Leigh Coombes

Subjectivities and Silences, Mother and Woman: Theorizing an Experience of Silence as a Speaking Subject

The article theorizes the positioning implications of a specific occasion of silence told through an autobiographical narrative. Positioning theory is discussed, as are modifications to speech act theory. These discussions raise questions concerning the social power relations that enable specific silences. The article reads an account of a mothers silence to argue that that silence may enable subject positions that marginalize or exclude the silent participant, reproduce criteria of inadmissibility or incompetence, or code some experiences as ineffable. The article also discusses silence as an effect of potentially contradictory positioning.

Speaking from the margins: A discourse analysis of ten women's accounts of spirituality

Psychologys concern with the human subject has traditionally marginalised womens accounts of their own experience. This paper reports a study of the discursive resources identified in 10 womens accounts of their spirituality and the relationships between these resources and those identified in selected psychological, feminist, and poststructuralist texts. From a poststructuralist perspective, we analyse and discuss the ways in which the womens accounts, and the more academic accounts, reproduce discourses and discursive objects, and simultaneously produce speaking positions for women. We discuss some of the problematics of engaging with the research process and of working through and with theories that historically constitute women as lacking, invisible, and silent.

Manufacturing egalitarian injustice: A discursive analysis of the rhetorical strategies used in fathers' rights websites in Aotearoa/New Zealand

The fathers’ rights movement is a worldwide phenomenon that takes a particular form in our geopolitical region. Responding initially to an apparent judicial preference for mothers to have custody of children, the movement grew alongside, and in resistance to, the women’s movement. In this paper, we analyse how texts of fathers’ rights discourse strategically appropriate egalitarianism in the context of gendered struggles over rights within the nuclear family. Texts from four fathers’ rights websites are engaged to locate, construct and critique the discursive power of the movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We discuss examples of strategies that appropriate egalitarianism, engage quantifying logic, and demonise women and argue how the fathers’ rights sites exemplify resistance to the impact of the women’s movement on Family Court and criminal justice interventions into violence against women at home.

iAnorexic: Haraway’s Cyborg Metaphor as Ethical Methodology

The burgeoning connections between the human body and technology have opened space for disenfranchised “others” to take up alternative lived experience, such as the exclusively online pro-anorexia movement. Haraway’s (1991) cyborg metaphor, characterised by organic/machine hybridisation, speaks to the blurring of the boundaries between taken-for-granted binaries that “other” women and their experiences of their bodies. Through a study of pro-anorexia online, we illustrate how cyborg theory enables a nonpathologising understanding of women’s embodiment. In this article, we discuss cyborg metaphor as an ethical methodology for new engagements with pro-anorexia and women’s embodiment, privileging transdisciplinary movement, simultaneity, and contradiction.

Gynetic organisms: pro-anorexic techno bodies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse pro-anorexia from a discursive, metaphorical standpoint in order to enable an understanding of how pro-anorexia functions as political resistance through technological bodies. Design/methodology/approach – Techno-metaphor is used to reveal how pro-anorexic communities online function through technology. Findings – Six techno-metaphors work to construct pro-anorexic cyborg embodiment through technology. This pro-anorexic cyborg embodiment offers relief from the tensions of patriarchal femininity and provides control over troublesome embodiment. Technology enables women experiencing anorexia to resist the dominant interpretations of their lived experience that subjugate them. Originality/value – This research offers an understanding of pro-anorexia as resistance to intolerable femininity and reconstructed female bodies through technology. By exploiting technological political space, pro-anorexics are claiming positions and forms of embodiment previously off-...

Shaping Feminist Psychologies in Aotearoa: History, Paradox, Transformation

Complex gender and race relations among Māori and Pākehā feminists permeate the shape, history and status of feminist psychologies in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Our discussion begins with some background to the issues we face in our bicultural partnerships, the history of feminist engagements with Western egalitarianism, and the achievements attributable to egalitarian feminism over the past 40 years. The body of our chapter interweaves the personal experiences of some feminist psychologists in Aotearoa/New Zealand with the theoretical changes and challenges posed by academic work and the practical, social changes and challenges led by activists. We also discuss three movements that infuse our contemporary work: from feminist activism towards the legitimacy of service delivery and knowledge production for and by women; of bicultural feminism towards parallel development and recognition of cultural differences, privileges and authority amongst academic feminists; and a resurgence of resistance to feminist-led social change by anti-feminist men’s groups.