntary childlessness. The dataset comprised 195 peer-reviewed articles that were coded and analysed to explore, inter alia: the main topic under investigation; country location of authors; sample characteristics; theoretical framework and methodology. The findings are discussed in relation to the socio-historical contexts of knowledge production, drawing on theoretical insights concerned with the politics of location, representation and research practice. The shifts in the topics of research from the 1970s, when substantial research first emerged, uphold the view of voluntary childlessness as non-normative. With some regional variation, knowledge is dominated by quantitative, hard science methodologies and mostly generated about privileged, married women living in the global North. The implications of this for future research concerned with reproductive freedom are outlined.
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- Date Issued: 2018
‘They tell you about the risks’: Exploring sources of sexuality education among very young adolescents in rural Mpumalanga
- Authors: Essop, R , Tolla, T , Lynch, Ingrid , Mokoae, M
- Date: 2018
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/453282 , vital:75242 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC-10de5bde91
- Description: Early adolescence (ages 10 - 14) is a crucial stage of development. The importance of early intervention in improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is increasingly acknowledged. Yet, school-based sexuality education largely focuses on older adolescents, leaving very young adolescents to contend with conflicting information from different sources. This study responds to the need for contextually nuanced research with very young adolescents, which can inform policy and programmes aimed at improving their SRH outcomes.
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- Date Issued: 2018
Focus on 'the family'?: how South African family policy could fail us
- Authors: Morison, Tracy , Lynch, Ingrid , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/446244 , vital:74484 , xlink:href="https://hsrc.ac.za/uploads/pageContent/7505/HSRC%20POLICY%20BRIEF%2011%20-%20MORISON%20Family%20policy_PRESS%20(2).pdf"
- Description: In the past decade South African policymakers have increasingly focused on families as sites of state intervention. To date, several family policies have been developed to support societal well-being and cohesion. The most recent policy document is the White Paper on Families in South Africa (DSD 2012), which aims to facilitate the mainstreaming of a family perspective into all government policy-making. Family policies are intended to provide support, enhance family members’ wellbeing, strengthen family relationships, and help families address social challenges, such as economic instability. Their ultimate aim is to ensure a safe and socially cohesive society (Robila 2014). A core concern, therefore, is with promoting ‘stable, healthy families’. This concern is valid in South Africa since many families experienced a profound lack of stability under apartheid and today instability is brought about by various socio-economic changes, especially the HIV and AIDS epidemic.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Stigma resistance in online childfree communities: The limitations of choice rhetoric
- Authors: Morison, Tracy , Macleod, Catriona I , Lynch, Ingrid , Shivakumar, Seemanthini T
- Date: 2016
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/446299 , vital:74488 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684315603657"
- Description: People who are voluntarily childless, or ‘‘childfree,’’ face considerable stigma. Researchers have begun to explore how these individuals respond to stigma, usually focusing on interpersonal stigma management strategies. We explored participants’ responses to stigma in a way that is cognisant of broader social norms and gender power relations. Using a feminist discursive psychology framework, we analysed women’s and men’s computer-assisted communication about their childfree status. Our analysis draws attention to ‘‘identity work’’ in the context of stigma. We show how the strategic use of ‘‘choice’’ rhetoric allowed participants to avoid stigmatised identities and was used in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, participants drew on a ‘‘childfree-by-choice script,’’ which enabled them to hold a positive identity of themselves as autonomous, rational, and responsible decision makers. On the other hand, they mobilised a ‘‘disavowal of choice script’’ that allowed a person who is unable to choose childlessness (for various reasons) to hold a blameless identity regarding deviation from the norm of parenthood. We demonstrate how choice rhetoric allowed participants to resist stigma and challenge pronatalism to some extent; we discuss the political potential of these scripts for reproductive freedom.
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- Date Issued: 2016
Gay men and fatherhood in South Africa: a discursive study
- Authors: Morison, Tracy , Lynch, Ingrid , Reddy, Vasu
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143782 , vital:38282 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: There is little South African research on gender and sexual minorities’ reproductive decision-making and, to date, no published work explicitly focused on gay men. Motivated by the virtual absence of gay men in research, as well as their marginalisation more generally, we undertook a qualitative investigation of gay men’s thoughts, feelings and perspectives of fatherhood, fatherhood decisions, and experiences of pathways to parenthood. Framed by a reproductive justice perspective, the aim of the study was not only to generate new knowledge, but also to inform policy, services, and advocacy. In this paper we present some of the findings from our discursive analysis of participants’ accounts of their own experiences of the pathway to parenthood or remaining ‘childfree’. We locate our analysis within the broader South African context and show how the entanglement of various social identity markers - particularly gender, race, and class - come to bear on participants’ experiences.
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- Date Issued: 2015
Knowledge production about voluntary childlessness as a family form: a systematic review of trends
- Authors: Lynch, Ingrid
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143604 , vital:38266 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: There has been a steady increase in research concerned with non-traditional reproductive decision-making, including research investigating voluntarily childlessness. Existing reviews of this body of scholarship focus on dominant themes over time including: the demographic incidence of voluntary childlessness, different pathways to voluntary childlessness, motivations for being childfree, physical and mental health consequences of being childfree and stigmatisation of childfree individuals and responses to stigma. We extend previous systematic literature reviews to attend to sociohistorical and geopolitical aspects of knowledge production about voluntary childlessness. Our dataset comprised 195 peer-reviewed articles that were coded and analysed to explore inter alia the main topic under investigation, country context, sample characteristics and methodology. We discuss the findings in relation to the socio-historical contexts of knowledge production, highlighting implications for current understandings of families, reproductive decision-making and reproductive justice.
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- Date Issued: 2015