Mark Finn

Monogamous order and the avoidance of chaotic excess

In Western culture, sexual fidelity is widely regarded as a prime source of relationship stability and personal happiness and thus a worthy practice. This article is an empirical and critical account of monogamous coupledom as a privileged relational experience. Data are drawn from 14 in-depth interviews with Australian men and women who self-identified their cross- or same-sex partnerships as sexually and emotionally monogamous. Monogamy, as participants construct it, is critiqued as an action and policy that produces an exclusive and contained essence of relationships and that guards against a perceived chaotic excess that is set-up in opposition to it. Such action is seen to impel a sense of mastery in relationships and selves that are properly enclosed, channelled and thereby ordered. The sociohistoric binary arrangement of an ordered inside and chaotic outside is focused on as enabling a superior monogamous order while also underpinning its precariousness and psychological frailty. Drawing on Deleuzian ideas about a non-privileged and non-hierarchical system of relating, an alternative way of intimately connecting with others is brought into theoretical view, one that does not favour contained and fixed essences as foundations for relationships, intimate connections and life.

Practices of Body Management: Transgenderism and Embodiment

(Dis)ordered body management practices such as transgenderism and anorexia are largely conceptualized within psychology as the pathological manifestation of individual distress. It is argued that the way they are talked about, treated and ultimately understood as matters of and for health, serves the regulatory (socio-cultural and political) function of targeting more visible embodiments as problematic and indicative of distressed subjectivity. A poststructuralist discourse analytic is employed as a means of exploring alternative constructions and understandings of problematic embodiment. It is proposed that transgenderism discursively and materially relocates (dis)ordered embodiment from the constituting realm of health to that of productive choice, wherein the notion of distress is questioned. As a matter of choice, gender (re)embodiment is understood as potentially positive, pleasurable and a site for non-distressed multiple subjectivities. From this, it is suggested that community, health and social psychologists re-evaluate current constructions of ‘problematic’ body management practices, account for their wider social and political function, and attend to ways in which non-distressed management can otherwise be understood and supported. Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A critical analysis of affirmative therapeutic engagements with consensual non-monogamy

In this article we explore predominant psychologisations of consensual non-monogamy in therapist’s accounts of their engagements with clients in open relationships. A total of 17 UK counsellors (14 men and 3 women) took part in individual semi-structured interviews in 2010, with participants identifying their clinical responses to open non-monogamy as being non-directive and non-pathologising and thus in a sense “affirmative”. In a Foucauldian-informed analysis we pay particular attention to the conceptual externalisation (and psychologisation) of non-monogamy as an outside and excessive domain that is both trivial yet threatening and that works to reproduce the privilege of monogamous coupledom. This is in specific relation to open (gay) dyadic relationships as the kind of sexually non-exclusive relationship that interviewees had more professional experience with and so gave greater account of. We make a case for a less dichotomising engagement with open non-monogamy and for an inclusive therapeutic practice that does not implicitly assume the transparency of monogamy discourse and thus risk negating its normalising effects in the name of psychological and relationship well-being.

Adolescent Awareness and Use of Electronic Cigarettes: A Review of Emerging Trends and Findings

Adult electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use is increasing globally, and early studies have suggested that similar trends may be observed among the adolescent population, albeit at lower levels. The current literature review presents data collected since 2014 from 21 cross-sectional studies and one cohort study that were all published in English. In particular, it focuses on awareness, ever use, past 30-day use, and regular use of e-cigarettes. The article suggests that adolescents are nearing complete awareness of e-cigarettes. Furthermore, in relation to ever use and past 30-day use, higher prevalence rates continue to be reported across time, especially in the United States. Nonetheless, reported regular use of e-cigarettes remains much lower than past 30-day use, although conclusions are limited due to inconsistencies with measurement and consequent lack of cross-cultural applicability. The majority of studies do not report whether adolescents use non-nicotine e-cigarettes. There is a current absence of longitudinal studies that explore any association between e-cigarettes and tobacco use and little qualitative data that may illuminate how and why adolescents use e-cigarettes. Through addressing these methodological limitations, future research will be able to inform health care and policy more effectively.

Good mothers, bad thoughts: New mothers’ thoughts of intentionally harming their newborns

This article explores the accounts of six white, ‘middle-class’ women living in the UK who as first-time or recent mothers experienced thoughts of intentionally harming their newborn infants. Our analytic approach is psychosocial insofar as we take the womens accounts as being conditional on a merging of social, discursive and psychological elements. Two dominant ways of relating to thoughts of harm are highlighted. The first is to do with the exclusion of such thoughts as indicative of unhealthy non-containment and depressive illness. The second involves including thoughts of harm as an extension of maternal vigilance and care. Here we draw on recent feminist understandings of a mothers ambivalence as involving a heightened awareness of her own sense of self and her world through her relation to her child. It is argued that the disassociation of non acted-out destructive impulses from normative mothering perpetuates the usual pathologization of thoughts of harm and the associated vilification of women. Recent calls for the normalization of thoughts of harm that can be experienced by many new mothers are also challenged as leaving in place the idea that the experience of thoughts of harm is incongruous and debilitating to motherhood. In contrast, we make a case for thoughts of destructive harm as being a creative impulse that can be constructively incorporated into mothering and maternal subjectivity.

