Performing Coolness: Smoking Refusal and Adolescent Identities

The implications of smoking refusal for personal identity style were studied through conversations in six small focus groups or dyads of 13- and 14-year-old non-smokers from an urban New Zealand secondary school. The approach to analyzing their talk was informed by notions of `performativity' and `social space' to focus on the connections between identity and social relations. Smoking emerged as a key signifier of power and status. It was salient at both top and bottom ends of the social hierarchy depending upon the competence displayed in smoking as part of a larger ensemble of personal deportment and behavior. Being a non-smoker therefore inevitably carried connotations of being `average' or `in the middle', presenting non-smoking adolescents with the problem of accrediting themselves against superior `smoker cool' groups. A discourse analytic approach was used to examine the resources and strategies participants brought to bear on this `problem', which was then seen to be solved differently by boys and girls. Boys could establish alternatives to `smoker cool' through physical activity, girls had little recourse but to accept their inferior status. The implications of this for health education and promotion are discusse

Patrons of the sex industry: perceptions of risk

This paper reports on an in-depth study of how men who buy sex construe risk in relation to their sexual activities. Twenty men were contacted in a massage parlour, four more through sex workers or newspaper advertisements. In-depth, face-to-face interviews were recorded. Two main discourses were articulated by the men to 'manage' risk. Parlour clients articulated a discourse of the 'cordon sanitaire' which they defined in various way to encompass elements of both commercial and non-commercial sex. Most felt while they operated within this they ran only those risks inevitable in life. Outside the cordon were dangerous venues, especially the streets. A few felt either fatalistic or invulnerable about possibilities of risk even within this 'cordon sanitaire'. Street clients articulated a different discourse about risk, based on a strategy of discrimination between women

The Prostitution Reform Act (2003) and Social Work in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Social work practice with sex workers in New Zealand occurs within a context of decriminalization since the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act (PRA) in 2003. This article presents the findings of a qualitative study focused on social workers’ perceptions of sex work/ers, the PRA, and its influence on practice with individuals in the sex industry. The findings suggest that social workers hold nuanced perspectives on sex work. While decriminalization creates opportunities that support social work practice with sex workers, challenges to antioppressive, critical social work remain, even within the context of decriminalization