Julia Moore

“I need numbers before I will buy it” Reading and writing qualitative scholarship on close relationships

The authors highlight important contributions of qualitative research for the study of close relationships, arguing for greater representation of this scholarship in the journals. Four challenges experienced by interpretive researchers trying to publish in Journal of Social and Personal Relationships and close relationship journals are discussed.

Trailblazing healthcare: institutionalizing and integrating complementary medicine.

OBJECTIVES This study examines three integrative health centers to understand their (1) historical development, organizational goals, and modalities, (2) the processes and challenges of integrating complementary and allopathic medicine, while encouraging staff collaboration, and (3) how each center becomes institutionalized within their community. METHODS We focus on three organizational case studies that reflect varying forms of integrative health care practices in three U.S. cities. Participant-observation and in-depth interviews with center directors were analyzed qualitatively. RESULTS Important patterns found within the three cases are (1) the critical role of visionary biomedical practitioners who bridge complementary and allopathic practices, (2) communicating integration internally through team interaction, and (3) communicating integration externally through spatial location, naming, and community outreach. CONCLUSION IM centers continue to blaze new trails toward mainstream access and acceptance by gathering evidence for IM, encouraging team collaboration within organizational contexts, constructing organizational identity, and negotiating insurance reimbursements. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS IM is not the enactment of specific modalities, but rather a philosophy of healing. Though scheduling conflicts, skepticism, and insurance coverage may be obstacles toward IM, collaboration among specialists and with patients should be the ultimate goal.

Reconsidering Childfreedom: A Feminist Exploration of Discursive Identity Construction in Childfree LiveJournal Communities

This article employs participant definitional analysis, sensitized with feminist poststructuralism and critical ethnography, to understand three identity construction processes that members of childfree LiveJournal communities participate in: (a) naming childfreedom, (b) negotiating childfreedom, and (c) enacting childfreedom. I argue that childfree identities are contested and sometimes activist. Ultimately, I call for scholars to reconsider the definition of childfree to account for the complex and nuanced identities constructed by individuals who identify as such.

Once Upon a Midnight Stalker: A Content Analysis of Stalking in Films

Media portrayals of crime have been linked to biased information processing and beliefs about society and personal risks of victimization. Much of this research has either focused on relatively holistic analyses of media consumption, or on the analysis of elements of only a few types of crime (e.g., murder, rape, assault). Research to date has overlooked how media portray stalking in interpersonal relationships. This study content analyzed 51 mainstream movies with prominent stalking themes to compare and contrast such depictions with the actual scientific data about stalking. By considering victim variables, stalker variables, relational variables, stalking behavior variables, victim response variables, and justice variables, this analysis illustrates how films have portrayed stalking as more gender equivalent, briefer, more deadly and sexualized, and more criminally constituted in stalker history and actions compared to actual stalking cases. Implications for the cultivation of attitudes about real-world stalking behaviors and recommendations for further research are discussed.

Troubling the Functional/Dysfunctional Family Binary Through the Articulation of Functional Family Estrangement

Critical perspectives remain largely absent from the study of family communication. To interrogate the power of discourse to construct knowledges about how family is and should be, we drew on Judith Butler’s poststructural theory of performativity to critically analyze the common experience of family estrangement. We argue that professional discourse performatively constructs the functional family binary by equating ongoing, open, and positive family communication with functional family identity, while constructing estrangement as unnatural, dysfunctional, and in need of intervention. We then illustrate how some individuals who self-identify as estranged from a family member “trouble” the functional/dysfunctional family binary by articulating their own families as functionally estranged.

“Uh Oh. Cue the [New] Mommy Wars”: The Ideology of Combative Mothering in Popular U.S. Newspaper Articles About Attachment Parenting

ABSTRACT Through critique of concordance, we argue that popular U.S. newspaper articles about attachment parenting perpetuate the ideology of combative mothering, where mothers are in continuous competition with one another over parenting choices. Specifically, article writers construct a new, singular metaphorical mommy war between proattachment parenting and antiattachment parenting proponents by prepackaging attachment parenting and its debate, advocating for attachment parenting through instinct and science, and rejecting attachment parenting because of harm to children, relationships, and mothers. A minority of articles, however, avoided reifying this pro-/antiattachment parenting mommy war by exploring the complexities of parenting beyond prepackaged philosophies. We explore the implications of this new mommy war on ideologies of motherhood and the politics of choice.

The Impact of Criminalization of Stalking on Italian Students: Adherence to Stalking Myths

Although behaviors that we today identify as stalking have occurred throughout history, the recognition and systematic investigation of stalking are quite recent. Italy’s antistalking law is fairly new, and factors such as cultural myths, stereotypical beliefs, and definitional ambiguities continue to cause problems in the interpretation and recognition of stalking among the general public. This study examined perceptions and attitudes of 2 groups of Italian criminology students at 2 different times, before and after the implementation of Italy’s 2009 antistalking law. The Stalking Attitudes Questionnaire (McKeon, Ogloff, & Mullen, 2009) was administered to samples in 2007 and 2010. Results revealed significant changes in some beliefs and attitudes between the pre- and post-assessments. Interpretation suggests that the combination of Italian antistalking legislation and increased attention to research seem to have decreased students’ adherence to stalking myths.

Performative face theory: A critical perspective on interpersonal identity work

ABSTRACT Power operates not only through ideological and institutional control, but also through everyday interpersonal communication practices that sediment what is and ought to be. However, critical theorizing about power remains scarce within the sub-fields of interpersonal and family communication. To answer questions about operations of power in interpersonal identity work, performative face theory is set forth, which places Erving Goffman’s theorization of face in conversation with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. Performative face theory suggests that discursive acts cited or repeated in negotiations of face constitute and sometimes subvert naturalized identity categories. Four theoretical principles are provided and an empirical example of childbearing identity is presented. Finally, implications of this novel critical interpersonal and family communication theory are discussed.

From “I’m Never Having Children” to Motherhood: A Critical Analysis of Silence and Voice in Negotiations of Childbearing Face

ABSTRACT Women who once communicated themselves as permanently childless/childfree by choice but then became mothers must negotiate a drastic shift in childbearing identity. To study this identity work, the present study adopts performative face theory, a critical interpersonal and family communication theory that places Goffman’s theory of face in conversation with Butler’s theory of performativity. In this theorization, negotiations of face sediment oppositional identities through the reiterative power of discursive and bodily acts. Critical-qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with mothers who once told others they never wanted to have children demonstrates how the facework strategies of voice and silence allow women to perform the “sincerely childfree” face and then the “good (future) mother” face. These negotiations of face are enabled and constrained by relations of power that define identity categories. Although these negotiations of face are often relationally harmonious, they also reify power/knowledge about motherhood as intensive and positive.

Performative and subversive negotiations of face in parent–child communication about childbearing choice across generations

ABSTRACT Some women who previously told others they never wanted to have children ultimately do become mothers. These women negotiate their own and their children’s childbearing identities. Using performative face theory, a critical poststructural interpersonal and family communication theory of identity and difference, this study analyzed intergenerational shifts in parent–child communication between families-of-origin (when participants were children) and families-of-creation (when participants were parents). Most participants described how their parents articulated either pronatalist face threats or antinatalist face support, which constrained possibilities for their childbearing identities. Participants, however, stressed that they have talked or plan to talk to their own children in a different, more neutral-natalist way by sharing their stories, emphasizing childbearing agency, and quietly desiring grandchildren. Negotiations of childbearing face are therefore informed by—and in turn sustain, resist, or sometimes subvert—discursive articulations of power/knowledge that circulate throughout culture about (never) having children.