Voluntary childlessness (VC) is a growing phenomenon in the 21st Century in western societies with the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in 2013 showing that one-fifth of women are childless at the age of 45. Sociological literature highlights how VC is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon and is often difficult to define. However, since its inception, psychoanalysis has made an inextricable link between femininity and motherhood thus psychoanalytic theory views motherhood as normative and it is often seen as a developmental stage. This thesis explores how psychoanalytic practitioners understand, conceptualise and respond to VC in the clinical setting. Four psychoanalytical practitioners were interviewed and three main themes arose as a result of the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of the data collected. The first finding highlighted the biopsychosocial pressures that the participants felt their patients experienced. Some participants spoke of the professional pressure they experienced from within the psychoanalytic field as a result of the theory that links motherhood and femininity. The second finding highlighted the ethical dilemmas faced by some patients with regards to whether to become a mother, such as a VC choice might be the result of difficult childhoods, immaturity, or because their mental health issues precluded them from motherhood or they feared motherhood might induce mental illness. The final finding highlighted that working with childless patients was both complex and conflictual. The practitioners discussed both their personal professional responses to childlessness in general. This research is important for highlighting how psychoanalytical practitioners are influenced by the competing discourses in society surrounding motherhood. Finally, the thesis critically evaluates the research, makes suggestions for future enquiries and reflects on the clinical implications of the findings.

The social scientific debate over consumption is of increasing concern to commentators addressing the cultural implications of socio-economic change. All too often, however, the individual meanings that consumers have for the goods they consume have been neglected by these commentators, notably in favour of abstract discussions of the role of consumption in the emergence of a 'postmodern' culture. Arguing that consumption provides the sociologist with an invaluable means of addressing questions concerning the relationship between structure and agency, this thesis attempts to move beyond the limited conception of a fragmented self, picking and choosing his or her identity from the menu of life, to begin to establish an empirical grounding for the relationship between consumption and identity amongst young people. Data were collected from a triangulated three-stage research process, in the form of a series of focus group interviews, informed by Personal Construct Psychology, a participant observation study in a sports shop, and a Consumer Meanings Questionnaire. Arguing that young people's identities are largely constructed in peer group settings, the evidence presented suggests that consumption provides an everyday cultural framework, within which young consumers negotiate some semblance of everyday stability in a 'risk' society. In this sense, young people appear to pursue a dual task. First, they are intent upon forming group-based identities. Second, they attempt to construct a sense of individuality in this context. Hence, it is argued that whilst young people choose consumer goods according to peer group meanings, they tend to see their own choices as 'individual' and those of their peers as being determined by media and marketing-created desires. As such, whilst it would be misleading to see young people as dupes of the capitalist system, neither are they free agents. Teenagers construct their identities partially through the framework that consumption provides, but not with products of their own choosing. Far from being whimsical consumers in this context, I argue that essentially, young people are modernists, adapting to the rational constraints upon their everyday lives and changing the character of their consumption patterns accordingly. The situated realities of so-called postmodern forms of consumption can therefore only be understood, it is argued, through innovative triangulated research methods which address consumer meanings in routine everyday settings and which, in turn, consider the theoretical implications of such meanings, for both an understanding of the ideological impact of consumerism and it's relationship to debates concerning structure and agency.

