This thesis explores the phenomenology of women’s experiences and perceptions in the first 18-24 months after childbirth. Close engagement with participants’ narratives enables women’s voices to be heard in the sometimes conflicting discourses about motherhood while identified issues in postnatal care issues are examined. Healthcare policy identifies the need for service improvement and reconfiguration of service delivery is well documented. However, a paucity of empirical knowledge remains with little explanatory theory, from women’s perspectives, about new mothers’ experiences during this period. Becoming a mother engenders a perceptual shift, or psychological re-negotiation, with being-in-the-world. Greater understanding of these issues is therefore central to inform effective service provision. Women’s perceptions of their care and their narratives about their individual perspectives, experiences and feelings following childbirth are explored. A case-study research approach provides rich data from in-depth interviews analysed using phenomenology (IPA). The study, conducted in parallel with an RCT, offers evidence of how participants (N = 12) discuss their engagement with the world. The phenomenological examination of mothers’ lived-world experiences, their life-world, provides a wealth of data. Responses are equivocal, highlighting the importance of being determined when seeking care at a time when mothers felt vulnerable. Participants report coping with events by drawing on their experiences and knowledge acquired caring for their families. Mothers identify how professionals need to develop greater awareness of the importance of enhancing listening skills in order to help women effectively. Themes of vulnerability, disempowerment and doubts about their abilities emphasise participants’ need for compassion, kindness and understanding. Support during delivery and positive postnatal experiences can lead to improved physical and emotional health; lack of support can impact on physical and psychological morbidity. The thesis highlights how postnatal care remains a Cinderella story. Greater awareness of such issues is emphasised to deliver quality postnatal care that is timely and non-threatening to avoid women feeling disempowered and belittled.

Sexual health matters! This motif underpins the entire thesis. With survey responses from university educators and focus group encounters with clinical professionals undertaking the UK-wide Sexual Health Skills course, the study explores ways in which specific discourses pertaining to sexual health and illness inform the need for, and provision of, professional education for nurses in England. Through using a Foucauldian ‘lens’ and a novel process called crystallisation in sexualities and gender epistemologies (S&GE), it was possible to shed new light on some old problems hindering nurse education. The methodologies facilitated a discursive engagement between the power / knowledge of sexual health sciences (scientia sexualis), the orthodox ‘regimes of truth’, and various silenced voices. The silenced voices pertain to wider, socially and clinically ‘invisibilised’, needs of clients or patients in relation to the provision of nurse education. Set against the backdrop of England's first ever Government strategies on teenage pregnancy, sexual health and HIV, statistics on narrow definitions of sexual ill-health are still considered the worst in western Europe. Nurses acknowledge these poor facts, and witness to additional neglect related to sexual well-being in the wider, holistic, domains of a person's life, health and relationships. Respondents recount a lack of formal sexual health education in pre- and post qualifying curricula, including incidents of critical, experiential, ‘on the job’, learning which are capped and thwarted by clinical and educational staff who are unable and / or unwilling to explore the full learning potential through reflection and analysis of practice. Respondents acknowledge how their professional education frequently ill-equips them to deal with requirements in practice as well as newer, public health, demands on their roles to increase preventative education and effective health promotion. This thesis gives them a voice in expressing such concerns. The outcome of this work has led to the conceptualisation of a model of ‘learning for life’ across a curricular triptych for professional education which supports client care. Panels of this triptych relate to the foundational or holistic dimensions of sexual health matters; ancillary aspects secondary to other health conditions, and finally, the specifics, those formally defined in epidemiology and strategies of sexual ill-health and associated stigmas. Whether someone qualified twenty-five years ago or within the last three months, the quality and quantity of formal sexual health learning across the curricular triptych model remains negligible and incommensurate with clinical demands on professional nursing care.

