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‘White excellence and black failure’: the reproduction of racialised higher education in everyday talk
- Authors: Robus, Donovan , Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6254 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007872
- Description: Since the advent of democracy in South Africa in 1994, much effort has been expended on overcoming the institutionalised racism that characterised apartheid. The transformation of higher education, particularly with regard to the merging and incorporation of institutions, is such an example. This article is an analysis of discourses on race emerging in the talk of students and staff during the incorporation of a historically white satellite campus (Rhodes University East London) into a historically black university (University of Fort Hare). The argument, which relies on Essed’s notion of everyday racism, infused with insights from discursive psychology, is that higher education institutions areracialised through the intricate interweaving of macro-level processes and discourses that recur in everyday talk and practices. In their talk, the participants in the study persistently assigned racialised identities to the institutions (Rhodes is white and Fort Hare is black) and invoked a ‘white excellence/black failure’ discourse. ‘White excellence’ folds in on, and is reproduced by, the desirable, modern, urban space and an appeal to Euro-American standards. Institutions and individuals are positioned as being able to overcome ‘black failure’ by moving into white space and through intense personal labour.
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A discourse of disconnect : young people from the Eastern Cape talk about the failure of adult communications to provide habitable sexual subject positions
- Authors: Jearey-Graham, Nicola , Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6308 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018864 , http://0-hdl.handle.net.wam.seals.ac.za/10520/EJC171669
- Description: Face-to-face adult communication with young people about sexuality is, for the most part, assigned to two main groups of people: educators tasked with teaching schoolbased sexuality education that is provided as part of the compulsory Life Orientation (LO) learning area, and parents. In this paper, we report on a study conducted with Further Education and Training College students in an Eastern Cape town. Using a discursive psychology lens, we analysed data from, first, a written question on what participants remember being taught about sexuality in LO classes and, second, focus group discussions held with mixed and same-sex groups. Discussions were structured around the sexualities of high school learners and the LO sexuality education that participants received at high school. We highlight participants’ common deployment of a ‘discourse of disconnect’ in their talk. In this discourse, the messages of ‘risk’ and ‘responsibility’ contained in adult face-to-face communications, by both parents and LO teachers, are depicted as being delivered through inadequate or nonrelational styles of communication, and as largely irrelevant to participants’ lives. Neither of these sources of communication was seen as understanding the realities of youth sexualities or as creating habitable or performable sexual subject positions. The dominance of this ‘discourse of disconnect’ has implications for how sexuality education and parent communication interventions are conducted.
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The new moral order and racism in South Africa post 11 September 2001
- Authors: Painter, D , Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2002
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6215 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006266
- Description: In this paper we argue that globalisation imposes on ‘developing’ countries more than an economic order; they find themselves with the moral imperative to align themselves with the West against its Others, increasingly portrayed as Islamic fundamentalists. The 11 September terror attacks in the United States of America have pushed this process to a new level, with the attacks represented as no less than a barbaric attack on ‘civilisation’. Through an analysis of a newspaper article reporting on the disciplining of a Muslim woman in for wearing an Osama Bin Laden t-shirt to work in South Africa, we indicate how this moral representation of the 11 September events and the Islamic Other have unique local effects. In South Africa it creates yet more possibilities for racialising practices to continue without being framed in explicitly racial terms. We further reflect on the implications of these events, and the complex interplay of the global and the local they demonstrate, for critical psychology in South Africa.