Countries around the world provide various forms of legal recognition for same-sex relationships. In the UK, legal recognition for same-sex relationships first became available in 2005 with the introduction of civil partnership (CP) which remained the only option until 2014 when same-sex civil marriage legislation was passed in England, Wales and Scotland. In a context of heated debate and speculation, this thesis contributes to emerging literature on individual’s experiences of legal forms of same-sex relationship recognition by exploring how CP is experienced, given meaning, and situated biographically. The thesis draws on personal narratives elicited through qualitative life story interviews with 28 men from across the UK. Interviews covered the life course, but were thematically focused around CP to provide insight into: motivations for entering CPs; experiences of planning, constructing, and participating in CP ceremonies and celebrations; and meanings and impacts of becoming and being civilly partnered. The resulting co-constructed narratives were systematically analysed using narrative methods. Minority stress theory, along with other relevant theories and concepts, were employed to further illuminate, analyse, and interpret participants’ narratives. Two generational core-narratives were identified in participants’ biographical accounts. Older participants told stories of struggle and resilience, and younger participants told new narratives of normality. Despite some generational differences, all participants reported experiences consistent with minority stress, including coping and resilience mechanisms, arising from their gay social identities which remain subject to residual stigma. Participants’ accounts of CP revealed that becoming and being civilly partnered was largely, but not wholly, a positive experience which can be understood in terms of the overarching, and overlapping themes of citizenship, normativity and well-being. With regard to citizenship, participants welcomed the legal rights and recognition of CP which was seen to offer varying forms and degrees of equality. In terms of normativity, some participants reported that CP confirmed their perceived normality while others thought it was a normalizing process granting them normative identities. Furthermore, while some engaged in, or were compelled to engage in, arguably normative marital practices, others felt they were resisting these. Regarding well-being, becoming and being civilly partnered seemed to mitigate minority stress and contribute to well-being. Overall, the knowledge generated from the personal narratives presented in this thesis enriches debates, contributes broadly to the social sciences literature, and provides new perspectives on, and representations of, gay men’s identities, lives, and relationships.

This thesis interrogates what a whole family approach is in Welsh policy and practice utilising an Integrated Family Support Team (IFST) as the case study. The study examines the construction of ‘family’ in policy, practice and by parents themselves and the impact of gender on practitioner and parental normative constructions of mothering and fathering as care practices. Both the UK and Welsh governments locate their use of a whole family approach within a social exclusion framework that views strong familial bonds as the source of sustainable social capital. Documentary analysis is used to examine the policy construction of a whole family approach and of the target families themselves, as this has implications for the application of a whole family approach in practice and the type and nature of family engagement. To date there has been very limited articulation of the therapeutic process entailed in a whole family approach. Through the use of practitioner interviews this thesis addresses that gap in research. It is imperative to gain an understanding of how practitioners conceptualise and engage with families within a whole family approach as this determines which individuals are included and excluded. This is a particularly pertinent issue given the well-rehearsed arguments regarding mother-blaming and lack of father inclusion within child protection practice. Parental perspectives on the construction of ‘family’, and aspirations for both family life and their own mothering and fathering practices, are explored via analysis of parental accounts and values card-sort statements as recorded (and thereby mediated) by IFST practitioners. The findings from this analysis are that there is a considerable degree of constructive conceptual alignment between policy, practice and parental perspectives on the construction of family, and the gendering of parenting as care practices.

‘Honour’-based violence (HBV) is defined as a form of crime, predominantly against women, committed by the agnates of the victim, often in collaboration, which are justified by the victims’ perceived violation of social norms, particularly those around sexuality and gender roles. While HBV is often considered as a cultural phenomenon, I argue that the cross-cultural distribution of crimes fitting this definition prohibits a purely cultural explanation. I advance an alternate explanation for HBV through a deployment of the cultural materialist strategy and the anthropological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Claude Lévi-Strauss (as interpreted by Gayle Rubin) and Eric Wolf. I argue that HBV is an epiphenomenon of the ‘exchange of women’ model of marriage transactions occurring within the patrilinear kinship structures typical of Central Eurasia, and that this is particularly marked amongst peoples with a history of agrarian and pastoral modes of production, in which kinship underwrites relations of resource and labour sharing. Within these scenarios, marriage is an aspect of the political economy of the group, since it extends or consolidates kinship networks. In post-agrarian neopatrimonial states, kinship relations remain salient to social status through nepotism and the intensification of subgroup identification. I argue that women’s embodiment of the standards of marriageability — their ‘honour’ — within their communities is a form of symbolic capital which inflects the status of their families, and their ability to participate in strategic marital exchanges. This theory is investigated through an extensive and historicised survey of kinship and marriage in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and through original survey data on marriage forms and attitudes and experiences of HBV in the region, suggesting that HBV and understandings of gender, marriage and kinship are intrinsically linked. Thus, this thesis argues that while HBV may appear to be enculturated, its aetiology may be material in nature. Efforts to reduce HBV in the Middle East should encompass reform of personal status laws which posit the patrilinear, patricentric family as the ideal model, and that campaigns to reduce forced and child marriage should be considered as part of the process to reduce HBV.