This is a study of teachers’ and pupils’ perceptions regarding sex education in two countries, Taiwan and England. It is a mixed method comparative study of four schools, two in each country. Interviews, focus groups and surveys were undertaken in these schools during the 2007/08 academic year. There were approximately 2100 participants - all year eight pupils (aged between 12 and 14) and volunteering teachers/coordinators. It was found that sex education was taught within all four participating schools and was consistently recognised as a valuable part of the curriculum. Two distinct approaches to sex education were found in the two countries. Perceptions of sex education were consistent across both schools in Taiwan and a key reason for this was that sex education had developed through a top-down policy. There was more variation between the two schools in England reflecting more flexible policies. The strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches are discussed along with the influence of stakeholders such as policy makers and governors/ coordinators. Biographic factors such as age and gender are also explored. The two phenomena (consistent and variable sex education) uncovered in this study are further explored within a descriptive model.

This thesis explores gendered work and women‟s empowerment in interactive service work in Nepal, focusing on two five-star hotels, two deluxe resorts and two casinos. It develops a conceptual framework to explore how gendered work and women‟s empowerment are related, paying attention to the interactional and structural levels. This feminist research uses mixed methods of 21 questionnaires to gather quantitative data that shed light on the gendered workforce. Qualitative data is derived from 65 interviews (semi-structured and in-depth) with male and female workers, managers, male family members and policy experts, two focus group discussions with women working in two casinos and observations in the six sample establishments. The study makes three arguments. First, gendered work is constructed by three distinct but related dimensions, namely: the gender division of labour; the gendered ideologies of managers and workers; and the gendering of skills provided through training. Second, workers, to a variable extent, perform gendered emotional, aesthetic and (hetero) sexualised labour and such performances shape and are shaped by gendered work. Third, women‟s paid work empowers them to some extent at an individual level; however, structural constraints continue to impede their empowerment. The thesis makes theoretical as well as empirical contributions to existing knowledge. Theoretically, it contributes to understanding of the relationship between gendered work and empowerment in which structural context is of critical significance. At the empirical level, this makes an original contribution to the analysis of interactive service work in Nepal. The thesis finds that women doing gendered work are to some extent empowered at the individual level and perhaps „doing‟ gender per se is not a problem. However, structural constraints continue to impede women‟s empowerment, despite some gradual changes. The thesis also finds that the hotel and casino sector are not feminised in contrast to studies conducted in the „West‟.

This thesis studies how financial incentives affect women's fertility timing decisions. Each chapter investigates this question by looking at a policy that exogenously increased fertility related financial incentives. The timing impacts of these policies are estimated using a discrete-time proportional hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity. In the first chapter, the impact of the 1999 UK Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) on the timing of birth is studied. This paper employs the 1991-2003 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and identifies the policy impact of WFTC by observing the change in the timing of birth using a difference in differences estimator. The main finding of this paper suggests little evidence of changes in the timing of all birth parity apart from first birth. Such a finding is likely to be explained by the policy design of WFTC that increased not only the fertility but also the labour supply incentives simultaneously. Moreover, a further analysis highlights the importance of other policies, which also in uenced women's labour supply during the period of study. The second chapter, on the other hand, studies the impact of the 1977-2001 US infertility health insurance mandates, which regulated the insurance companies to cover for infertility treatment cost. Although the majority of the past literature has studied impacts on older women who are likely to seek treatment, this paper proposes that the mandates may have had a wider impact on the US population. Specifically, it may have given an option for younger women to delay birth since these policies reduced the opportunity cost of having a child in the future. The chapter employs the 1980-2001 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Results suggest a significant delay of 1-2 years in the time of first birth among highly educated white women.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Home Education in England and Wales is growing in popularity. Despite this apparent growth, there is currently little research into home education in the UK from a sociological perspective. Based on data collected in an in-depth qualitative study of home educating groups and families during 2007, this thesis examines the motivations, practices and experiences of home educating parents. Despite the 'alternative' image of home education, constructions of parenthood within home education are highly gendered, with mothers and fathers tending to take on traditional gender roles. Mothers therefore perform the majority of the intense physical and emotional labour of home education. Home education expands the motherhood role beyond that predominantly found in contemporary society (providing fulfilment for many mothers), while simultaneously reinforcing normative images of motherhood. Where fathers are involved in the day-to-day process of home education this tends to be in a secondary role with mothers maintaining a significant role in the home education process. Home education is therefore a meeting point for mothers' constructions of childhood, motherhood and education. These constructions can be split into three 'types': 'Natural', 'Social' and 'Last Resort'. The interrelation of motherhood, childhood and education within home education and their co-location within the family means that notions of pedagogy and education become an extension of the socialisation process focussed on the individual child rather than education being seen as a separate process. Home education is therefore a project of motherhood which focusses on family and self and relies on the maintenance of a balance between personal labour and fulfilment.

