“I pulled it out”: a discursive exploration of narrated accounts on decision-making and power differentials in the prescription and use of long-acting reversible contraceptives
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela
- Date: 2024-10-11
- Subjects: Uncatalogued
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Doctoral theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/467017 , vital:76807 , DOI https://doi.org/10.21504/10962/467017
- Description: Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC), viz., intrauterine devices, subdermal implants, and injectable contraceptives, are highly effective, long-term birth control methods that limit user action. Alongside the decrease in fertility rates achieved through their mass provision has been their coerced or non-consented administration to marginalised women. These highly effective yet provider-controlled and thus imposable contraceptives have been associated with problematic classed, raced, ageist, and ableist promotions. A critical lens that inquires into their endorsement within clinical practice is thus necessary. The bulk of literature evidencing reproductive injustices in relation to fertility control through LARC technologies emanates from the US and UK contexts. Not much research on the South African context has explored how contraceptive decision-making within clinical interactions shapes LARC uptake despite usage increasing through the years. Using a poststructural, postcolonial feminist framework alongside a reproductive justice stance, this study explores health providers’ and contraceptive users’ narrations of the prescription and usage of LARC technologies alongside how such talk emplots women who use, continue, or discontinue using these contraceptive technologies. In addition, the power relations (re)produced in the participants’ talk that maintain or constrain coloniality and reproductive justice with implications for certain people’s reproductive choices/rights were explored. To do so, I used data from 72 semi-structured interviews with contraceptive users (51) and healthcare providers (21). A combination of stratified purposive, convenient, and snowball sampling was used to sample the providers and users of LARC recruited within a city, town, and village. To elicit stories about healthcare providers’ and LARC users’ narrative emplotments in the prescription and usage decisions about LARC, semi-structured interviewing was used. The questions asked were open-ended and loosely structured around LARC technologies, the decisions that cohere around them, and the makers of those decisions. In analysing the data, I fused Parker's (1992) criteria for locating discourses with Barker’s (2017) method for determining the potential for emplotment into narratives. Findings suggest that participants framed contraceptive usage as either a personal, imposed, or shared decision. In personal decisions, the feminisation of contraceptive use emerged, with study, work, and relationship stability statuses requiring participants to solely and prudently self-discipline towards contraceptive uptake so as to match usage with reproduction desire. When decisions were imposed (subtly or openly), a passive role was assumed as female guardians (mothers, grandmothers, or aunts) recommended, pushed, and coerced health users (particularly young women) towards uptake. While the contraceptive users themselves were placed on the margins in decision-making, resisting the imposed decisions was difficult since participants’ “risk” of pregnancy was reportedly foregrounded. Shared decisions pointed to less one-sided accounts of decision-making. These decisions were enacted in relationships and were neither siloed nor imposed. Here, sexual partners, parents, or healthcare providers dialogically negotiated contraceptive uptake, and the possibilities for non-use were availed. Data from healthcare providers showed that non-use for young and postpartum women was not an option. In addition, healthcare providers either formed alliances with the LARC users themselves or concerned parents to support or push for contraceptive provision. Supportive alliances enabled secret uptake or ongoing contraceptive usage among some contraceptive users, thus resisting pronatalism or one-sided intentions for childbearing within intimate partnerships. These healthcare providers emplotted themselves as empowering contraceptive users. Alliances that pushed for contraceptive uptake were formed with guardians/parents upon menarche or in case the of rape. In overriding consent within these alliances, healthcare providers avoided being rendered responsible or blameworthy for early pregnancies in the face of the constructed risk used to emplot young women. This over-commitment to providing contraceptives has differing implications for women’s sexual agency and sexual health interventions. The data also describe decisions to use contraception as expert-led, patient-led, or collaborative decisions between health users and healthcare providers. Through the information and decision-making was expert-led micro-narrative, a medical discourse constituting use as a necessity and non-use as a risk emerged. A patient autonomy and a my body, my choice discourse informed the information and decision-making was patient-led micro-narrative; here, healthcare providers were either detached or excluded from decision-making as health users assumed more active roles in their own contraceptive care decisions. In collaborative decisions, both parties negotiated (non)use, with LARC users providing their embodied experiences and healthcare providers availing medical knowledge in reaching decisions. The study argues for a reproductive justice framework to underpin the signifier “fertility control”, showing how the threat of degeneration informs responses to reproduction by iii identifying and amplifying deficiency and negative outcomes while masking positive outcomes among certain women. It then creates a fertile ground for the re-engineering and recentring of colonialist thinking and its product, the restraining of the agency of fertile beings it renders “less developed”. , Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology, 2024
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024-10-11
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela
