List of Titles

‘… a huge monster that should be feared and not done’: lessons learned in sexuality education classes in South Africa

- Shefer, Tamara, Kruger, Lou-Marie, Macleod, Catriona I, Baxen, Jean, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Shefer, Tamara , Kruger, Lou-Marie , Macleod, Catriona I , Baxen, Jean , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2015
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:6314 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020933 , http://www.mrc.ac.za/crime/aspj/2015/AhugeMonster.pdf
Description: Research has foregrounded the way in which heterosexual practices for many young people are not infrequently bound up with violence and unequal transactional power relations. The Life Orientation sexuality education curriculum in South African schools has been viewed as a potentially valuable space to work with young people on issues of reproductive health, gender and sexual norms and relations. Yet, research has illustrated that such work may not only be failing to impact on more equitable sexual practices between young men and women, but may also serve to reproduce the very discourses and practices that the work aims to challenge. Cultures of violence in youth sexuality are closely connected to prevailing gender norms and practices which, for example, render women as passive victims who are incapable of exercising sexual agency and men as inherently sexually predatory. This paper analyses the talk of Grade 10 learners in nine diverse schools in two South African provinces, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, to highlight what ‘lessons’ these young people seem to be learning about sexuality in Life Orientation classes. We find that these lessons foreground cautionary, negative and punitive messages, which reinforce, rather than challenge, normative gender roles. ‘Scare’ messages of danger, damage and disease give rise to presumptions of gendered responsibility for risk and the requirement of female restraint in the face of the assertion of masculine desire and predation. We conclude that the role which sexuality education could play in enabling young women in particular to more successfully negotiate their sexual relationships to serve their own needs, reproductive health and safety, is undermined by regulatory messages directed at controlling young people, and young women in particular – and that instead, young people’s sexual agency has to be acknowledged in any processes of change aimed at gender equality, anti-violence, health and well-being.
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Date Issued: 2015

National substantive agreement entered into between two parties, being: Essential Foods: Grains, a division of Pioneer Foods (Pty) Ltd and Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU)

- Pioneer Foods (Pty) Ltd, Essential Foods: Grains, Food and Allied Workers Union

Authors: Pioneer Foods (Pty) Ltd , Essential Foods: Grains , Food and Allied Workers Union
Date: 2014-09-11
Subjects: Essential Foods: Grains , Pioneer Foods (Pty) Ltd , Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU) , Collective bargaining -- South Africa , Wages -- South Africa
Language: English
Type: collective labor agreements , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/95833 , vital:31203 , Labour Research Service (LRS)
Description: National substantive agreement entered into between two parties, being: Essential Foods: Grains, a division of Pioneer Foods (Pty) Ltd and Food and Allied Workers Union (FAWU).
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Date Issued: 2014-09-11

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When veiled silences speak: reflexivity, trouble and repair as methodological tools for interpreting the unspoken in discourse-based data

- Morison, Tracy, Macleod, Catriona I

Authors: Morison, Tracy , Macleod, Catriona I
Date: 2013
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:6220 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006280 , http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794113488129
Description: Researchers who have attempted to make sense of silence in data have generally considered literal silences or such things as laughter. We consider the analysis of veiled silences where participants speak, but their speaking serves as ‘noise’ that ‘veils’, or masks, their inability or unwillingness to talk about a (potentially sensitive) topic. Extending Lisa Mazzei’s ‘problematic of silence’ by using our performativity-performance analytical method, we propose the purposeful use of ‘unusual conversational moves’, the deployment of researcher reflexivity, and the analysis of trouble and repair as methods to expose taken-for-granted normative frameworks in veiled silences. We illustrate the potential of these research practices through reference to our study on men’s involvement in reproductive decision-making, in which participants demonstrated an inability to engage with the topic. The veiled silence that this produced, together with what was said, pointed to the operation of procreative heteronormativity.
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Date Issued: 2013

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