Suchergebnisse

Current conceptualisations of citizenship in South Africa are embedded in the egalitarian discourse of the Constitution, lauded for its recognition of historically marginalised groups, including sexually and gender diverse people. Within the paradox of progressive legal advancements and the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, we use a decolonial feminist lens to critically engage with the notion of citizenship for black lesbian women in contemporary South Africa. We adopt a social-psychological perspective of citizenship as an active practice, embedded within the dynamic intersections of historical, structural and discursive patterns of power-knowledge relations in everyday life. We draw from five focus group discussions that were part of a study that explored the intersections of identity, power and violence in the lives of black lesbian women in South Africa. Focusing on the enactments of citizenship in public spaces, we contend that black lesbian women's lived experiences of citizenship point to the enduring manifestations of the coloniality of power, in which the centrality of race underpins the intersections of class, gender and sexuality. We conclude by arguing that current conceptualisations of full citizenship in contemporary South Africa require a reframing that recognises the coloniality of power and the heterogeneity of marginalised and invisibilised subjectivities.

The homophobia and hostility experienced by queer learners in Icelandic and South African schools are well documented. Drawing on in-depth interviews with queer youth (16–19 years) in Iceland and South Africa, this paper aims at understanding how queer youth navigate heterosexist and homophobic school spaces and create some positive spaces. The findings highlight that queer youth employ various social and discursive strategies to (re)position themselves as agentic subjects. They counter heteronormativity by drawing on what we define in this paper as "queer capital", which entails deploying various social and discursive strategies to establish some kind of distinction within the school and in their interaction with peers. Humour, parody, and active resistance, as well as finding ways to escape the regulatory mechanisms of gender, and relating easily to both genders, are examples of the social/discursive strategies employed by our participants and discussed in the paper. The paper then concludes with implications for research with queer youth.

The identity of stepmother is, in many ways, a troubled one – constructed as "other" and often associated with notions of "wickedness" in literature and everyday talk. This paper reports findings from a study on the difficulties faced by stepmothers and how they use talk about their (male) partners, often constructing men as hapless, helpless or hopeless, to repair their "troubled" identities. The data were collected from a web forum for stepmothers based in the UK and 13 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with stepmothers. The analysis took a synthetic narrative-discursive methodological approach, underpinned by feminist theory with particular attention to the discourses that were drawn on by participants and the constraints that these imposed. This paper presents these findings in relation to three constructions of their partners through which repair work was attempted: men as in need of rescue; men as flawed fathers; and men as damaged. The paper concludes with some suggestions for supporting stepmothers by challenging dominant narratives around families in talk, in the media and in government and institutional policies.

Though certainly not women's only site of identity or set of responsibilities in conflict settings, motherhood represents a distinct challenge within political violence. Yet, given the paucity of research on the topic, we still are operating without a clear understanding of how political violence jeopardizes maternal well-being and care-taking practices. Drawing on feminist perspectives on mothering, in the analyses presented here, the authors use content analysis to explore mothering and political violence from five focus groups with women in Palestine. Results demonstrate the considerable suffering mothers and children endure in war; the work mothers do to promote children's well-being in this context; and how these efforts exhaust the psychological resources of mothers. Findings enhance a relatively small body of knowledge about the lived experiences of mothers within conflict settings, and point to the importance of tending to the strategies and needs of mothers who navigate political violence with and for their children.

Girls' magazines play an important role in female adolescents' identity and their constructions of femininity. Despite breast development being common to all female adolescents, and breasts being a key signifier of femininity, the representation of breasts in girls' magazines has not been investigated. A Foucauldian discourse analysis was conducted to understand the ways in which breasts are represented in two popular girls' magazines ( Teen Vogue and Seventeen). Articles in Seventeen promoted a contradictory and potentially confusing postfeminist discourse, supporting calls for Body Positivity, whilst at the same time framing breasts as problematic and encouraging girls to aspire to an ideal breast. The reader was positioned as a consumer with the purchase and wearing of bras offered as a neoliberal solution to these problems. In contrast, Teen Vogue articles conveyed a feminist informed Body Positivity discourse. Readers were positioned as active feminist advocates, incited to adopt radical, collective, political responses in order to challenge the potentially damaging messages surrounding breast ideals and sexualisation. We argue that consistent feminist messages are needed across and within media to support teenage girls in negotiating their bodies and identities.

The body is central to women's construction of premenstrual change as premenstrual syndrome (PMS), and to experiences of premenstrual distress. Embodied change, such as bloating or breast tenderness, can act as a marker of PMS. Within biomedical models, PMS is located within the body. Women's dissatisfaction with their bodies is also reported to be higher in the premenstrual phase of the cycle. What is absent from this analysis is the meaning and experience of embodied change, in the context of broader constructions of femininity and embodiment. In this paper, we adopt a feminist material-discursive theoretical framework to examine the role of premenstrual embodiment in women's premenstrual distress, drawing on open-ended survey responses and interviews with 83 women who self-diagnose as "PMS sufferers". We theorize premenstrual body hatred as subjectification, wherein women take up cultural discourse associated with idealized femininity and the stigmatization of the fat body, resulting in self-objectification, distress and dehumanization. However, women can resist negative cultural constructions of premenstrual embodiment. We describe the impact of psychological therapy which increases awareness of emotional and embodied change, resulting in greater acceptance of the premenstrual body and self-care, serving to reduce premenstrual distress and self-objectification.

Guided by Denise Ferreira da Silva's contributions to decolonization through a black feminist poethical mode of intervention, this article overall offers the provocation: Is decolonization possible in this world as we know it? Having been provoked by this question and its implications ourselves, we deem this provocation both necessary and an important contribution to the topic of this special issue. Within this provocation we briefly consider decolonization of the psy-disciplines, decolonization of the psy-curriculum, and decolonization as the end of the world as we know it, particularly through a praxivist imaginary. With this, we furthermore consider the radical potentials of abolition pedagogies that guide us to state that mental health, or the psyche, or the professions that take the psyche as their object of study, cannot be decolonized in the context of the world as we know it.