- Date: 2024-10-11
- Subjects: Uncatalogued
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Doctoral theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/467017 , vital:76807 , DOI https://doi.org/10.21504/10962/467017
- Description: Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC), viz., intrauterine devices, subdermal implants, and injectable contraceptives, are highly effective, long-term birth control methods that limit user action. Alongside the decrease in fertility rates achieved through their mass provision has been their coerced or non-consented administration to marginalised women. These highly effective yet provider-controlled and thus imposable contraceptives have been associated with problematic classed, raced, ageist, and ableist promotions. A critical lens that inquires into their endorsement within clinical practice is thus necessary. The bulk of literature evidencing reproductive injustices in relation to fertility control through LARC technologies emanates from the US and UK contexts. Not much research on the South African context has explored how contraceptive decision-making within clinical interactions shapes LARC uptake despite usage increasing through the years. Using a poststructural, postcolonial feminist framework alongside a reproductive justice stance, this study explores health providers’ and contraceptive users’ narrations of the prescription and usage of LARC technologies alongside how such talk emplots women who use, continue, or discontinue using these contraceptive technologies. In addition, the power relations (re)produced in the participants’ talk that maintain or constrain coloniality and reproductive justice with implications for certain people’s reproductive choices/rights were explored. To do so, I used data from 72 semi-structured interviews with contraceptive users (51) and healthcare providers (21). A combination of stratified purposive, convenient, and snowball sampling was used to sample the providers and users of LARC recruited within a city, town, and village. To elicit stories about healthcare providers’ and LARC users’ narrative emplotments in the prescription and usage decisions about LARC, semi-structured interviewing was used. The questions asked were open-ended and loosely structured around LARC technologies, the decisions that cohere around them, and the makers of those decisions. In analysing the data, I fused Parker's (1992) criteria for locating discourses with Barker’s (2017) method for determining the potential for emplotment into narratives. Findings suggest that participants framed contraceptive usage as either a personal, imposed, or shared decision. In personal decisions, the feminisation of contraceptive use emerged, with study, work, and relationship stability statuses requiring participants to solely and prudently self-discipline towards contraceptive uptake so as to match usage with reproduction desire. When decisions were imposed (subtly or openly), a passive role was assumed as female guardians (mothers, grandmothers, or aunts) recommended, pushed, and coerced health users (particularly young women) towards uptake. While the contraceptive users themselves were placed on the margins in decision-making, resisting the imposed decisions was difficult since participants’ “risk” of pregnancy was reportedly foregrounded. Shared decisions pointed to less one-sided accounts of decision-making. These decisions were enacted in relationships and were neither siloed nor imposed. Here, sexual partners, parents, or healthcare providers dialogically negotiated contraceptive uptake, and the possibilities for non-use were availed. Data from healthcare providers showed that non-use for young and postpartum women was not an option. In addition, healthcare providers either formed alliances with the LARC users themselves or concerned parents to support or push for contraceptive provision. Supportive alliances enabled secret uptake or ongoing contraceptive usage among some contraceptive users, thus resisting pronatalism or one-sided intentions for childbearing within intimate partnerships. These healthcare providers emplotted themselves as empowering contraceptive users. Alliances that pushed for contraceptive uptake were formed with guardians/parents upon menarche or in case the of rape. In overriding consent within these alliances, healthcare providers avoided being rendered responsible or blameworthy for early pregnancies in the face of the constructed risk used to emplot young women. This over-commitment to providing contraceptives has differing implications for women’s sexual agency and sexual health interventions. The data also describe decisions to use contraception as expert-led, patient-led, or collaborative decisions between health users and healthcare providers. Through the information and decision-making was expert-led micro-narrative, a medical discourse constituting use as a necessity and non-use as a risk emerged. A patient autonomy and a my body, my choice discourse informed the information and decision-making was patient-led micro-narrative; here, healthcare providers were either detached or excluded from decision-making as health users assumed more active roles in their own contraceptive care decisions. In collaborative decisions, both parties negotiated (non)use, with LARC users providing their embodied experiences and healthcare providers availing medical knowledge in reaching decisions. The study argues for a reproductive justice framework to underpin the signifier “fertility control”, showing how the threat of degeneration informs responses to reproduction by iii identifying and amplifying deficiency and negative outcomes while masking positive outcomes among certain women. It then creates a fertile ground for the re-engineering and recentring of colonialist thinking and its product, the restraining of the agency of fertile beings it renders “less developed”. , Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology, 2024
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024-10-11
South African government responses to Trump's Global Gag Rule: Silence, ignorance, and avoidance
- Ndabula, Yanela, Macleod, Catriona I, du Plessis, Ulandi, Moore, Sarah-Ann
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela , Macleod, Catriona I , du Plessis, Ulandi , Moore, Sarah-Ann
