26:T4fa,

Since the 1970s, feminist research has provided a powerful critique of biomedical models of childbirth. While this critique has been extremely important, it has to some extent led to the neglect of other forms of power. For example, there has been little research which has explored childbirth as a way of ‘doing gender’ in which normative or resistant forms of gender and femininity are (re)performed. Drawing on the Foucauldian notion of ‘technologies of power’, we argue that gender is a form of disciplinary power which shapes the choices that women make in relation to childbirth. Drawing on pre-birth interviews with 21 white, middle-class pregnant South African women who were planning on either a home birth (n = 12) or an elective caesarean section (n = 9), we show how three central technologies of white femininity shaped and regulated women’s childbirth choices. These included: a patriarchal optics of childbirth, the ‘natural childbirth’ ideal and the ‘good mother’ imperative. The article concludes that women’s childbirth choices are heavily shaped by gendered technologies of power and that the decision to have a home birth or an elective caesarean section intersects with scripts of ‘doing white femininity’ in South Africa.

27:T471,

Recent feminist and sociological scholarship has problematised the underlying medical assumptions in the established literature on infant feeding by attending to the social and discursive construction of breastfeeding practice. Such work has suggested that the pervasive cultural discourse around breastfeeding as the ‘morally correct’ choice has implications for actual decisions and practices as well as subjective judgements and feelings, particularly those of guilt and inadequacy. The present study employs a discursive approach to analyse the ways in which childcare materials published since 2000 construct the issue of infant feeding. In particular, we focus upon the ways in which these materials attend to the possible implications of pro-breastfeeding discourses for mothers’ subjective experience of guilt. We highlight a focus within the materials on not ‘feeling’ guilty, as opposed to affirmations that formula feeding mothers are not guilty. The complex and potentially problematic nature of such public health messages in terms of gendered subjectivities is considered.

28:T50f,

This paper analyses online texts concerning the supposed ‘rules’ and ‘etiquette’ of heterosexual casual sex, exploring how ‘ideal’ casual sex was constructed – as object and practice. We examine how casual sex was constituted by authors who positioned themselves as knowledgeable and/or expert in relation to casual sex and demonstrate the discourses that their accounts drew on in constructing archetypal casual sex. Our analysis is situated within feminist/critical theorising and debates regarding the institution of heterosexuality and, in particular, construction of monogamy as ‘ideal’ when it comes to heterosexual relationships. We argue that casual sex was constituted as not a natural act through the specific instructions of how to ‘do casual sex right’. We outline the construction of an attraction imperative in relation to casual sex, its hierarchies of respectability, and address what an analysis about casual sex tells us about contemporary heterosexuality. This paper demonstrates that although casual sex could possibly offer an alternative to the currently pervasive mononormativity, it fails to provide this in accounts of ‘ideal’ casual sex as relayed in the public arena.

29:T47b,

This study examines how dominant societal discourses of menstruation are appropriated, rejected, or interpreted as adolescent girls make meaning of their menarche. Thirteen women ages 18–21 participated in flexible in-depth interviews to retrospectively recount their menarcheal experience. A variation of the Reading Guide was used for primary data ana