The 1960's and the 1970's were decades of extraordinarily rapid change in South Korea. The military coup that took place in May, 1961 presaged eighteen years of increasingly harsh and oppressive authoritarian rule under the leadership of Park Chung-hee, during which time South Korea shed its centuries old dependency upon rural agrarianism and emerged as one of the world's premier industrial economies. At the forefront of this advance was the textile and garment industry; a manufacturing complex characterised by a myriad of sweat-shop factories in which the overwhelming majority of employees were girls and young women. Working conditions in these establishments were of a universally low standard, and all notions of workers' rights and dignities were sacrificed for the government-sponsored imperative to maximise exports and minimise costs. To facilitate this circumstance, the Park Chung-hee regime constructed a nation-wide trade union organisation that was, in effect, nothing more than an agent of the state: unrepresentative of, and unresponsive to, the interests of workers in all industries. With little, or no, support from male co-workers, and despite their political naivety and the traditionally subordinate status of Korean females, the women textile and garment workers confronted the state, the employers, and their 'official' trade union representatives, and succeeded in forming the nucleus of a fully democratic labour organisation. The enterprise-level democratic trade unions thus formed were not isolated or transient phenomena but included educational and vocational 'outreach' programmes of mutual support, the purposes of which were to enhance individual awareness and extend the concepts of solidarity and collectivity throughout the industrial sector. One of the purposes of this dissertation is to make visible the hidden history of these women. Writers and commentators on South Korean industrial relations share a common disregard for the achievements of the women activists of the 1970's and, instead, locate elsewhere the birth of democratic trade unionism. This study takes advantage of unique access to the life histories and personal records of many individuals, both male and female, who were actively involved in the events of the period. It presents a narrative of the lives and the attainments of women workers whose struggles have gone largely unrecorded, and whose outstanding accomplishments have, until now, remained uncelebrated.

This thesis is based on a mixed methods study with a sequential exploratory design, and is about the fertility preferences of women living in rural South Africa. The quantitative secondary analysis utilises the South African Demographic and Health Surveys of 1998 and 2003, and the qualitative ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in a rural area of KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, in 2011 and 2012. The fieldwork included ethnographic field notes and maps generated through participatory mapping exercises, 63 semi-structured interviews with women of different generations and 6 key informant interviews. The thesis examines women’s landscapes of fertility and focuses on intergenerational understandings of fertility preferences, migration and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The thesis identified that women’s landscapes of fertility are subject to change over time and differ between women of different generations. Older women’s landscapes of fertility are influenced by understandings of the importance of continuity of family whilst those of younger women are synonymous with their experiences of increasing autonomy and agency, caused by escalating modernity. For younger women, migration was a key issue within their landscapes of fertility and their migration later affected their mothers who became migratory followers of their daughters. This is a reversal of typical paradigms of migration, as it identifies that women from different generations can be migratory followers or leaders. It was found that HIV influenced women’s landscapes of fertility due in part to the South African, changing socio-political responses to the disease. The thesis contributes to geographical and anthropological understandings about change in women’s fertility preferences over time in the context of societal change. The thesis also identifies the value of ethnographically informed understandings of fertility preferences as a key indicator of demographic change and population shifts.

This thesis considers how sexual and romantic relationships between academic faculty and students in higher education are governed. Using analytic techniques drawn from Foucault and discursive psychology to interpret a corpus of texts, which includes policy documents, interview transcripts, fictional accounts, newspaper articles, and computer mediated discourse, I explore how five discourses are mobilized to frame faculty student relationships. I find that harassment discourse, which emerges as the dominant frame of reference in scholarly accounts, is taken up less readily in the accounts studied here. Rather, discourses foregrounding four alternative, but often imbricated, themes are more extensively mobilized: infantilization; religiosity; health, safety, and hygiene; and professionalism. These discourses reinforce elements of the truth claims propounded by harassment discourses; notably, their gendered and heterosexist assumptions, and their insertion of a gap between academic and student, albeit one configured along subtly different lines. However, they also challenge them, positing alternative claims to truth, recasting the subject positions of academic and student, and re-orienting relations between the two. For example, infantilization discourses construct faculty-student relationships as a horrific relation between adult or parent and child which must be monitored, whereas religious discourses construct a pastor-flock relation, articulating relationships as a temptation to be resisted or atoned for. The thesis offers contributions to research on faculty-student relationships per se, and is also understood as opening up analysis of organizational sexuality and the university more generally by arguing for the usefulness of a government approach to these phenomena.