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/441299 , vital:73875 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183241229046"
- Description: In 2017, Donald Trump signed the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA), thereby reinstating the Global Gag Rule. The policy restricted all United States foreign funding from abortion-related activities. Little research reports the responses of recipients of this bilateral assistance. The study documents the South African government's responses to the PLGHA. We accessed Hansard parliamentary debates, interviewed four parliamentarians alongside one government official, and reviewed a USAID-funded initiative developed while the policy was in effect. We analysed the data using interpretive content analysis through a global social policy and gendered coloniality lens. Our research documents silence, ignorance, avoidance, and possible over-interpretation of the PLGHA within the South African government. The colonialist politics of global redistribution created the grounds for gendered regulation, resulting in a fundamental undermining of reproductive rights. Ironically, the solution – advocacy and parliamentarian briefing regarding sexual and reproductive issues – is generally led by civil society, the bodies weakened by the PLGHA.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela , Macleod, Catriona I , du Plessis, Ulandi , Moore, Sarah-Ann
- Date: 2024
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/441299 , vital:73875 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1177/02610183241229046"
- Description: In 2017, Donald Trump signed the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA), thereby reinstating the Global Gag Rule. The policy restricted all United States foreign funding from abortion-related activities. Little research reports the responses of recipients of this bilateral assistance. The study documents the South African government's responses to the PLGHA. We accessed Hansard parliamentary debates, interviewed four parliamentarians alongside one government official, and reviewed a USAID-funded initiative developed while the policy was in effect. We analysed the data using interpretive content analysis through a global social policy and gendered coloniality lens. Our research documents silence, ignorance, avoidance, and possible over-interpretation of the PLGHA within the South African government. The colonialist politics of global redistribution created the grounds for gendered regulation, resulting in a fundamental undermining of reproductive rights. Ironically, the solution – advocacy and parliamentarian briefing regarding sexual and reproductive issues – is generally led by civil society, the bodies weakened by the PLGHA.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2024
Sistering and sexual socialisation: a discursive study of Xhosa women’s sisterly interactions concerning sex and reproduction
- Ndabula, Yanela, Macleod, Catriona I, Young, Lisa S
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela , Macleod, Catriona I , Young, Lisa S
- Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/160301 , vital:40432 , DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2020.1785551
- Description: Considerable research has been devoted to understanding and promoting parent-child sexual socialisation. Less attention has been paid to experiences of sibling interactions concerning sex. Drawing on discursive psychology, this study explores how women report interacting about sex and reproduction in their sisterly relationships. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted, using Free Association Narrative Interview technique, with five Black isiXhosa-speaking, middle-aged and working class women in South Africa.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela , Macleod, Catriona I , Young, Lisa S
- Date: 2020
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/160301 , vital:40432 , DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2020.1785551
- Description: Considerable research has been devoted to understanding and promoting parent-child sexual socialisation. Less attention has been paid to experiences of sibling interactions concerning sex. Drawing on discursive psychology, this study explores how women report interacting about sex and reproduction in their sisterly relationships. Ten in-depth interviews were conducted, using Free Association Narrative Interview technique, with five Black isiXhosa-speaking, middle-aged and working class women in South Africa.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Using Translanguaging in Higher Education to Empower Students' Voices and Enable Epistemological Becoming
- Asfour, Fouad, Ndabula, Yanela, Chakona, Gamuchirai, Mason, Paul, Oluwole, David O
- Authors: Asfour, Fouad , Ndabula, Yanela , Chakona, Gamuchirai , Mason, Paul , Oluwole, David O
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/453268 , vital:75235 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2020/sp31a4"
- Description: This article is based on research conducted by a group of plurilingual postgraduate students from different disciplines who facilitated writing groups at the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University over the past two years. It is based on self-reflective writing of language biographies and aims to raise attention about, and to open up a discussion on, the impact of social and personal language practices. We approach the role of language not only as complex interrogation of academic identity, but also as sense of embodied self, an active element in the formation of geo- and body-politics of knowledge which has been highlighted in recent literature focussing on translanguaging in education and decolonising the curricula of Higher Education. Following selfguided research, we engaged in a critical reflection on the use of home languages in education and consulted relevant literature that argues for the inclusion of translanguaging practices in Higher Education. Our research, therefore, focuses on new epistemologies afforded by a shift away from the monolingual habitus and from the concept of multilingualism towards plurilingualism and translanguaging. Our data suggests that a plurilingual approach towards teaching and learning in Higher Education can afford epistemological access to learners across faculties and disciplines in Higher Education, and we argue that the role of languages of tuition in curricula need to be strategically re-evaluated.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