Literary representations of female philanthropy challenge the separate spheres dichotomy that we continue to associate with nineteenth-century literature and society, as the work of the philanthropic heroine instead depicts a diversity of social spaces located between the family home and the worlds of commerce and politics. These social spaces – one of the most important being the parish – are represented as highly receptive to the influence of middle- and upper-class women by the writers of my study, thereby demonstrating how female authors could formulate the geography of their fictions to support their participation in contemporary social debate. In this thesis I use the term ‘parochial spheres’ to describe these spaces, which include the landed estate, the village and the military regiment. My emphasis on parochial spheres calls attention to the gentlewoman’s relationships with rural and provincial environments. I use the concept of ‘borderline’ female citizenship to think about these relationships, as it indicates the potential power of the philanthropic heroine in her community, as well as the likelihood of power contests between the female philanthropist and her male contemporaries. The writers of my thesis are mainly drawn from the Victorian period. However, I also examine works by Hannah More, and the image of the philanthropist across the period. More is crucial to the representation of female philanthropy, as female authors interact with a tradition of conservative reform popularised by the Evangelical polymath at the beginning of the period. Embedded within this tradition is the narrative of maternalism, which enables women writers to depict their heroines as the protective conservers of the social order, but also as the generators of new, feminised solutions to public questions of reform. These fluctuations between conservation and reform reveal the significance of the parochial sphere to women’s writing during the Victorian period.

This thesis uses a range of recent television and film texts to interrogate postfeminist media formations of masculinity. In particular, this work focuses on increasingly prevalent media narratives that are about producing men as suitable romantic partners for postfeminist women. Arguing that existing literature on postfeminism ignores or trivialises the issue of masculinity, this thesis addresses new cultural formations of masculinity that are linked not only to postfeminist discourse, but also related cultural and economic shifts such as post-industrialisation and the rise of neo-liberal cultural politics. Analysing texts from the mid-1990s to 2012, the work argues that such representations are rife with tensions and contradictions. They represent in part an ungendering of previously feminine arenas (such as the makeover, and the home) yet are also marked by a discourse that requires the reassertion of sexual difference and the maintenance of heteronormativity. As such, the urge towards coupling becomes central to these formations, across the range of texts discussed within this thesis. The thesis argues that postfeminist media representations of masculinity are often characterised by an interplay between dominant, residual and emergent formations. In the makeover show, the mission is to improve a man to satisfy his existing partner (perhaps as preparation for a proposal) or to ready him for entry into the dating market. In the lifestyle show, the advice given on how to manage domestic labour is committed to encouraging harmony between the heterosexual couple. The homebuilding sitcom focuses on the challenges of the transition between youth and the establishment of a family unit: finding the right partner, settling down, building a home, having children. The Hollywood romantic comedy, even in its recent, male-centred incarnations, still presents successful coupling as integral, essential, and inevitable, even if its attitude to the union is sometimes ambivalent. In all of these television and film genres, there is a considerable focus on how men must change in order to become, and stay, "marriageable". This emphasis on coupling is paired with images of singledom as failure, a pathologisation which, this thesis argues, is rapidly becoming ungendered. The example texts' reinforcement of compulsory heterosexuality, their focus on a particular 'life-stage' (the early stages of independent living) and the increased focus on men's private lives means that domestic space and the home become key sites in which these tensions and battles are played out. This thesis examines the central role of the home, its decor, arrangement and labour, as both one of the major negotiations of coupling and as an aesthetic strategy for representing different formations of masculinity and postfeminist dilemmas of masculinity within this group of texts.

