In recent years concerns have been raised about the increase in alcohol consumption amongst young women in the UK. This paper presents a qualitative study of the experiences and relationship young, middle-class, female students have with alcohol. Interviews with five friendship groups were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal the integral part alcohol plays in the young women's social lives and its importance in the staging of the young female self. Drinking can be seen as empowering and confidence boosting. However, the 'friendship' between femininity and alcohol is a contemptuous and fragile one. Loosing public self-control is seen as an invitation to unwanted sexual attention and even exploitation. The interviews not only illustrate the gendered and classed behavioural codes imposed on women, but also how the women have made these their own. We discuss how the young women's description of 'problem drinking' as being, for the most part, the preserve of men and so called 'chavvies', allows them to project an image of themselves as feminine and in control of their own drinking. We conclude that this could have implications for the extent to which they see the messages of public health campaigns about the dangers of 'binge' drinking as relating to them. y Philippa Morgan is not affiliated to an academic institution. This was the blib I wrote for her: Philippa Morgan is self employed and works in qualitative market research. She obtained an undergraduate degree in Psychology in 2006 from the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. The research this article is based on grew out of work that Philippa conducted in the final year of her degree.Extract 1: 'Yeah, I think it's the thing of like, people think, 'Oh! You're so funny when you're drunk.' and 'oh, he's always the life and soul of the party, he's always drunk.' and I suppose it also takes away the fear that people aren't going to find you fun to be around or something.'!
In this article the focus is on how the relation between the self and body is formulated in medical/healthcare discourses and how these affect the experiences of pregnant women. I draw on data collected during research on the self-image of young mothers, analyses of booklets and handouts distributed to pregnant women, and interviews conducted both on individual and group bases with young mothers. I argue that the normalizing tendencies identified in the booklets strip women of their agency. However, pregnant women do not always position themselves in terms of maternal normativities. Their accounts of pregnancy and childbirth both support and challenge the knowledge that underpins the practices of medical/healthcare institutions. Their position as agents matters a great deal for them and affects the extent to which they experience pregnancy and childbirth positively or negatively.
This study adopts a feminist critical approach to explore how parenting was understood during the COVID‐19 restrictive measures in Iceland. Iceland has been known as a front runner in gender equality, and women’s participation in the workforce is high. Data consists of 97 stories that were collected during the peak of COVID‐19 in April 2020 using the story completion method. The stories were thematically analysed. Most of the participants were university‐educated women. The themes demonstrate the power of neoliberal discourses in framing parenting. Parenting during a pandemic, especially mothering, is constructed as an overwhelming project that requires detailed organization and management. There is also resistance to neoliberal governmentality through redefining successful parenthood. Furthermore, the gendered nature of domestic work is questioned, especially the traditional, inactive father who prioritizes his own needs only to fail comically in the domestic sphere. The study contributes to our understanding of gendered parenthood in neoliberal, pandemic times.
This paper presents a feminist Foucauldian analysis of women’s interpretations of images of women in post-feminist advertising. Building on Ros Gill’s analysis of post-feminist advertising images of women, and more specifically the figure of ‘the midriff ’, the paper presents an analysis of focus group discussions with seven young women who were asked to discuss ‘midriff’ advertising images. Whilst participants sometimes construed these images positively as ‘sexy’ and independent, midriff figures were more frequently constituted negatively as ‘bimbos’ and/or ‘slutty’ ‘sex objects’ whose seeming independence was achieved through or limited only to attracting men. In interpreting midriff figures negatively, participants, we suggest, constituted the midriff as other; as different and distant from themselves and ‘normal’ women. Where occasionally participants interpreted images more favourably, the midriff figure was, in contrast, constituted as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ and as being about ‘what she likes, not what he likes’. Participants did not identify themselves or their arguments as feminist. Nevertheless, they articulated critiques of these images which often converged significantly with critical feminist analyses. Our analysis suggests, therefore, that young women read these images in complex ways. These complexities of interpretation, we argue, should be central in understanding the relationships between women, bodies and post-feminist images of women’s bodies.
This article contributes to recent research on young women’s emerging feminist movements or feminist counter-publics in the digital age. The focus is on the #freethenipple protests in Iceland in 2015 organised by young women and the ensuing debates in mainstream digital news media and popular ezines. A feminist, post-structuralist perspective is adopted to analyse the discursive context in which the debates and discussions about the protest are embedded, but we are also informed by recent theories about role of affect in triggering and sustaining political movements. The data corpus consists of 60 texts from the digital public domain published during and after the protests. The young women’s political movement is construed as a revolution centring on reclaiming the body from the oppressive structures of patriarchy which, through shame and pornification, have taken their bodies and their ability to choose, in a post-feminist context, from them. Public representations of the protest are mostly supportive and many older feminists are affectively pulled by the young women’s rhetoric about how patriarchy has blighted their lives. We argue that the young women manage to claim space as agents of change but highlight the importance of the support or affective sustenance they received from older feminists.
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