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Research as intervention within community mental health
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 1997
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6286 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014525 , http://www.curationis.org.za/index.php/curationis/article/view/1307
- Description: This paper raises some issues for discussion and debate concerning the nature of research within a mental health setting. Research, no matter what form it takes, is always an intervention. Sensitivity to various concerns surrounding research is required of the mental health worker. Participatory research, which is seen as empowering participants, has become popular in mental health programmes. Attention needs to be paid however, to the meaning of participation and the process of decision-making. Researchers are often uncomfortable with shedding their “objective informer” stance and adopting a position that requires social action. Some of this has to do with the epistemological view taken by the researcher. This paper suggests that the knowledge produced in research is a social construction created in interaction between the researcher and participants and has a multiplicity of potential meanings. The instrumental, conceptual and persuasive uses of research are discussed, and two intervention-type research procedures (needs assessment and evaluation) are critically reviewed It is concluded that research, as with all other interventions, should be carefully planned, implemented, monitored and evaluated. , This paper was written by Catriona Macleod as M.Ed (Psych), Department of Educational Psychology, University of Zululand
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South African psychology and ‘relevance’: continuing challenges
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6290 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014542 , http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/008124630403400407
- Description: During the apartheid era, psychology was accused of being irrelevant, and of advertently or inadvertently bolstering apartheid. Since 1994, much has changed in psychology. However, much has remained the same. In a situational analysis of research in psychology over the last five years it emerged that quantitative methods based on ‘hard’ science theory, as well as the traditional topics of assessment, psychotherapy, counselling, psychopathology and stress continue to dominate psychological research. A minority of studies utilise theoretical frameworks and tackle topics that illuminate the interweaving of the individual with the sociopolitical context. Knowledge is being generated chiefly about urban, middle-class adults living in the three wealthiest provinces, with university students being the most popular source of participants. Historically white universities continue to dominate the publishing scene, and collaboration takes place chiefly with high-income countries. A comparison of these results with the key issues raised in the United Nation Development Programme's South Africa human development report 2003 shows that psychology has a long way to go before it can establish its ‘relevance’ credentials. , Full text access on Publisher website: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/008124630403400407
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‘Who? what?’: an uninducted view of towards a new psychology of women from post-Apartheid South Africa
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6251 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007869 , http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0959353508092088
- Description: From the text: Towards a New Psychology of Women (TPNW) promises a new psychology of “women”. On the cover of the second edition, the Toronto Globe and Mail is cited as acclaiming the book as “nothing short of revolutionary” as it “set out to recognize, re-define and understand the day-to-day experience of women”. But when we take a closer look at these “women” we discover that they are in fact “white”, (for the most part) middle-class women living in heterosexual relationships in a liberal democracy. This kind of exclusionary inclusion, in which the use of the generic term “woman” disguises the normative assumptions made about the race, class, sexual orientation and location of women, replicates the phallocentrism evidenced in the normalising masculinist terms “mankind” or “Man”. By now, of course, these kinds of critiques of “white” Western feminism by African American writers (e.g. Collins, 1999) postcolonial feminists (e.g. Mohanty, 1991), African feminists (e.g. Ogundipe-Leslie, 1994; Mangena, 2003), and queer theorists (e.g. Jackson, 1999) are well known.
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Men and talk about legal abortion in South Africa : equality, support and rights discourses undermining reproductive ‘choice’
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona , Hansjee, Jateen
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6295 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014770 , http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2013.802815
- Description: Discursive constructions of abortion are embedded in the social and gendered power relations of a particular socio-historical space. As part of research on public discourses concerning abortion in South Africa where there has been a radical liberalisation of abortion legislation, we collected data from male group discussions about a vignette concerning abortion, and newspaper articles written by men about abortion. Our analysis revealed how discourses of equality, support and rights may be used by men to subtly undermine women's reproductive right to ‘choose’ an abortion. Within an Equal Partnership discourse, abortion, paired with the assumption of foetal personhood, was equated with violating an equal heterosexual partnership and a man's patriarchal duty to protect a child. A New Man discourse, which positions men as supportive of women, was paired with the assumption of men as rational and women as irrational in decision-making, to allow for the possibility of men dissuading women from terminating a pregnancy. A Rights discourse was invoked to suggest that abortion violates men's paternal rights.
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Foucauldian feminism: the implications of governmentality
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona , Durrheim, Kevin
- Date: 2002
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6261 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007879
- Description: Foucauldian discourse has been received with varying degrees of enthusiasm within feminist circles. Some authors (e.g. Balbus, 1988; Di Leonardo, 1991; Hartsock, 1990) see a Foucauldian stance as incompatible with feminist theory, while others (e.g. Grimshaw, 1993; Hoy, 1988; McNay, 1992; Sawicki, 1988) advocate a positive relationship between Foucauldian discourse and feminism. And then there are those theorists (e.g. Burman, 1990) who stand between these two positions, stating that while Foucault offers useful insights and methods to feminists, it can also be dangerous.
