Lisa Smyth

Gendered Spaces and Intimate Citizenship: The Case of Breastfeeding

This article situates breastfeeding politics in the context of intimate citizenship, where womens capability to care in a range of social spaces is at stake. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Fenster, the article considers the extent to which recent breastfeeding promotion work by the Health Promotion Agency in Northern Ireland has sought to reconceive of social spaces in ways that have the potential to improve intimate citizenship for breastfeeding women.

Feminism and Abortion Politics: Choice, Rights, and Reproductive Freedom

Abstract This paper examines the problems associated with feminist articulations of rights claims and other alternatives for advocating reproductive freedom. Criticisms of private choice advocacy in particular, and rights advocacy in general, are considered, along with proposals either to abandon rights claims in favour of care theory on the one hand, or advocate gendered citizenship on the other. Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser and Drucilla Cornell, the author argues that the category of the rights-bearing citizen should not be thought to be necessarily masculinized, in virtue of the assumption of “indivisibility,” and that making rights claims does not necessarily entail reproducing a gendered public/private dichotomy. Thus, this paper contends that rights theory offers a worthwhile platform for feminist advocacy of reproductive freedom.

Narratives of Irishness and the Problem of Abortion: The X Case 1992

This paper considers the ways in which discourses of abortion and discourses of national identity were constructed and reproduced through the events of the X case in the Republic of Ireland in 1992. This case involved a state injunction against a 14-year-old rape victim and her parents, to prevent them from obtaining an abortion in Britain. By examining the controversy the case gave rise to in the national press, I will argue that the terms of abortion politics in Ireland shifted from arguments based on rights to arguments centred on national identity, through the questions the X case raised about womens citizenship status, and womens position in relation to the nation and the state. Discourses of national identity and discourses of abortion shifted away from entrenched traditional positions, towards more liberal articulations.

Researching Conservative Groups: Rapport and Understanding Across Moral and Political Boundaries

This article explores whether it is possible to understand the perspectives of people with whom we find it difficult or impossible to empathise, because their moral and political views are very different to our own. Focusing on our dilemmas in carrying out qualitative research with conservative evangelicals and anti‐abortion activists, we take issue with the assumption that understanding is connected with the presence of rapport and empathy in research interviews. This article argues instead that a reflexive approach, which considers researchers’ orientations towards their subject and their respondents and their emotional journeys through the research process, will enable more comprehensive interpretation of our research material.

The Cultural Politics of Sexuality and Reproduction in Northern Ireland

This article is concerned with the ways in which moral conservatives frame their opposition to liberal sexual and reproductive service provision in a divided society, namely Northern Ireland. The analysis focuses on the assertion of a common ‘Northern Irish’ position as a key strategy in opposing both abortion access and impartial and confidential sexual health service provision for young people at activist and official political levels.The relative success of the conservative lobby’s cultural strategy, despite the otherwise divided social context, raises important questions about the role of gender and age in the politics of recognition.

Maternal situations: sectarianism and civility in a divided city

This paper explores the tensions between civility and sectarianism in contemporary Belfast. Drawing on interviews with mothers engaged in raising young children in the largely working-class and divided inner city, the paper offers a situated account of the dynamics of social reproduction and change. This is pursued through an analysis of the interplay between expectations of civility and sectarianism in three situations: walking, shopping and playing. The tensions and dilemmas of maternal action as the divided inner city is navigated indicate the gendered character of civility, an important emerging norm facilitating social change in the post-conflict era. The situation of motherhood itself, both at the centre of ethno-national reproduction and at the interface of public and private life, is not insignificant in routinely drawing mothers into the everyday dynamics of post-conflict continuity and change.

The Social Politics of Breastfeeding: Norms, Situations and Policy Implications

This paper explores the social and emotional consequences of three major assumptions about human action underpinning breastfeeding promotion campaigns in the UK. Drawing on Joass critique of instrumental accounts of rational action, the paper illustrates the ways in which these campaigns firstly contribute to the moralisation of motherhood; secondly value highly individualised, de-contextualised forms of action; and thirdly promote an objectified view of the human body as a pliable instrument of human intentions. The consequences of these assumptions, as they shape the efforts of mothers to care for their babies and young children in complex, unpredictable and often uncontrollable situations, provides the focus of discussion. The paper concludes that a target-driven health-promotion policy, relying on a mechanistic account of social and emotional life, is contributing to the burden of early motherhood in ways that are not conducive to infant and maternal health and attachment.

The Disorganized Family: Institutions, Practices and Normativity

This paper considers the value of a normative account of the relationship between agents and institutions for contemporary efforts to explain ever more complex and disorganized forms of social life. The character of social institutions, as they relate to practices, agents and norms, is explored through an engagement with the common claim that family life has been de-institutionalized. The paper argues that a normative rather than empirical definition of institutions avoids a false distinction between institutions and practices. Drawing on ideas of social freedom and creative action from critical theory, the changes in family life are explained not as an effect of de-institutionalization, but as a shift from an organized to a disorganized institutional type. This is understood as a response to changes in the wider normative structure, as a norm of individual freedom has undermined the legitimacy of the organized patriarchal nuclear family, with gender ascribed roles and associated duties. Contemporary motherhood is drawn on to illustrate the value of analysing the dynamic interactions between institutions, roles and practices for capturing both the complexity and the patterned quality of social experience.

The Different Roles of Parents and Friends: Support for Divorce and Repartnering Following Martial Dissolution among Latina and White Women

What role do significant others play in orientations to repartnering following divorce? Situated within critical role theory, and focusing on 23 white and Latina divorcees from Texas (the United States), this paper examines orientations toward repartnering in the light of distinct friend and parent expectations. While friends were sources of sympathy and affirmation, parents were more interventionist, indicating moral expectations. Parents either encouraged repartnering as the route to a happy future, or discouraged it on grounds that first marriage creates sacred, unbreakable bonds. The former response was more common among whites, and the latter more common among Latinas. The paper argues that the expectations of friends and parents are taken account of during this transitional period, in positive and negative ways, as orientations toward marriage, divorce, and repartnering were explained and justified.

Maternal Risk Anxiety in Belfast: Claims, Evaluations, Responses

This article considers the social logic of maternal anxiety about risks posed to children in segregated, post-conflict neighbourhoods. Focusing on qualitative research with mothers in Belfast’s impoverished and divided inner city, the article draws on the interactionist perspective in the sociology of emotions to explore the ways in which maternal anxiety drives claims for recognition of good mothering, through orientations to these neighbourhoods. Drawing on Hirschman’s model of exit, loyalty and voice types of situated action, the article examines the relationship between maternal risk anxiety and evaluations of neighbourhood safety. In arguing that emotions are important aspects of claims for social recognition, the article demonstrates that anxiety provokes efforts to claim status, in this context through the explicit affirmation of non-sectarian mothering.