Sandra L. Faulkner

Reconciling Messages: The Process of Sexual Talk for Latinas

Young Latinas’experiences and meanings of sexuality were explored through 31 interviews, with grounded theory used to provide theoretical understanding of sexual talk. The women’s level of comfort with sexual talk and their explicitness influenced the kind of sexual talk they engaged in with partners. The analysis of being in a romantic relationship revealed similar descriptions of processes within the accounts that led to the discovery of the core variable reconciling messages. This describes the Latinas’ process of accepting messages that fit their value system, rejecting messages that they feel misrepresent their beliefs, and altering messages to accept their own sexuality. The findings expand Communication Boundary Management theory and have implications for interventions aimed at assisting women with safer sex topics.

The negotiation of closetable identities: A narrative analysis of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered queer Jewish identity:

We focused on the closetable identities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered queer (LGBTQ) Jewish Americans through the use of identity narratives. Thirty-one people participated in narrative interviews about their identity negotiation decisions. The Communication Theory of Identity framed the inquiry by showing how the interpenetrations of identity layers and critical elements created changes and conflict in participants’ lives that necessitated negotiating their LGBTQ Jewish identity. Analyses revealed conflicts related to self-perception, experiences, perceptions of others, and enactments of being LGBTQ and Jewish, many of which revolved around issues of alienation. The potential for identity gaps to emerge and produce largely negative outcomes was ever present in their lives as they sought supportive communities for one or both identity elements. This study has implications for individual and community support of multiple and stigmatized identities.

Examining the Content and Outcomes of Young Adults’ Satisfying and Unsatisfying Conversations About Sex

In this study, we examined young adults’ conversational descriptions of satisfying and unsatisfying sexual conversations with a romantic partner and the relational and sexual outcomes. We coded participants’ responses for content, when and where conversations occurred, and the results of conversations. Most often, conversations occurred in residences at the beginning of relationships and addressed sexual pleasure, relationship issues, sexual health, past sexual experience, attitudes/values, and sexual decision making. The results of conversations included relational consequences such as distrust, anger, understanding, and being afraid to talk to a partner, as well as sexual outcomes such as better sex, condom use, and better sex talk. The findings suggest that the costs and rewards of young adults’ sexual disclosure have implications for the effectiveness of sexual communication.

Bad Mom(my) Litany: Spanking Cultural Myths of Middle-Class Motherhood

Through personal narrative, the author shows the experience of new motherhood by juxtaposing a social science relationship researcher role with middle-class cultural expectations of mothers. Autoethnographic scenes of the exhaustion of juggling expanding roles and cultural advice about what being a good mommy means with anxiety about being a bad mother help the author question (spank) entrenched mommy myths. The author uses poetic inquiry and personal narrative as forms to acknowledge, examine, and potentially alter the complex reality that although a mom might like and love her child, she might be anxious and abhor the prescribed role of being mommy.

That Baby Will Cost You: An Intended Ambivalent Pregnancy

This personal narrative highlights an intended ambivalent pregnancy, speaking to Sotirin’s call for radical specificity in mother-writing. The author began writing in a creative nonfiction workshop from memory fragments, diary entries, interviews, and scholarly research recognizing the story contained secrets, omissions, places she can’t remember, and places that are still in shadow that ethically need to stay closed. The use of creative nonfiction frames the story as a series of marginalized discourses from a relational dialectics perspective, in particular ambivalence (vs. certainty), bodily knowledge (vs. medicalization, vs. middle-class pregnancy), and flux (vs. cost–benefit ratios). The problem is that these marginalized discourses are not well represented in the totalizing picture of the pregnant lady. The story works as a performance text to transform totalizing oppressive discourse into a restructured aesthetic moment.

TEN (The Promise of Arts-Based, Ethnographic, and Narrative Research in Critical Family Communication Research and Praxis)

ABSTRACT The author presents a personal narrative on marriage and poetic inquiry to show how arts-based research (ABR), ethnographic, and narrative research methods can realize the potential of critical work to critique, expand, and alter dominant discourse that circumscribes family communication research and praxis. Faulkner uses the personal narrative, TEN, to show how critical family communication research can be done and make an argument for ABR in ethnographic and narrative forms as useful for studying identity, subjugated perspectives, and difficult experiences not easily talked about.

Method: Six Poems

These six poems re-present, query, and interpret the research process/method in a narrative study on Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer (LGBTQ) Jewish identity by showing the research story. They demonstrate my research/personal perspective, the integration of the scientist and the poet, and participants’ perspectives before, during, and after the “formal” interview periods. These poems highlight the difficulties of identity in the field, conducting interviews, and being reflexive and conscious as well as the joy and confusion in connecting to those we study.

Sociocultural factors and breast cancer in sub-Saharan Africa: implications for diagnosis and management

The incidence of breast cancer is on the rise in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and efforts at early diagnosis have not been very successful because the public has scant knowledge about the disease, a large percentage of breast cancer cases are diagnosed late and mainly rural SSA womens practice of breast self-examination is poor. In this paper, we argue that an examination of the social and cultural contexts of SSA that influence breast cancer diagnosis and management in the region is needed. We discuss the implications of sociocultural factors, such as gender roles and spirituality, on breast cancer diagnosis and management in SSA.

Feminist Identity in Romantic Relationships: A Relational Dialectics Analysis of E-Mail Discourse as Collaborative Found Poetry

The authors used relational dialectics theory (RDT 2.0) to frame a collaborative autoethnography based on a year of their e-mail exchanges to show how romantic dyads use discourse to conceptualize themselves and their relationships. They used collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a method to connect feminist inquiry with a critique of traditional interpersonal communication research. The use of found poetry/poetic transcription illustrates the antagonistic discourses of (a) intellect versus embodiment, (b) real-life work versus other worlds, (c) balance versus giving everything, and (d) past relationships versus the present. The RDT analysis demonstrated a conflict between feminist ethics, individual identities, and romantic narratives that contributed to a conflicted relational culture. This autoethnography suggests the utility of this type of text for RDT and the examination of discursive struggles of identity and intimacy crafted jointly in relational discourse.

Form and Structure

Whether your desire to write about personal experience connects to a reason you can point to or not, you will have to ask yourself some questions before you begin: How will you shape this experience in language so that a reader can connect with it? What scaffolding will you build to support it? How can you arrange your information to leave the correct impression, make the biggest impact? These are questions of form and structure.