26 research outputs found
Lesbian and bisexual women's human rights, sexual rights and sexual citizenship: negotiating sexual health in England.
Lesbian and bisexual women's sexual health is neglected in much Government policy and practice in England and Wales. This paper examines lesbian and bisexual women's negotiation of sexual health, drawing on findings from a small research project. Themes explored include invisibility and lack of information, influences on decision-making and sexual activities and experiences of services and barriers to sexual healthcare. Key issues of importance in this respect are homophobic and heterosexist social contexts. Drawing on understandings of lesbian, gay and bisexual human rights, sexual rights and sexual citizenship, it is argued that these are useful lenses through which to examine and address lesbian and bisexual women's sexual health and related inequalities
Arbitrating abortion: sex-selection and care work among abortion providers in England
The UKâs on-going sex-selective abortion (SSA) controversy remains a major obstacle to the liberalization of national abortion governance, and is an issue broadly attributed to a âculturalâ preference for sons among South Asian women. We conceptualize how healthcare professionals âarbitrateâ requests for SSA by exploring the tension between its legal status and how requests are encountered by abortion providers. SSA is framed in this article as a legitimate care service that can support providers to meet the diverse reproductive health needs of women to the full extent of the law
Embodied Subjects and Fragmented Objects: Womenâs Bodies, Assisted Reproduction Technologies and the Right to Self-Determination
âRepeal the 8thâ in a Transnational Context: The Potential of SRHRs for Advancing Abortion Access in El Salvador
This article undertakes a discursive feminist reading of citizenship and human rights to understand, through the cases of Ireland and El Salvador, domestic abortion rights movements as part of a transnational womenâs rights movement. While abortion has been partially decriminalised in Ireland, approximately 42 per cent of the worldâs women1 of reproductive age still live in a country where abortion is prohibited entirely or only permitted to save a womanâs life or health (Singh et al., 2018, p. 4). In El Salvador, abortion is illegal and those suspected of having the procedure are prosecuted. As in Ireland, since 2012/2013 numerous controversies have brought the issue to wider public attention and have further galvanised the feminist movement to campaign for reform. Feminist abortion rights campaigns in both countries have connected important sites of activism and contestation: civil society, national parliaments, regional human rights systems and the United Nations
Fear of a Black (and Working-Class) Planet: Young Women and the Racialization of Reproductive Politics
Blurring, moving and broken boundaries: Men's encounters with the pregnant body
This paper draws on the findings of a longitudinal ethnographic study of menâs transition to fatherhood, conducted in the United Kingdom (UK). It is concerned with their encounters with the pregnant and labouring body. Until relatively recently there has been surprisingly little work, either theoretical or empirical, on the experience of pregnant embodiment. Work in the last decade
has indicated that womenâs experience of âbeing-with childâ, their experience of living in and being a pregnant body, can be an ambivalent affair, as some find disconcerting the experience of simultaneously being self and yet Other. If women, who possess the embodied and therefore privileged knowledge of pregnancy, can feel ambivalence, perhaps the case for expectant men is more so. This paper draws on interviews with men making the transition to fatherhood and analyses their experiences of and relation to the pregnant and labouring body. The theoretical analysis of their empirical accounts explores in particular the blurring, moving and broken boundaries of the pregnant and labouring body and how these changing body boundaries can challenge the takenfor-granted assumption that bodies should always be contained, strong and firm. The implications of menâs encounters with this âdifferently boundedâ body are examined