I. `I Don't Think That's Normal': A Reflection on Accounts of Experiences of Treatment for Eating Disorders

There is already a considerable body of literature documenting and debating the convergences of girls’ and women’s normative and pathologized experiences of body weight and weight management from a range of both feminist and mainstream perspectives. (e.g. Fallon et al., 1994; Orbach, 1993; Polivy and Herman, 1987). Among this literature, numerous critical feminist analyses have explored how ‘anorexia nervosa’ (Bordo, 1993; Hepworth, 1999; Malson, 1998) and ‘bulimia’ (Burns, 2004) can be understood as being discursively constituted within (rather than deviating from) a range of profoundly gendered normative values and ideals of late 20thand early 21st-century western cultures. The experiences and practices of those diagnosed as eating disordered have thus been analysed as corporeal re-articulations of and/or resistances to a multiplicity of culturally dominant ideals about, for example, gender, embodiment, self-control, individualistic competitiveness, personal display, self-discipline, mass consumer culture and the uncertainties of postmodernity (Bordo, 1993; Brumburg, 1988; Hepworth, 1999; Malson, 1999, 2000; Probyn, 1987). During the last decade, however, there have also been some significant changes in the discursive fields in which gendered embodiment, body weight and weight management practices are constituted and regulated. Not least among these discursive shifts is the emergence of a highly prominent and vociferously pursued ‘war’ against an alleged global ‘epidemic of obesity’ (Department of Health, 2004; Tischner and Malson, this volume; World Health Organization, 2006). Negative construction of ‘fat’ bodies has long been commonplace (Harris et al., 1991; Shaw, 2005) and claims that ‘obesity’ is related to poor health are not new (Turner, 1987), but this high-profile construction of ‘obesity’ as an ‘epidemic’ and the concomitant promotion of weight-loss practices as national and

HIV positive men as fathers: Accounts of displacement, ir/responsibility and paternal emergence

It is now apparent that socio-cultural constructions of masculinity variously impact men’s experiences of their HIV positive status, yet how being a father can feature in this mix remains under-researched. This study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews and Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis to explore the accounts of six self-identifying heterosexual fathers (four Black African migrants, two White European) who had been living with HIV from 5 to 24 years. While the HIV-related literature calls for the need to subvert ‘traditional’ expressions of masculinity as a means of promoting HIV prevention and HIV health, we argue that the lived experience for HIV positive men as fathers is more socially, discursively and thus more psychologically nuanced. We illustrate this by highlighting ways in which HIV positive men as fathers are not simply making sense of themselves as a HIV positive man for whom the modern (new) man and father positions are useful strategies for adapting to HIV and combating associated stigma. Discourses of modern and patriarchal fatherhoods, a gender-specific discourse of irresponsibility and the neoliberal conflation of heath and self-responsibility are also at work in the sense-making frames that HIV positive men, who are also fathers, can variously deploy. Our analysis shows how this discursive mix can underpin possibilities of often conflicted meaning and identity when living as a man and father with HIV in the United Kingdom, and specifically how discourses of fatherhood and HIV ‘positive’ health can complicate these men’s expressions and inhabitations of masculinity.

The psychological architecture of the stable couple relationship

This article is a critical review of mainstream psychological theory on heteronormative “Western” coupledom from the 1930s, focusing on the ideological notion of stability as a foundation for successful romantic partnerships. Theorized qualities of couple stability and associated subjectivities are broadly discussed in relation to the psychologies of attachment, commitment, trust, intimacy, and monogamy. It is argued that these central facets of coupledom, as a microcosm of the sociopolitical realm, work to stabilize and regulate relationships according to static versions of wholeness and certainty. Promissory of an illusionary order that is devoid of perceived chaos, the stabilizations of couple relationships are critiqued as limiting transformative possibility. Aspects common to process philosophy and chaos theory are discussed as laying ontological ground for a relational system that is not structured by way of a misplaced foundational stability. Current research and theory around practices of open non-monogamy are addressed in regard to this.

Authenticity, validation and sexualisation on Grindr: an analysis of trans women’s accounts

ABSTRACT The socio-historic sexualisation of transgender identities is reported to have disaffirming consequences for the broad trans community, and for trans women in particular. Given trans people’s increasing use of socio-sexual ‘hook-up’ apps, this paper looks at trans women’s talk of self/other identifications in relation to their regular use of Grindr. Eight semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with London-based women who identified as trans* in some way. A Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis highlights intersecting frames of trans authenticity, validation and sexualisation. Within these frames, trans women can be variously positioned in gendered and sexualised ways. Specifically, a discourse of trans authenticity is seen to involve the marking out of an identificatory truth that is situated in culturally acceptable and hence de-sexualised womanhood, while a competing discourse of trans validation involves an ambiguity and eroticism that can serve to reimagine this truth. Trans subjectivities can thus consist of a desire for authentic (gendered and non-sexualised) selfhood, on the one hand, and self-affirming ambiguity and sexualisation on the other. That trans women can construct ambivalent relationships with trans-sexualisation discourse highlights the limitation of anti-sexualisation advocacy and implications for supporting trans sexualities are considered.