Nascent Desires: Gendered Sexualities in Life Orientation Sexuality Education Programmes and Popular Music
- Authors: Moodley, Dale Dhersen
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:3274 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1021260
- Description: Formal school-based sexuality education is one medium, amongst others, that recognises young people’s sexuality, but usually as at-risk and/or risk taking subjects, or as innocent subjects. I analyse the gendered sexualities of young people as represented in: Grade 10 Life Orientation sexuality education programmes and popular music, as two mediums of sexual socialisation in Grade 10 learners’ lives, and as engaged with by Grade 10 learners and educators. I collected data from two schools in the Eastern Cape that included: (i) sections on sexuality from two Life Orientation manuals used by educators in classrooms: ‘Oxford Successful Life Orientation’ (2011), and ‘Shuters Top Class Life Orientation’ (2011); (ii) videos and lyrics of three songs voted most popular by learners which were ‘Climax’ by Usher, ‘Beez in the Trap’ by Nicki Minaj, and ‘Where Have You Been’ by Rihanna; (iii) observations of seven sexuality education classes; and, (iv) in-depth semistructured interviews conducted with eight learners and two educators. I draw on an integrated theoretical and methodological approach – Foucauldian, feminist poststructural and psychosocial psychoanalytic perspectives – to conceptualise and analyse gendered sexualities in terms of: (i) the dominant gendered discourses found in sexuality education manuals, and music videos and lyrics; (ii) the reflexive and interactive gendered subject positions taken up and/or resisted by learners and educators during classroom lessons and one-on-one interviews; and, (iii) learners’ and educators’ conscious and unconscious investments in particular gendered subject positions during one-on-one interviews. These three sets of analysis produced four major themes. The first theme centres on responsible sexuality; young women are expected to assume more sexual responsility than young men, thus curbing their sexual agency. The second theme outlines three types of pleasure – sexual, romantic and dating and/or relationship pleasure – that accord young men and women active and passive ways of exercising pleasure. The third theme highlights the heteronormative transitioning adolescent subject that constructs young women as reproductive subjects and young men as sexual subjects. The last theme focuses on gendered power relations and raunch culture, and maintains that young men are powerful and likely to commit acts of sexual violence against young women because they are powerless. The central argument developed when viewing all the themes is that dominant gendered discourse, gendered subject positions, and conscious and unconscious investments in these positions challenge the extent to which the gendered meanings that underpin adolescent learners’ sexuality are stable and fixed. The gendered discourses in the Life Orientation sexuality education programmes showed that gender is expressed rigidly, thus privileging masculine over feminine sexuality. However, the gendered discourses in the popular music contested rigid gender binaries and produced fluid and equitable masculine and feminine sexualities. The classroom practices depicted multiple and more equatable gendered sexualities, highlighting just how contested gender is. Finally, educator and learners’ personal biographies illustrated how conflicting masculine and feminine sexualities present a signficant source of emotional conflict for them. It may benefit policymakers and stakeholders to consider informal mediums of sexual socialisation for learners, such as music, when drafting the Life Orientation sexuality education curriculum, whilst also taking into account learners and educators personal lives.
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Systematic marine spatial planning and monitoring in a data poor environment: a case study of Algoa Bay, South Africa
- Authors: Chalmers, Russell
- Date: 2012
- Subjects: Spatial ecology -- South Africa -- Algoa Bay , Coastal zone management -- South Africa -- Algoa Bay
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:5373 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015695
- Description: Globally the failure of traditional fisheries management approaches is evident through the increasing number of overexploited or depleted marine stocks. Past sectoral management has failed to address cumulative impacts of fisheries activities on ecosystem health. Ecosystem based approaches have been advocated as a viable alternative for sustainable management of marine ecosystems as they present a holistic and precautionary approach, which integrates management of multiple activities with that of maintaining ecological health. Although conceptually advanced, implementation has been poor due to the complexities of competing ecological and socio-economic management objectives. Marine spatial planning can facilitate the implementation of ecosystem based management as it is able to address the spatial heterogeneity of biological communities and anthropogenic activities. Ecosystem based management approaches aim to address the full range of anthropogenic drivers on the marine environment, including but not limited to fisheries, tourism, coastal development, and land and marine based pollution sources amongst others. Fisheries activities have a direct impact on the local marine environment and were therefore the focus of this study which forms a starting point for implementing ecosystem based management in Algoa Bay. It is envisaged that future research will build on this foundation and include additional anthropogenic drivers into the management and monitoring strategies developed in this study in order to achieve a truly holistic ecosystem approach to management in Algoa Bay. Algoa Bay is situated centrally within the warm-temperate Agulhas bioregion along the east coast of South Africa and is the largest and best formed logarithmic spiral bay along this section of coastline. A large city, two commercial ports and several coastal settlements are located within Algoa Bay and a wide range of marine based activities occur within the area. A large section of the coastline is proclaimed as a National Park yet only two small offshore marine areas are formally protected. The development of a large marine protected area (MPA) adjoining the terrestrial section was proposed in the mid-1990s but a lack of adequate spatial data with which to quantify the fishery costs and conservation benefits led to wide scale public opposition and halted the declaration process. The primary goal of this study was to obtain and analyse baseline data to understand spatial and temporal trends in the distribution and abundance of fish populations and fisheries activities in order to develop a spatial framework for marine conservation and management in a data limited situation using Algoa Bay, South Africa as a case study. Furthermore, it aims to contribute to the development of a monitoring framework to evaluate the success of implementation and the resultant changes in biological and socio-economic environments. This information will be used to re-initiate the stakeholder engagement process in the future.
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