- Title
- Sistering and sexual socialisation: a psychosocial study of Xhosa women’s ‘sex and reproduction talk’ with their sisters
- Creator
- Ndabula, Yanela
- Date Issued
- 2017
- Date
- 2017
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/35055
- Identifier
- vital:24313
- Description
- While much work has been put into understanding parent-child talk about sex, less is known about how sisters discuss sex. Using a psychosocial framework, in this study, I explore how women report talking about sex and reproduction in their sister-sister relationships, the subject positions within the talk and how the talk restricts or shores up particular ways of ‘doing sex and reproduction’ in society. Moreover, I examine why these women emotionally invest in certain discourses over others in their sisterly sex talk. The psychosocial framework combines discursive psychology with a psychoanalytic approach to explore both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ processes involved in sexual socialisation within sistering. Psychoanalytic concepts were used to ‘thicken’ the discursive reading of the text. Five isiXhosa-speaking, middle aged and working class women were the participants of the study. The Free Associated Narrative Interview was used to collect the data thus participants were encouraged to convey their experiences of sex talk and reproduction within their sisterly relationships with minimal interruptions from the interviewer. Analysis suggests that the women drew on two broad interpretative repertoires in order to construct their sisters as sexual subjects: a repertoire of secrecy, and a repertoire of responsibilisation and risk. Furthermore, sisterly sex talk was constructed as a complex interchange of shifting positions of openness and power due to two coinciding identities - that of mother and of peer taken up by the participants. A psychoanalytic reading of the data suggests an emotional investment in exemplifying responsibility. The participants experienced anxiety in negotiating a sexualised femininity and projected their sexual desire onto their sister to defend against anxiety in their talk; this enabled them to feel as though they were ‘doing’ sex better than their sisters.
- Format
- 147 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- Rhodes University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Ndabula, Yanela
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RU Department of Psychology
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