Harriette Marshall

Fit to Reproduce? The Regulative Role of Pregnancy Texts

This article presents an analysis of popular UK-based guides to pregnancy. A discursive approach is adopted to explicate the interpretative repertoires used to construct pregnancy. ‘Planning for pregnancy’ incites women to engage in self-disciplining practices relating to the (pre)pregnant body, the self and ‘transforming the environment’. The easy combination and repeated use of these practices in conjunction with a repertoire of ‘pregnancy as risk’ serves to mask diversity and to decontextualize and individualize pregnancy to render it separate from women’s other relationships, identities and knowledges, with little regard for the specific circumstances in which women become/are pregnant. Medicalized discourses position women with limited agency, while, by means of repertoires of ‘choice’ informed by ‘woman-centred’ discourses, women are construed as consumers, taking responsibility for themselves and their babies. A tension is manifest in that the responsibility and blame for ‘abnormality’ or ‘unsuccessful’ outcomes is located with individual women/parents. We argue that through both medicalized and ‘womancentred’ discourses, reproduction remains a key site for the regulation of women.

Asian Women's Ethnic Identity: The Impact of Gender and Context in the Accounts of Women Bringing Up Children in East London

This study examines the ways in which a group of women of Asian origin or descent define and discuss aspects of ethnicity and ethnic identity. Thirty-two Asian women of different religious and cultural backgrounds who were bringing up young children in East London were interviewed by an Asian psychologist. As part of a more extensive interview about childbirth, child care and child rearing, women were asked about their ethnic identity. Their accounts indicate that their constructions of ethnicity and ethnic identity are fluid and changing, taking account of gender, developmental changes associated with motherhood and the context of their lives as mothers of young children. Analysis of their accounts is used to argue that ethnicity and ethnic identity are not homogeneous categories, that they operate across gender and, therefore, greater consideration needs to be given in developmental psychology to the complexity and variations in womens representations of ethnicity.

Young people's accounts of personal relationships in a multi-cultural East London Environment: Questions of community, diversity and inequality

A thematic decomposition of group interviews conducted with 176 young people from East London on the topic of personal relationships is presented. The focus of the analysis is on the role played by cultural and community factors on the form of personal relationships, and particular emphasis is given to the power-related issues of gender and ethnicity. Five broad themes are discussed, entitled ‘An imagined community: Harmonious diversity’, ‘multi-culturalism and racism’, ‘Asian communities and families’, ‘the inter-relationship of gender with ethnicity’ and ‘the role of religion in shaping relationships’. The findings are discussed in relation to inadequacies with abstract and generalized psychological models that fail to grasp the specificities of community relations. Copyright

On Developmentality: Researching the Varied Meanings of ‘Independence’ and ‘Maturity’ Extant amongst a Sample of Young People in East London

ABSTRACT The first section of the paper addresses criticisms of the ‘developmental psychological model’ as it applies to youth studies and addresses and clarifies these by introducing the concept of developmentality. The concepts of ‘independence’ and ‘maturity’ are identified as crucial aspects of developmentality and as increasingly problematic both for researchers and for young people. The second section addresses this problem empirically by presenting findings from a ‘Q methodological’ study into understandings of independence and maturity amongst young people aged between 16 and 18 years attending Further Education colleges in East London. Five interpretable ‘Q’ factors are explicated as ‘individual independence’, ‘maturity as adherence to religious moral codes’, ‘all you need is love’, ‘resolute, authentic individualism’, and ‘material and practical maturity’. The final section discusses the implications for research and policy of these various distinct understandings.

Young Women's Accounts of the Meanings of the Body in Relation to Independence, Responsibility and Maturity

This article examines the ways in which young women living in East London position the body in terms of their lives and relations with others and the implications of their representations for mainstream psychological approaches to adolescent development. Mainstream psychological approaches, as articulated in stage and ’Sturm und Drang’ theories, characterize adolescence as a time when young people move from a state of dependence on parents to individuation and independence from others (Erikson, 1968; Noller and Callan, 1991; Coleman and Hendry,1990; Apter, 1991). Concomitant with this emphasis on independence is the notion that young people gradually take on responsibility for themselves and their actions and make their own decisions (Griffin, 1993; Smetana and Asquith,