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Reflecting on South African psychology: published research, ‘relevance’ and social issues
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona , Howell, Simon
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6219 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006277
- Description: As South Africa prepared to host the 30th International Congress of Psychology in 2012, a call was made to reflect on the strengths of and challenges facing contemporary South African Psychology. This paper presents our response to our brief to focus on social issues by presenting the results of a situational analysis of South African Psychology over the last five years and comparing this corpus of data to a similar analysis reported in Macleod (2004). Articles appearing in the South African Journal of Psychology (SAJP) and abstracts in PsycINFO with the keyword ‘South Africa’ over a 5½ year period were analysed. The content of 243 SAJP articles and 1986 PsycINFO abstracts were analysed using the codes developed by Macleod (2004). Results indicate: an increase in the number of articles, a reduction in the percentage of articles using quantitative methodologies and ‘hard’ science theoretical frameworks (particularly in the SAJP), and an increase in qualitative, theoretical, and methodological papers, and papers using systems-oriented theory (particularly in the SAJP). Traditional topics of assessment, stress and psychopathology continue to dominate, with social issues such as housing, land reform, development programmes, water resources and socio-economic inequities being largely ignored. Most research continues to be conducted in Gauteng, KwaZulu/Natal and the Western Cape, predominantly with adult, urban-based, middle-class participants, sourced mainly from universities, hospitals or clinics and schools. Collaborations or comparisons with other African, Asian, South American and Middle East countries have decreased. While the analysis presented in this paper is limited by its exclusion of books, theses, research reports and monographs, it shows that in published research there are some positive trends and some disappointments. The limited number of social issues featuring in published research, the under-representation of certain sectors of the population as participants, and the decrease in collaboration with, or comparison to, countries from the global ‘South’ represent challenges that require systematic attention.
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Beyond coming out: lesbians’ (alternative) stories of sexual identity told in post-Apartheid South Africa
- Authors: Gibson, Alexandra , Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: Book chapter
- Identifier: vital:6304 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1016063
- Description: Over the last several decades, the ‘coming out’i story has become entrenched as the central narrative with which lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people can narrate their experiences of claiming a sexual identity and storying their lives in general (Bacon, 1998; Blackburn, 2009). It has developed into a “canonical narrative” (Bruner, 1987, p. 15), or a culturally recognisable story for LGB people, in that it involves the recounting of a series of familiar events in moving from a place of shame to one of self-acceptance about one’s sexual identity (Cohler & Hammack, 2007; Plummer, 1995). The ‘coming out’ canonical narrative additionally operates as a counter-narrative, which has enabled LGB people to voice their sexuality within heterosexist and heteronormative confines (Blackburn, 2009). Nevertheless, there are limitations (and limiting effects) to this narrative, and further refinement of how we understand sexual identity narratives is required. To illustrate this argument, we draw on a narrative-discursive study of eight lesbians’ stories of sexual identity in post-apartheid South Africa.
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Cracks in reproductive health rights: knowledge of abortion legislation stipulations amongst learners in Buffalo City, South Africa
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona , Seutlwadi, Lebogang , Steele, Gary
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6296 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014772
- Description: Background: The Choice on Termination of Pregnancy (CTOP) Act legalised abortion on request in South Africa until up to 12 weeks of gestation and thereafter under specified conditions. Within the context of liberal legislation, accurate information is a necessary (although not sufficient) requirement for women to exercise their reproductive rights. Objectives: This research investigated Grade 11 learners’ knowledge of the CTOP Act and its stipulations. Methods: Survey research was conducted with respondents drawn from a range of schools in Buffalo City, South Africa. Multi-stage sampling was used, namely stratified random sampling of schools and purposive sampling of grades used within schools. The data were collected by means of self-administered questionnaires in group situations. Results: Results indicate that knowledge of the legal status of abortion, as well as of the various stipulations of the law, was poor. Various misunderstandings were evident, including that spousal approval is required in order for married women to have an abortion. Significant differences between the knowledge of respondents at the various schools were found, with those learners attending schools formerly designated for African learners during Apartheid having the least knowledge. Conclusion: Given the multiple factors that may serve as barriers to women accessing abortion, it is imperative that at least the most fundamental aspect of reproductive rights, that is, the right to information, is not undermined.
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The risk of phallocentrism in masculinities studies: how a revision of the concept of patriarchy might help
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6216 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006268
- Description: In this article I critique South African work on masculinities through a fine grained reading of Morrell’s introductions to three texts. While this work appears, on first reading, to contribute to pro-feminist theorising, I argue that it inadvertently falls into a phallocentric trap. This is achieved in three ways: firstly, and most crudely, through conflating women and men into a singular, universal model that is in reality the masculine appearing as the universal; secondly, and more subtly, through concentrating almost exclusively on men and masculinities, thereby marginalising women (again); and thirdly, through constructing multiplicities of masculinities – this allows men to resist hegemonic masculinity, but never undo masculinity itself. In this way, the possibility of deconstructing the feminine/masculine binary recedes and the concept of patriarchy gets sidelined. I argue for a reinsertion of the notion of patriarchy into our study of gender, but also that the very notion of patriarchy needs revision in order to accommodate the multiple fissures that occur between men.