In existing scholarship of twentieth-century British lesbian history the post-war period has been largely overlooked. Whereas the interwar period and the 1970s and 1980s have garnered much critical interest as crucial loci of lesbian identity formation, the post-war period has been obscured between the two. What work does exist has focused almost exclusively on the creation of lesbian public spaces and lesbian communities. This has been to the exclusion of research into lesbian home and private life, and has also served to obscure experiences of closeted or isolated women. The critical focus on the interwar period in particular has also been facilitated and corroborated by lesbian literary studies, which has used the modernist movement as the backbone for the creation of a lesbian literary canon. This has been to the obscuration of lesbian literature of the post-war period. Furthermore, this academic bias has overlooked the significance of the cultural value of such literature by failing to acknowledge or investigate what lesbians in post-war Britain were actually reading. This thesis positions itself at the intersection of these research gaps. Employing an interdisciplinary approach this project argues for the greater inclusion of post-war literature and post-war lesbian lives in scholarly investigation. Through close textual analysis of a range of post-war lesbian literature and oral history interviews conducted by the author, this thesis presents insights into the minutiae of lesbian life and into the roots of lesbian identity formation within this period. To situate itself within existing historiography this thesis takes as its starting point the lesbian magazine, Arena Three (1964-71), undertaking an analysis of the magazine’s book review column in order to build a picture of the post-war lesbian reader. Following on from this, close textual analyses of lesbian pulp fiction and original oral history transcripts are used to assess representations of domesticity. Specifically the concepts of hetero-domesticity and homo-domesticity are developed and employed to investigate lesbian identities as they existed within both heterosexual and same-sex relationships. Graham Dawson’s oral history theory of ‘composure’ is used to examine how lesbian narrators are successful or unsuccessful in incorporating experiences of hetero-domesticity into wider lesbian narratives. This framework is similarly employed to investigate the ways in which homo-domestic experiences can assist lesbian narrators to achieve composure. Lastly oral history reminiscences of reading in the post-war period are analysed in order to assess the role that literature played, both in lesbian identity formation and in facilitating narrators’ journeys into wider lesbian social worlds.

This research is premised on the investigation of Muslim women working in the Iranian Radio and Television Organisation (IRIB). The study is structured on a number of principal questions: why these women joined IRIB and how they managed the reactions of sceptical family members; how they construct the meaning of womanhood in relation to work, family and motherhood; what challenges these women encounter in the workplace; and how they negotiate and persevere to overcome those challenges, achieve success and make changes in a male-dominated organisation. The main focus is on the post-1979 Islamic revolution, when many practicing Muslim women, who were largely excluded from the film and media industries before the Revolution, began working in radio and television. Modern media that were considered instruments of ‘westernisation’ and ‘decadence’ before the Revolution were re-legitimised by religious authorities and even elevated to the status of ‘public universities’. Many Muslim women, therefore, entered this male dominated ‘forbidden space’ that had a largely secular and liberal work culture before the Revolution. Through 30 semi-structured interviews with these women, this research examines gender relations within the workspace, family domain and in the public arena. The research manifests complex dynamics of gender relations in the context of Iran and in the IRIB organisation. It argues that gender is a relational concept; and an area of constant negotiation and contest. In particular, the study demonstrates that gender relations are defined in negotiation with religious beliefs, traditional norms and political ideologies. They are also reinforced in the family and embedded in the culture of organisation. Overall, it is concluded that after the Islamic revolution, Muslim women found new opportunities to enter spaces in the public domain that were previously considered as being ‘inappropriate’ for women. Despite confronting many challenges in this respect, they have exercised their agency and achieved considerable success in changing traditional and prejudiced attitudes within structures that are underpinned by Islamic gender ideology. In doing so, they have also constructed a new identity of Muslim women that goes beyond simplistic stereotypical dichotomies such as liberated/oppressed, western/eastern, and secular/Muslim.