Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 36
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    Performing smart sexual selves: A sexual scripting analysis of youth talk about internet pornography
    (SAGE Publications, 2023-01-22) Healy-Cullen S; Morison T; Taylor J; Taylor K
    In this article, we explore young New Zealanders’ use of sexual scripts in talk about Internet pornography (IP) to perform ‘smart’ sexual selves. Using sexual scripting theory, as developed by feminist discursive psychologists, our analysis of interview data generated with 10 youth (aged 16–18 years) highlights two commonly constructed sexual identities across youth talk; (i) the proficient Internet pornography user, and (ii) the astute Internet pornography viewer. The way these young people talk about portrayals of sexuality and gender in IP – and their ability to discern its artifice – suggests they are savvy consumers who are capable of using IP as a cultural resource (e.g. for learning, entertainment) while at the same time acknowledging it as a flawed representation of sex and sexuality. We discuss the implications of our findings for strengths-based sexuality education that supports sexual agency, proposing a justice-orientated approach grounded in the notion of ethical sexual citizenship.
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    Patient-provider power relations in counselling on long-acting reversible contraception: a discursive study of provider perspectives
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2022-05-06) Morison T
    Contraceptive providers play an essential role in shaping contraceptive decision-making and care, with the potential to constrain patients' agency. This is a particular concern given the rising hegemony of Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) and growing evidence of negative patient experiences of LARC promotion and provision. Despite this evidence, little research has considered health providers' perspectives. Drawing on interviews with 22 contraceptive health providers in Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper explored their professional identity construction, focusing on meaning-making in instances of conflict between providers' and patients' priorities and agendas. Guided by feminist poststructuralist theory, the discursive analysis highlights common rhetorical strategies used by participants to (1) justify the use of coercive practices to encourage LARC uptake, and (2) in turn, negotiate positive identities. Findings show how participants grapple with the reproductive politics structuring contraceptive care, including established understandings of the purpose of (long-acting) contraception and contraceptive providers' roles vis-à-vis provision and promotion. The findings point to limitations on contraceptive agency, despite the unanimous endorsement of rights-based voluntary care. Extending the critical literature on LARC and contributing to the under-researched area of contraceptive coercion and agency, the findings of this study have important implications for the delivery of contraceptive care.
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    Moe Kitenga: a qualitative study of perceptions of infant and child sleep practices among Māori whānau
    (SAGE Publications, 2020-06-21) George M; Theodore R; Richards R; Galland B; Taylor R; Matahaere M; Te Morenga L
    Insufficient sleep is a strong risk factor for unhealthy weight gain in children. Māori (the indigenous population of Aotearoa (New Zealand)) children have an increased risk of unhealthy weight gain compared to New Zealand European children. Interventions around sleep could provide an avenue for improving health and limiting excessive weight gain with other meaningful benefits for whānau (extended family) well-being. However, current messages promoting good sleep may not be realistic for many Māori whānau. Using qualitative methods, the Moe Kitenga project explored the diverse realities of sleep in 14 Māori whānau. We conclude that for infant sleep interventions to prevent obesity and improve health outcomes for Māori children, they must take into account the often pressing social circumstances of many Māori whānau that are a barrier to adopting infant sleep recommendations, otherwise sleep interventions could create yet another oppressive standard that whānau fail to live up to.
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    Seven theses about the so-called culture war(s) (or some fragmentary notes on ‘cancel culture’)
    (1/01/2023) Phelan S
    How might we understand the forms of mediatized politics that are signified under the dreary heading of the ‘culture war(s)’? This article addresses this question in the form of seven theses. Informed by a distinct theoretical reading of Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism, I highlight the anti-political character of culture war discourses, particularly as amplified in a public culture dominated by the social media industry. The seven theses are prefaced by an overview of the category of ‘cancel culture’, in light of its recent prominence as an object of culture war discourse. I highlight the primary role of far-right actors in the normalization of culture-war conflicts that persecute different identities, but also critique the online left’s entanglement in sedimented antagonisms that primarily benefit reactionary actors. The theses stress the repressive effects of culture war discourses on our collective political imagination. They redescribe some of the fault lines of a familiar terrain by thematizing the differences between a moralized and radical democratic understanding of political antagonism.