- Authors: Asfour, Fouad , Ndabula, Yanela , Chakona, Gamuchirai , Mason, Paul , Oluwole, David O
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/453268 , vital:75235 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2020/sp31a4"
- Description: This article is based on research conducted by a group of plurilingual postgraduate students from different disciplines who facilitated writing groups at the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University over the past two years. It is based on self-reflective writing of language biographies and aims to raise attention about, and to open up a discussion on, the impact of social and personal language practices. We approach the role of language not only as complex interrogation of academic identity, but also as sense of embodied self, an active element in the formation of geo- and body-politics of knowledge which has been highlighted in recent literature focussing on translanguaging in education and decolonising the curricula of Higher Education. Following selfguided research, we engaged in a critical reflection on the use of home languages in education and consulted relevant literature that argues for the inclusion of translanguaging practices in Higher Education. Our research, therefore, focuses on new epistemologies afforded by a shift away from the monolingual habitus and from the concept of multilingualism towards plurilingualism and translanguaging. Our data suggests that a plurilingual approach towards teaching and learning in Higher Education can afford epistemological access to learners across faculties and disciplines in Higher Education, and we argue that the role of languages of tuition in curricula need to be strategically re-evaluated.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Using Translanguaging in Higher Education to Empower Students' Voices and Enable Epistemological Becoming
- Asfour, Fouad-Martin, Ndabula, Yanela, Chakona, Gamuchirai, Mason, Paul, Oluwole, David O
- Authors: Asfour, Fouad-Martin , Ndabula, Yanela , Chakona, Gamuchirai , Mason, Paul , Oluwole, David O
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/425506 , vital:72251 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2020/sp31a4"
- Description: This article is based on research conducted by a group of plurilingual postgraduate students from different disciplines who facilitated writing groups at the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University over the past two years. It is based on self-reflective writing of language biographies and aims to raise attention about, and to open up a discussion on, the impact of social and personal language practices. We approach the role of language not only as complex interrogation of academic identity, but also as sense of embodied self, an active element in the formation of geo- and body-politics of knowledge which has been highlighted in recent literature focussing on translanguaging in education and decolonising the curricula of Higher Education. Following selfguided research, we engaged in a critical reflection on the use of home languages in education and consulted relevant literature that argues for the inclusion of translanguaging practices in Higher Education. Our research, therefore, focuses on new epistemologies afforded by a shift away from the monolingual habitus and from the concept of multilingualism towards plurilingualism and translanguaging. Our data suggests that a plurilingual approach towards teaching and learning in Higher Education can afford epistemological access to learners across faculties and disciplines in Higher Education, and we argue that the role of languages of tuition in curricula need to be strategically re-evaluated.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
- Authors: Asfour, Fouad-Martin , Ndabula, Yanela , Chakona, Gamuchirai , Mason, Paul , Oluwole, David O
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/425506 , vital:72251 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.29086/2519-5476/2020/sp31a4"
- Description: This article is based on research conducted by a group of plurilingual postgraduate students from different disciplines who facilitated writing groups at the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University over the past two years. It is based on self-reflective writing of language biographies and aims to raise attention about, and to open up a discussion on, the impact of social and personal language practices. We approach the role of language not only as complex interrogation of academic identity, but also as sense of embodied self, an active element in the formation of geo- and body-politics of knowledge which has been highlighted in recent literature focussing on translanguaging in education and decolonising the curricula of Higher Education. Following selfguided research, we engaged in a critical reflection on the use of home languages in education and consulted relevant literature that argues for the inclusion of translanguaging practices in Higher Education. Our research, therefore, focuses on new epistemologies afforded by a shift away from the monolingual habitus and from the concept of multilingualism towards plurilingualism and translanguaging. Our data suggests that a plurilingual approach towards teaching and learning in Higher Education can afford epistemological access to learners across faculties and disciplines in Higher Education, and we argue that the role of languages of tuition in curricula need to be strategically re-evaluated.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2020
Sistering and sexual socialisation: a psychosocial study of Xhosa women’s ‘sex and reproduction talk’ with their sisters
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/35055 , 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- Authors: Ndabula, Yanela
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/35055 , 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.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
- «
- ‹
- 1
- ›
- »