Feminism & Psychology

The period before conception is increasingly claimed to be of critical importance for pregnancy and birth outcomes, prompting calls for public health advice and interventions to be targeted at women before rather than during pregnancy. Drawing on Foucault’s concepts of governmentality and technologies of the self, this article explores the implications of preconception health messages for women of reproductive age. Following a critical discursive analysis of 57 UK newspaper articles, three dominant representations of preconception health were identified: preconception health as optimizing fertility, as determining infant health, and as point of intervention. I suggest that these representations reflect neoliberal health agendas, positioning women as in control of and responsible for their fertility, the health of their future children, future generations, and of the wider population, all through careful self-policing of their lifestyles. In this way, “good” preconception health is emphasized as an increasingly important form of health citizenship. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the gendered nature of these expectations, with a disproportionate focus on the potential impact of women’s preconception health. Few challenges to these dominant messages were identified, and concerns are raised about the potential impacts on the autonomy and subjectivities of women of reproductive age, regardless of pregnancy intentions.

This paper explores the trend of stay-fit maternity in Taiwan and extends the feminist analysis of the yummy mummy under neoliberalism to a non-Western context. Drawing insight from Foucault’s critique of the theory of human capital and his emphasis on “psychic return,” it examines a process of continuous interaction between outer appearance and the inner world of these Taiwanese women during and after pregnancy. Thus, by using the perspective of the flux of psychic return in order to understand these women’s continuous aesthetic labour, I emphasize the importance of self-satisfaction as a determinant gain of the valorization of appearance in this process of maximizing self-appreciation and diminishing self-depreciation. I underline not only the importance of the functioning of an economy of affects which supports and overdetermines their beauty practices but also, in some circumstances, that the immaterial return in the quest for beauty takes priority over material earnings and the influences of social pressures. As well, my analysis finds complex and overlapping relations between self-satisfaction and neoliberal rationality such that self-appreciation constitutes the pleasure of embodying a recognized ideal of the maternal, the joy of overcoming undisciplined flesh, and the confidence-enhancement of being mistakenly seen as a young girl.

In everyday interaction, subtle manifestations of sexism often pass unacknowledged and become internalised and thus perceived as “natural” conduct. The introduction of new vocabularies for referring to previously unnamed sexist conduct would presumably enable individuals to start problematising hitherto unchallengeable sexism. In this paper, we investigate whether and how these vocabularies empower people to speak out against sexism. We focus on the use of the term “mansplaining” which, although coined over 10 years ago, remains controversial and contested. Using Conversation Analysis and Membership Categorisation Analysis, this paper excavates the interactional methods individuals use to formulate, in vivo, some prior spate of talk as mansplaining. In doing so, speakers necessarily reformulate a co-participant’s social action to highlight its sexist nature. Accusations of mansplaining are accomplished by invoking gender (and other) categories and their associated rights to knowledge. In reconstructing another’s conduct as mansplaining, speakers display their understanding of what mansplaining is (and could be) for the purpose at hand. Thus, the paper contributes to the well-established body of interactional research on manifestations of sexism by documenting how the normativity of epistemic rights is mobilised as a resource for bringing off accusations of mansplaining.

Despite growing scholarly interest in the identities and experiences of girls, little attention has been paid to the identities and experiences of rural girls, and in particular how girls’ subjectivities are discursively constituted in rural spaces. Using interviews and focus group discussions with girls and young women who attended a girls’ empowerment program, this paper draws on feminist poststructuralism and positioning theory to examine how rural gendered subjectivities are constructed and negotiated by girls and young women within the social, spatial, and discursive boundaries of a rural Canadian community. I examine how the girls and young women positioned themselves and were positioned by others as “small town girl” and “country girl” subjects, and how rural positionality was accomplished through invoking real and imagined notions of more urban “others.” It is through these contrasts to urban subjecthood that the variability of rural positionality is made visible. The findings of this study complicate and extend the dominant narrative of the urban-rural binary, and gendered identities and performances within rural spaces, by demonstrating the plurality of feminine rural subjectivity. This study offers new applications for the role of girls’ empowerment programs in shaping girls’ identities, experiences, and perspectives.

From policy to personal practice, injunctions to harness the positive effects of positive affects are pulsing through global emotion regimes. Scholarship tracing this phenomenon links the push for positivity – and other seemingly “entrepreneurial” affects – to neoliberal cultural formations. Within and beyond psychology, feminist analyses are highlighting the gendered address of these formations and their imbrication with contemporary femininities. While this raises important questions about the gendered implications of positivity imperatives, an absence of fine-grained empirical work means little is known regarding how positivity discourse is taken up and lived out. We draw from interviews with 24 women facing distinctive emotional management demands (influencers, mothers and service workers) to investigate how positivity inflects everyday living. Our analysis presents two affective–discursive repertoires that participants drew on to explain positivity: positivity as attractive relationality and positivity as agentic cognitive style. We also identified four figures who are central to positivity talk, and three affective–discursive practices linked to positivity: keeping emotions in check, virtuously declining negativity and triumphant positivity. We conclude that, while offering new and appealing feeling positions, positivity discourse may also reaffirm profoundly unequal patterns of emotional practice and regulation.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which affects 8 to 13% of reproductive-aged women, is a highly gendered disorder whose symptoms disrupt Western conceptions of femininity. This may be especially debilitating for young women, who are targeted by societal discourses governing how they “should” be. We interviewed 10 young Canadian women, aged 18 to 22, about how PCOS has influenced and/or conflated their conceptions of identity and (ab)normality within the current socio-cultural context. Using reflexive thematic analysis through a critical feminist lens, we present three themes: justifying abnormality, pathologizing the abnormal, and fear of failure in pregnancy. Young women described feeling “weird” and “not normal” as a result of their symptoms and expressed worries about their ability to adhere to gendered expectations. We argue that the blanketing of these desirable states as “normal” has pervasive implications for women’s lives and leaves them feeling defective and/or inadequate, which was further reinforced by implicit, gender-based power dynamics in medical institutions when women sought care. We suggest the need for engagement with discomfort and leveraging PCOS as a unique entryway into an analysis of intersectional issues to capture complexities in lived experience.