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Women’s micro-narratives of the process of abortion decision-making: justifying the decision to have an abortion
- Authors: Mavuso, Jabulile , Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143893 , vital:38292 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: What is missing from abortion research is research that explores women’s narratives of the processes of abortion decision-making in a way that acknowledges the constraints placed on ‘choice’. This study sought to explore, using Foucauldian feminist post-structuralism and a narrative-discursive approach, women’s micro-narratives of the abortion decision-making process. Purposive sampling was used to recruit a total of 25 participants from three abortion facilities in the Eastern Cape. Participants were unmarried ‘Black’ women between the ages of 19 and 35, and were mostly unemployed. Narrative interviews were done with the women. Analysis revealed an over-arching narrative in which women described the abortion decision as something that they were ‘forced’ into by their circumstances. To construct this narrative, women justified the decision to have an abortion by drawing on discourses that normalise certain practices located within the husband-wife and parent-child axes and make the pregnancy a problematic, unsupported and unsupportable one. Gendered and generational power relations reinforced this and contributed to the obstruction of reproductive justice.
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Danger and disease in sex education : the saturation of ‘adolescence’ with colonialist assumptions
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article , text
- Identifier: vital:6252 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007870
- Description: The United Nations Development Programme’s Millennium project argues for the importance of sexual and reproductive health in the achievement of all Millennium Development Goals. Sex education programmes, aimed principally at the youth, are thus emphasised and are in line with the specific Millennium Development Goals of reducing the incidence of HIV and improving maternal health. In this paper I analyse recent South African sex education and Life Orientation (a learning area containing sex education) manuals. Danger and disease feature as guiding metaphors for these manuals, with early reproduction and abortion being depicted as wholly deleterious and non-normative relationships leading to disease. I argue, firstly, that these renditions ignore well-designed comparative research that calls into questions the easy assumption of negative consequences accompanying ‘teenage pregnancy’ and abortion, and, secondly, that the persistence of danger and disease in sex education programmes is premised on a discourse of ‘adolescence’. ‘Adolescence’ as a concept is always already saturated with the colonialist foundation of phylogeny re-capitulating ontogeny. Individual development is interweaved with collective development with the threat of degeneration implied in both. This interweaving allows for the instrumentalist goal of sex education in which social changes are sought through changing individuals’ sexual attitudes and behaviour.
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The deployment of the medico-psychological gaze and disability expertise in relation to children with intellectual disability
- Authors: Mckenzie, Judith , Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6294 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014732 , http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13603116.2010.540042
- Description: In this study, we adopt the concepts of Michel Foucault on the medical gaze and Nikolas Rose on psychological expertise to differentiate between two forms of expertise evident in the education of intellectually disabled children. We draw on a discourse analytic study carried out in South Africa on intellectual disability in relation to educational practice to examine the operation of a medico-psychological gaze that calls for disability expertise in the management of disability. We conclude our discussion by noting that the dichotomy between impairment and disability that is proposed in the social model of disability does little to destabilise the power of the medico-psychological gaze since impairment is conceded to biomedical knowledge as an object of positive knowledge. This tacit acceptance of the medical authority gives sanction to disability expertise that operates in diffuse ways to regulate the educational experience of learners with intellectual disability. The implications of this conception for inclusive education are briefly explored, and further areas for research are suggested.
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Men and talk about legal abortion in South Africa: equality, support and rights discourses undermining reproductive ‘choice’
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona , Hansjee, Jateen
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6221 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006282 , https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13691058.2013.802815
- Description: Discursive constructions of abortion are embedded in the social and gendered power relations of a particular socio-historical space. As part of research on public discourses concerning abortion in South Africa where there has been a radical liberalisation of abortion legislation, we collected data from male group discussions about a vignette concerning abortion, and newspaper articles written by men about abortion. Our analysis revealed how discourses of equality, support and rights may be used by men to subtly undermine women’s reproductive right to ‘choose’ an abortion. Within an Equal Partnership discourse, abortion, paired with the assumption of foetal personhood, was equated with violating an equal heterosexual partnership and a man’s patriarchal duty to protect a child. A New Man discourse, which positions men as supportive of women, was paired with the assumption of men as rational and women as irrational in decision-making, to allow for the possibility of men dissuading women from terminating a pregnancy. A Rights discourse was invoked to suggest that abortion violates men’s paternal rights.
