Mandy Morgan

Weaving cohesive identities: New Zealand women talk as mothers and workers

Abstract This exploratory study examines the discourses which construct women as mothers and workers and explores the strategies the women use to weave these sometimes contradictory identities together. Discourse analysis was used to explore the talk of two focus groups of first‐time mothers, all New Zealanders of European descent in stable heterosexual partnerships with babies aged less than six months. The women deployed an intensive mother discourse which privileged their maternal role and positioned the babies as needing parental care and mothers as the natural providers of that care. However, they also felt the pressure of successful woman and economic rationalist discourses in which paid work is essential to wellbeing and good citizenship while motherhood is devalued. The womens decisions about re‐entering the paid workforce were characterised by conflict and constraint. The analysis focuses on the strategies of resistance that the women used to warrant their life choices, including constructing motherhood as a job, and deploying an independent mother discourse which serves to facilitate their striving for the best of both worlds. Also explored are some of the structural barriers that serve to further limit womens choices.

Remembering Embodied Domination Questions of Critical/Feminist Psy-discourse on the Body

During the 1990s, texts of critical and feminist psychologies challenged taken-for-granted notions of natural, empirical bodies. The implications of these challenges for speaking of embodiment have become increasingly troublesome. Drawing on poststructuralist theories, this paper reads three critical and/or feminist psychological texts to problematize the theoretical constitution of embodiment. These readings are focused on the question of how the multi-vocal possibilities of critical/feminist psydiscourse enable us to speak of embodying domination and transforming social power relations.

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.

Bullying in secondary schools: through a discursive lens

Abstract This paper analyses students’ constructions of bullying from a social constructionist perspective. Interviews were conducted with 24 students at a small semi-rural secondary school in New Zealand. These were taped, transcribed and a discourse analysis, informed by the work of Foucault, was carried out. It was found that students made sense of bullying by drawing on constructions that included bullying as a consequence of differences and as a form of discipline. These constructions had the effect of legitimizing the schools institutional power imbalance. This was supported by students and teachers who both played an active role in simultaneously enforcing, and being subjected to, the disciplinary technologies of normalization characterized by bullying. The goal of this research is to provide a critical focus to the political nature, power relations and ideological effects of these prevailing discourses that function to both create and support bullying behaviour in our schools.

Lawful possession: A constructionist approach to jealousy stories

Abstract Traditional approaches to jealousy have treated the emotion as unitary and individual. In the present paper, we construe jealousy as an embodiment of multiple, often conflicting, social judgements which are discursively constituted. Our project aims to apply constructionist theory to an empirical investigation of jealousy stories. Data from 32 storytellers was analyzed using a “positioning triad.” This “triad” includes the storyline through which the episode is unfolded, the positions of persons involved in the story, and the social acts performed. We classify each story according to three narrative forms (progressive, regressive, stable) and identify three positions which are crucial to the resolution of the storyline ( victim, avenger and outsider positions). We also describe the conflicting rights and judgements of the different positions. In conclusion, we discuss the problems we encountered in our project and the difficulties of conducting empirical research based on constructionism.

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.

Narrative Research on Child Sexual Abuse: Addressing Perennial Problems in Quantitative Research

Narrative research can offer insights into perennial methodological problems facing quantitative researchers in the field of child sexual abuse. Using research data from a retrospective, narrative study of 29 adult participants who had spent their childhood in a New Zealand commune in which child sexual abuse was known to have occurred, this article explores four key methodological issues in the field of child sexual abuse research. These include problems surrounding the definition and reporting of child sexual abuse; the relationship between sexual abuse and other adverse experiences; the link between abuse and its variable psychological effects; and finally, the ethics of conducting research into child sexual abuse. Recommendations are made for future directions in child sexual abuse research.

Politics and pedagogy: discursive constructions in the IB Theory of knowledge – Guide

The International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum is increasingly popular in both national and international secondary education settings. The Theory of knowledge (TOK) course is cast as the prime example of the international globalised values the IB Diploma represents. This article argues that such a positioning is contested within the TOK curriculum document, leading to confusion and tension in the positioning of teachers, students and learning. Two constructions of TOK are identified through discourse analysis, each of which positions teachers, students and learning differently. One construction serves primarily political goals, while the other serves pedagogical purposes. The tension between these positions may cause confusion for teachers and students, although techniques of tension reduction are identified. Further, this article argues that, in practice, both the pedagogical and political purposes of TOK may be achieved despite the tension in the curriculum document, if the personal pedagogical ideology of the teacher coincides with the political positioning of TOK.

Jane's Jealousy: A Narrative Analysis of Emotion Experience in Its Social Context

This article provides a narrative analysis of one written account of jealousy. The analysis assumes the importance of cultural, historical, and social context in making sense of the experience of jealousy. Our analysis was organized around the “positioning triad” of story line, positioning, and social acts. We were particularly guided by a structural Labovian (1972) approach to the basic story line. The story we examined was chosen for its useful illustration of three subject positions: victim, avenger, and outsider. The analysis highlights the way in which jealousy is constituted through a sequential unfolding of events that are made meaningful within the context of local mores, adolescent romance, and revenge.