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    What does it mean to be ‘porn literate’? Perspectives of young people, parents and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 5/04/2023) Healy-Cullen S; Morison T; Taylor J; Taylor K
    Porn literacy education is a pedagogical strategy responding to youth engagement with pornography through digital media. The approach is intended to increase young people's knowledge and awareness regarding the portrayal of sexuality in Internet pornography. However, what being 'porn literate' entails, and what a porn literacy education curricula should therefore include, is not a settled matter. Recognising the importance of end-user perspectives, 24 semi-structured interviews were conducted with parents, teachers and young people in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and analysed via critical, constructionist thematic analysis. Participants drew on a developmentalist discourse and a discourse of harm to construct porn literacy education as a way to inoculate young people against harmful effects, distortions of reality, and unhealthy messages. In addition to this dominant construction of porn literacy education, we identified talk that to some extent resisted these dominant discourses. Building on these instances of resistance, and asset-based constructions of youth based on their agency and capability, we point to an ethical sexual citizenship pedagogy as an alternative approach to porn literacy education.
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    Homosociality, Sexual Misconduct and Gendered Violence in England’s Premodern Legal Profession
    (Oxford University Press, 30/09/2022) McVitty E
    Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century evidence shows that common lawyers and law students regularly engaged in sexual misconduct and violence against women. Social histories of the early legal profession give little attention to such incidents, treating them as aberrations or as the ‘natural’ excess of privileged youth. By contrast, this article uses gender analysis to argue that sexual misconduct and gendered violence were structural features of all-male legal culture, contributing to homosocial bonding and to lawyers’ performance of masculinity. Records from the Inns of Court, London civic administration and royal government reveal law students asserting manhood through shared involvement in sexual misconduct and violence. However, it is significant for the history of the profession that young men were not the only offenders. While senior practitioners condemned misconduct and violence in rules and disciplinary regulations, in practice they shielded fellow lawyers from consequences and participated themselves. As perpetrators went on to become barristers, serjeants-at-law, judges and public office-holders, a tradition of toleration and intergenerational complicity was sustained across time. These findings generate new insights into how the training and socialization of lawyers contributed to the gendered violence inherent in the patriarchal judicial system of pre-modern England.
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    Muslim and Gay: Seeking identity coherence in New Zealand
    (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2016) Tuffin K; Hopner V; Kahu ER
    The process of accepting oneself as gay and of ‘coming out’ to family and friends is well documented. For Muslim men, this is complicated by the tension between their emerging sexual identity and their religious and cultural birth identity, which labels homosexuality as sinful. This paper explores this process in a sample of five gay Muslim men living in New Zealand, a liberal secular society where homosexuality is widely accepted and gay rights are endorsed in legislation. Identity Process Theory drives the analysis, which identifies five themes encapsulating the process of striving for psychological coherence: resistance, acceptance, tension, renegotiation and pretence. Initial phases of denial and anger at their emerging sexuality are strongly linked to the conflict with their religious identity. Later, acceptance of their sexuality as natural and even God-given protects them from blame for their ‘sins’. In contrast to earlier work in the UK, for most men, renegotiation of their Muslim identity is adopted as the key strategy for achieving intrapsychic coherence. However, at an interpersonal level, families remain a source of conflict, temporarily resolved through pretence. Renegotiating religious identity leaves men having to pretend not just to be straight, but also to be strongly religious.
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    Shameful sins: a Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)
    (Purdue University Press, 14/12/2018) Bortolotto M; Chen, F-J
    In her article “A Sinful Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)” María Celina Bortolotto analyzes how Lozada’s characterization of the main character, La Loca, questions the ideals of free agency offered by consumerist capitalism and the urban gay male ideal under the promise of a liberating gay lifestyle in a social context defined by identity politics. The novel is a fictionalized autobiographical account of Puerto Rican author Angel Lozada’s misadventures in the early 2000s gay scene in New York. This essay plays with the punitive sense of the word “capital” in the seven capital sins as a thematic thread to invite a reflection on the concepts of virtue and value constructed under U.S. Protestant capitalism: the former as emancipatory guilt; the latter as the specific status society grants to objects, practices and people creating, in turn, subjects whose value is purely economic versus those whose lives are deemed (morally) valuable in themselves.
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    The business of care: Marketisation and the new geographies of childcare
    (SAGE Publications, 25/04/2017) Gallagher AM
    The aim of this article is to outline a geographical research agenda for studying the marketization of childcare in Western neoliberal contexts. While childcare has been a key site of interrogation for feminist geographers, highlighting the profound inequities of marketized care for many who work in and use childcare, the contours of the childcare market as a situated and constructed economic entity has remained under-examined. I suggest that at a time when more families than ever rely on extra-familial childcare, an appreciation of how childcare markets function is urgently needed.