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Young people’s use of ‘peer pressure/normalization’ as discursive resources to justify gendered youth sexualities: implications for Life Orientation sexuality education programmes
- Authors: Jearey-Graham, Nicola , Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143749 , vital:38279 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
- Description: ‘Peer pressure’ has been associated in the scientific literature with a range of risky sexual behaviors, thereby undermining safe sex messages delivered in Life Orientation (LO) classes. LO texts warn against peer pressure. Taking a discursive psychology perspective, we show how young people, in contrast, use the discourses of ‘peer pressure to have sex’ and ‘peer normalization of sex’ to justify youth sexual activity. Using data from focus group discussions about youth sexualities with students at a Further Education and Training College in South Africa, we show how participants outlined a need for young people to be socially recognizable through engaging in, and being able to talk about sex, and how they implicated peer norms in governing individual sexual behavior. Both discourses pointed to a gendering of sexual norms. The deployment of these discourses by young people themselves has implications for Life Orientation programmes. Nuanced engagement with ‘peer group’ narratives is indicated.
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Teenage pregnancy and the construction of adolescence : scientific literature in South Africa
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2003
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6258 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007876 , http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0907568203104003
- Description: The depiction of teenage pregnancy as a social problem relies on the assumption of adolescence as a separable stage of development. Utilising a Derridian framework, I analyse how the dominant construction of adolescence as a transitional stage: (1) acts as an attempt to decide the undecidable (viz. the adolescent who is neither child nor adult, but simultaneously both) – an attempt which collapses in the face of teenage pregnancy; (2) relies on the ideal adult as the endpoint of development, and (3) has effects in terms of gendered and expert/parent/adolescent power relations.
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Teenage motherhood and the regulation of mothering in the scientific literature: the South African example
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6256 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007874
- Description: The mainstream literature on teenage pregnancy highlights teenagers' inadequate mothering as an area of disquiet. `Revisionists', such as feminist critics, point out that a confluence of negative social factors is implicated in teenagers' mothering abilities. Whether arguing that teenagers make bad mothers or defending them against this, the literature relies on the `invention of "good" mothering'. In this article I highlight the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning mothering (mothering as an essentialized dyad; mothering as a skill; motherhood as a pathway to adulthood; fathering as the absent trace) appearing in the scientific literature on teenage pregnancy in South Africa. I indicate how these assumptions are implicated in the regulation of mothering through the positioning of the teenage mother as the pathologized other, the splitting of the public from the private, domestic space of mothering, and the legitimation of the professionalization of mothering. I explore the gendered implications of the representations of mothering in this literature.
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Teenage pregnancy
- Authors: Macleod, Catriona
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: Text
- Identifier: vital:6301 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015906
- Description: In a book on preventing early pregnancy and poor reproductive outcomes in developing countries, the World Health Organisation (2011) declares that ‘adolescent pregnancy’ contributes to maternal, perinatal and infant mortality, and to a vicious cycle of poverty and ill-health. This statement reflects the common public assumption that ‘teenage pregnancy’ represents an individual, social, health, educational and financial risk that requires remediation. This kind of public perception is spurred by media coverage in which young girls with large protruding stomachs are etched in profile and stories of calamity are told (e.g. Time (21 June 2005) magazine). And yet the very notion of 'teenage pregnancy' is a relatively recent one. Depending on the country one talks about, it has been around since between the 1960s and 1980s. In the United States, for example, the rise of ‘teenage pregnancy’ as a social problem was associated with a shift in gendered power relations. Prior to the late 1960s the morally loaded concepts of 'unwed mother' and 'illegitimate child' were used to describe young women who conceived. For the most part, young pregnant women were excluded from society, with the accompanying shame around the lack of proper conjugal arrangements. The use of the term 'teenage pregnancy' removed the implied moral judgment and replaced it with seeming scientific neutrality. Young pregnant women now became publicly visible and thus the object of scientific scrutiny (Arney & Bergen, 1984).
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