Feminine sexual desire and shame in the classroom: an educator’s constructions of and investments in sexuality education
- Saville Young, Lisa, Moodley, Dale D, Macleod, Catriona I
- Authors: Saville Young, Lisa , Moodley, Dale D , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/444302 , vital:74215 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2018.1511974"
- Description: Within the growing body of literature on sexuality education in South Africa, researchers have highlighted how teachers may face, or themselves be, barriers to the implementation of rights-based comprehensive sexuality education. Important issues with regard to educators are: firstly, the social and discursive space within which educators are located; and secondly, the complex emotional and psychic investments that educators take up within particular discourses and practices. This paper explores, through a psychosocial reading of an interview extract with a particular educator based in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, how discursive and psychic concerns are sutured within the complex subjectivity of the educator as the medium for sexual education in schools. Specifically, it highlights the numerous ways in which feminine sexuality and desire may be avoided, denied and silenced. Even when feminine desire is specifically evoked as in this case, it is done so in a way that ensures social and cultural respectability, thereby reproducing shame narratives that form and maintain traditional gender discourses. Our analysis demonstrates how engaging with educators as subjects with their own sexual history and psychic dynamics, and as individuals with raced, gendered and classed identities, is a potentially transformative perspective for effective sexuality education.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
- Authors: Saville Young, Lisa , Moodley, Dale D , Macleod, Catriona I
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/444302 , vital:74215 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2018.1511974"
- Description: Within the growing body of literature on sexuality education in South Africa, researchers have highlighted how teachers may face, or themselves be, barriers to the implementation of rights-based comprehensive sexuality education. Important issues with regard to educators are: firstly, the social and discursive space within which educators are located; and secondly, the complex emotional and psychic investments that educators take up within particular discourses and practices. This paper explores, through a psychosocial reading of an interview extract with a particular educator based in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, how discursive and psychic concerns are sutured within the complex subjectivity of the educator as the medium for sexual education in schools. Specifically, it highlights the numerous ways in which feminine sexuality and desire may be avoided, denied and silenced. Even when feminine desire is specifically evoked as in this case, it is done so in a way that ensures social and cultural respectability, thereby reproducing shame narratives that form and maintain traditional gender discourses. Our analysis demonstrates how engaging with educators as subjects with their own sexual history and psychic dynamics, and as individuals with raced, gendered and classed identities, is a potentially transformative perspective for effective sexuality education.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2019
Caring for a child with disabilities: a psychosocial case study
- Saville Young, Lisa, Berry, Jessie
- Authors: Saville Young, Lisa , Berry, Jessie
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143860 , vital:38289 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: This paper presents a psychosocial analysis of an interview with a mother of a child with disabilities. A psychosocial perspective (conceptualizing the subject as both discursively and psychically constituted) has been argued for recently in critical disability studies by Goodley (2011) who advocates for psychoanalysis’ rich vocabulary for affective processes to explore the emotional elements of disablism, where disablism refers to ways in which society discriminates against people with disabilities (‘barriers out there’). While rejecting the use of psychoanalytic theory to pathologise and individualise people with disabilities, Goodley argues that how “oppression is felt psychically, subjectively and emotionally” (p.716) (‘barriers in here’) should not be overlooked, alongside subjectivity as always socially, politically, culturally and economically produced. This psychosocial analysis of a carer’s perspective thickens our understanding of how the caregiver is a social being, both not disabled but at the receiving end of disablism, and an interpersonal subject who may also be an ‘agent’ or ‘carrier’ of disablism.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Saville Young, Lisa , Berry, Jessie
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143860 , vital:38289 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: This paper presents a psychosocial analysis of an interview with a mother of a child with disabilities. A psychosocial perspective (conceptualizing the subject as both discursively and psychically constituted) has been argued for recently in critical disability studies by Goodley (2011) who advocates for psychoanalysis’ rich vocabulary for affective processes to explore the emotional elements of disablism, where disablism refers to ways in which society discriminates against people with disabilities (‘barriers out there’). While rejecting the use of psychoanalytic theory to pathologise and individualise people with disabilities, Goodley argues that how “oppression is felt psychically, subjectively and emotionally” (p.716) (‘barriers in here’) should not be overlooked, alongside subjectivity as always socially, politically, culturally and economically produced. This psychosocial analysis of a carer’s perspective thickens our understanding of how the caregiver is a social being, both not disabled but at the receiving end of disablism, and an interpersonal subject who may also be an ‘agent’ or ‘carrier’ of disablism.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
Sexual socialisation in Life Orientation manuals versus popular music: responsibilisation versus pleasure, tension and complexity
- Macleod, Catriona I, Moodley, Dale D, Saville Young, Lisa
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Moodley, Dale D , Saville Young, Lisa
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6309 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018866
- Description: This paper compares two forms of sexual socialisation to which learners are exposed: the sexuality education components of the Life Orientation (LO) manuals and the lyrical content and videos of popular songs. We performed a textual analysis of the sexual subject positions made available in, first, the LO manuals used in Grade 10 classes and, second, the two songs voted most popular by the Grade 10 learners of two diverse schools in the Eastern Cape. Of interest in this paper is whether and how these two forms of sexual socialisation – one representing state-sanctioned sexual socialisation and the other learners’ chosen cultural expression that represents informal sexual socialisation – dovetail or diverge. Against a backdrop of heterosexuality and an assumption of the ‘adolescent-in-transition’ discourse, the main sexual subject positions featured in the LO manuals are the responsible sexual subject and the sexual victim. A number of sexualised subject positions are portrayed in the songs, with these subject positions depicting sex as a site of pleasure, tension and complexity. Although these two modes of sexual socialisation use different genres of communication, we argue that learners’ choice of songs that depict fluid sexual subject positions can help to inform LO sexuality education in ways that takes learners’ preferred cultural expression seriously and that moves away from the imperative of responsibilisation.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Moodley, Dale D , Saville Young, Lisa
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6309 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018866
- Description: This paper compares two forms of sexual socialisation to which learners are exposed: the sexuality education components of the Life Orientation (LO) manuals and the lyrical content and videos of popular songs. We performed a textual analysis of the sexual subject positions made available in, first, the LO manuals used in Grade 10 classes and, second, the two songs voted most popular by the Grade 10 learners of two diverse schools in the Eastern Cape. Of interest in this paper is whether and how these two forms of sexual socialisation – one representing state-sanctioned sexual socialisation and the other learners’ chosen cultural expression that represents informal sexual socialisation – dovetail or diverge. Against a backdrop of heterosexuality and an assumption of the ‘adolescent-in-transition’ discourse, the main sexual subject positions featured in the LO manuals are the responsible sexual subject and the sexual victim. A number of sexualised subject positions are portrayed in the songs, with these subject positions depicting sex as a site of pleasure, tension and complexity. Although these two modes of sexual socialisation use different genres of communication, we argue that learners’ choice of songs that depict fluid sexual subject positions can help to inform LO sexuality education in ways that takes learners’ preferred cultural expression seriously and that moves away from the imperative of responsibilisation.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2015
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