The thesis explores the construction of gender in the Hollywood Teen Movie, often perceived as 'the odious norm' of Hollywood cinema with little to warrant serious analysis.[1] Although Timothy Shary's work has done much to promote the genre as an area of academic enquiry, there have been few sustained textual analyses of the Teen Movie. Through close textual analysis of seven representative case studies, this thesis stages an encounter between Butler's work on gender and the Teen Movie. Butler’s theorisation of performativity denaturalises and deconstructs the assumption of heteronormativity, enabling a detailed analysis of the genre's 'sexual coming-of-age narrative'.[2] Further, the textual analyses complicate and augment aspects of her theories. Following a review of the literature on the Teen Movie, and an examination of Butler's oeuvre, the thesis is divided into three sections. Firstly, the prom is explored as a typical narrative conclusion to the School Film. Secondly, the following chapter analyses star performance and film acting in the youth delinquency film. The final chapter examines the genre’s construction of the past in the "nostalgic" teen movie. The original contribution to knowledge is twofold: the thesis significantly expands existing work on the Teen Movie, and uses the depth and range of specific examples from the case studies to complicate Butler's work. Textual analysis of each film’s construction of heteronormativity demonstrates that this normative and mainstream genre offers a more complex and critical presentation of heterosexual norms than previously appreciated. The thesis rethinks the norm by demonstrating the complexity of normative culture, which demonstrates a range of examples that call for a reconsideration of Butler's theorisation of gender norms.

Sexual health behaviour and the choices people make are influenced by whole range of factors including social grouping, education, peer pressure and access to services/information. Report on the health of the public in Britain have shown that sexual ill health is unequally distributed across society (Department of Health 2001; Royal College of Nursing 2001). people from socially disadvantaged and marginalised groups experience the highest levels of sexually related illness. Quantitative studies form the main pool of information available in relation to sexual health and risk. They have demonstrated that in some areas of the country the infection rates for STI's are up to twelve times higher in men from black Caribbean communities (Fenton, Johnson et al. 1997; Lacey, Merrick et al. 1997; Low, Daker-White et al. 1997). At present there is very little published qualitative information on the factors affecting sexual health decisions, especially in relation to black Caribbean communities. The research study focuses on black Caribbean men. A qualitative approach is used to identify and explore the key factors influencing the health decisions and risk activities of black Caribbean men in relation to sexual health. Social construction theory provides the theoretical underpinning for this study alongside aspects of feminism, criticalist and ethnicities based approaches. The stereotype of black Caribbean men as sexually insatiable and irresponsible emerged as a key feature of the social scripts associated with their sexual behaviour. The themes 'The nature of the stereotype', 'Living with the stereotype' and 'Hearing the silences' discussed in the data chapters explore the impact of the stereotype on the sexual health decisions of black Caribbean men. The experiences highlighted through the themes expose the importance of the political, social and personal context associated with specific sexual scripts on the sexual health decisions of black Caribbean men. Of key importance in these socially determined scripts are the screaming silences contained within them. The findings are reviewed in the light of current sexual health policies to consider how sexual health services and professionals can best provide for the sexual health needs of black Caribbean men. The thesis adds to current knowledge in sexual health and ethnicities in concluding that the sexual health decisions of black Caribbean men take pace in the context of the real or imagined expectations that society has of them. Individuals sexual decisions therefore occur in light of shared and personal appraisal of socially determined relevant issues. This forms the context in which sexual scripts are given meaning and sexual decisions take place. The study compliments the established pool of quantitative data available linking issues of sexual health and ethnicity in Britain. The findings presented within the thesis reveal a range of issues to initiate further qualitative research in the area and provides a lead for British based thinking on adult sexual health decisions and ethnicity.