Lisa Lazard

‘Please don’t put the whole dang thing out there!’: A discursive analysis of internet discussions around infant feeding

The promotion of breastfeeding is an important focus of intervention for professionals working to improve infant health outcomes. Literature in this area focuses largely on ‘choices’ and ‘barriers to breastfeeding’. It is our argument, however, that womens cultural context plays a key role in infant feeding ‘choices’. In this article, we explore contested representations of infant feeding and infant feeding choices in public debates conducted on a large British parenting website. To sample dominant representations of infant feeding circulating in UK culture, two threads were chosen from the debating board of a busy online parenting community (105 and 99 individual posts, respectively). Participants on the threads were largely women. A feminist informed Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to deconstruct the intersecting constructions of gender, childhood and motherhood implicit in public discussions about infant feeding choices. We identify dominant constructions of women who breastfeed or bottle feed, social representations of both forms of infant feeding, and explore the relationship between constructions of infant feeding choices and constructions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ motherhood. This analysis functions to trouble the individualist assumptions underpinning the notion of infant feeding ‘choices’, considering the cultural context within which British mothers ‘choose’ how to feed their babies.

Methodological Pluralism in Theory and in Practice: The Case for Q in the Community

In this article, we discuss the issue of methodological pluralism in qualitative research and in particular the case of Q methodology. Q methodology occupies an interesting position in arguments around methodological pluralism in that its location within qualitative (as well as quantitative) traditions has often been represented as a contestable issue. To contextualise our exploration of qualitative methodological pluralism, we will begin by presenting the theoretical questions we see as relevant to the mixing of Q method with other qualitative methods, including Qs own contested positioning within this grouping. This strand of our argument highlights continuities between some conceptualisations of the pattern analytics of Q methodology and discursive and thematic analysis. To ground this point, we present an empirical study that used both Q methodology and thematic analysis to address an issue in the community. More specifically, we will describe how Q methodology and thematic analysis were used to approach the evaluation of a programme to reduce recidivism amongst offenders and thus offer practical solutions in an applied setting. We will conclude by reflecting on the possibilities of pluralism when methodological boundaries are understood as mobile, and when stability of boundary construction is conceptualised as relationally produced rather than pre-existing.

Doing reflexivity in psychological research: What’s the point? What’s the practice?

ABSTRACT Reflexivity is a fundamental expectation of qualitative work in psychology (and the wider social sciences), but what it looks like and how we do it is frequently ambiguous and implicit. This makes doing reflexivity a challenging endeavor, particularly for those new to using qualitative methodologies. This article explores reflexivity as a form of critical thinking and evaluation by demarcating reflexive activity in relation to other forms of critical thinking used in psychology. Using notions of perspectival location, we shed some practical light on the objectives and processes of reflexivity, from its significance in the identification of a research topic, through designing, conducting, and writing the research report. The overarching question of “what is the point of reflexivity?” is answered through an interrogation of common assumptions around producing “good” research in psychology as well as through a series of key questions illuminating different steps in the research process. We conclude that reflexivity requires the unpacking of partial, positioned and affective perspectives we bring to the research. This process facilitates our questioning and moves us beyond our own taken-for-granted assumptions and sense-making of the social world.

Reviews: Irina Anderson and Kathy Doherty: Accounting for Rape: Psychology, Feminism and Discourse Analysis in the Study of Sexual Violence. London: Routledge, 2008, 161pp.

does justice to the demands of intersectionality from a phenomenological perspective. However, as much as the table works as the starting point for filling out space with matter, sensation and experience or memory, the ‘furniture’ metaphor might leave the reader slightly unsatisfied with the promised engagement with time. This might be because of the lack of historicity in the practice of the discipline of phenomenology, which cannot sufficiently be resolved by the inclusion of Marxism or psychoanalysis, as Ahmed tries to do. Sometimes the book seems to scratch on the surface in a social constructivist mode when it talks about the impressions that the social makes on bodies, it seems to be a one-way direction that the phenomenological entities or flows take on in their move through time and space. The agency of the body comes short at some points even though Ahmed’s bodies do find a way to ‘stretch out’ and ‘embody’ space (p. 11). A further problem that occurs in the book is mentioned by Ahmed herself in the conclusion (p. 172). Is it just queer bodies, here lesbian bodies, that queer space? Is it their fate and duty to cross the straight lines? Ahmed does reflect on the problem of identity here but seems to be a bit lost when only tackling homonormativity as a form of following a straight line. One could ask here with Michael O’Rourke if there are queer–straight relations that are able to cross both homo-and heteronormative lines (O’Rourke, 2005). Indeed, this book does give a new line to queer theory. For me, it is the long wanted opening up of a new space of thought where one can put constructions of sexuality and race in relation to each other and find theoretical possibilities of queering philosophies.

26.95, ISBN 9780415211741 (pbk)

In this article, I will discuss the ways in which strong women characters are constituted in the 2005 film The Descent (Marshall, 2005). In doing so, I will unpack representations of these fictional women with a view to articulating the implications that they have for challenging both problematic feminine positionings and heterosexism(s). While the film The Descent can be read as falling short of offering a challenge to heterosexist understandings of femininity, it will be argued that viewing horror films as monolithically problematic for women may overlook the subversive potential of this genre. I will begin by outlining the plot of the film and then explain why the film became of interest to me as a feminist psychologist.