title: Health ‘in queer street’: constituting sickness, sexualities and bodies in the spaces of lesbian health

authors: MacBride-Stewart, Sara

abstract: This thesis explores lesbian health. The appeal of this project is its attention to the constitutions, resistances, and reproductions involved in the construction of ‘lesbian health’. ‘Lesbian health’ provides the context for exploring the meanings of health, sickness, sexuality, and bodies. The analysis takes place in three stages. It begins with a review of gay-positive studies of lesbian health. Second, is a discourse analysis of constructions of ‘health’, ‘illness’, and ‘sexuality’. It concludes with a critical analysis of the fluid and leaky constitutions of gendered sexualities and bodies. 

I conduct a study with 17 self-identified lesbians, using open-ended interviews that cover a variety of topics in the areas of health practices and concerns. Feminist Foucauldian approaches inform the critical discourse analysis of the interviewee’s accounts. An examination of the co-constitution of discourses about ‘health’ and ‘sickness’ in relation to ‘lesbian’ sexualities reveals a binary relationship. That is, health for lesbians is constituted as overcoming the societal pressures and exclusions related to ‘being gay’, avoiding the implication that lesbian ‘health’ or ‘sickness’ may be inherent. I draw on Elizabeth Grosz's critical analysis of the corporeal as I examine lesbian bodies in the contexts of cervical screening and dental dams. In these health promotion contexts, ‘lesbian’ bodies are brought into being, but their presence is potentially threatening. Lesbian bodies are constituted, materially and discursively, as liminal, fluid, and abject. The consequence is that disclosure as ‘lesbian’ is self-regulated. Other consequences for cervical screening and safe sex promotion are explained by the leaky fluidity of bodies and places, which reinsert ‘lesbian’ into the hegemonic space and simultaneously render ‘lesbian’ external to such space.
 
I suggest that health practices, concerns, and promotion are ‘in queer street’, literally troubled by the unsettling of hegemonic assumptions. Focusing on the lived, sexed body in health research, using discursive and critical theoretical tools, may offer one more way of challenging assumptions about sexuality and gender, and raise questions in the practice and analysis of health that address diversity and difference.

text: Health ‘in queer street’: constituting sickness, sexualities and bodies in the spaces of lesbian health This thesis explores lesbian health. The appeal of this project is its attention to the constitutions, resistances, and reproductions involved in the construction of ‘lesbian health’. ‘Lesbian health’ provides the context for exploring the meanings of health, sickness, sexuality, and bodies. The analysis takes place in three stages. It begins with a review of gay-positive studies of lesbian health. Second, is a discourse analysis of constructions of ‘health’, ‘illness’, and ‘sexuality’. It concludes with a critical analysis of the fluid and leaky constitutions of gendered sexualities and bodies. 

I conduct a study with 17 self-identified lesbians, using open-ended interviews that cover a variety of topics in the areas of health practices and concerns. Feminist Foucauldian approaches inform the critical discourse analysis of the interviewee’s accounts. An examination of the co-constitution of discourses about ‘health’ and ‘sickness’ in relation to ‘lesbian’ sexualities reveals a binary relationship. That is, health for lesbians is constituted as overcoming the societal pressures and exclusions related to ‘being gay’, avoiding the implication that lesbian ‘health’ or ‘sickness’ may be inherent. I draw on Elizabeth Grosz's critical analysis of the corporeal as I examine lesbian bodies in the contexts of cervical screening and dental dams. In these health promotion contexts, ‘lesbian’ bodies are brought into being, but their presence is potentially threatening. Lesbian bodies are constituted, materially and discursively, as liminal, fluid, and abject. The consequence is that disclosure as ‘lesbian’ is self-regulated. Other consequences for cervical screening and safe sex promotion are explained by the leaky fluidity of bodies and places, which reinsert ‘lesbian’ into the hegemonic space and simultaneously render ‘lesbian’ external to such space.
 
I suggest that health practices, concerns, and promotion are ‘in queer street’, literally troubled by the unsettling of hegemonic assumptions. Focusing on the lived, sexed body in health research, using discursive and critical theoretical tools, may offer one more way of challenging assumptions about sexuality and gender, and raise questions in the practice and analysis of health that address diversity and difference.

year: 2001

title: Life in the shadow of the media: Imaging street homelessness in London

authors: Hodgetts, Darrin

subjects: audience

abstract: Media images pervading everyday life often reproduce inequitable social relations that adversely affect the lives of vulnerable people. This article explores the influence of media representations of homelessness as a source of characterizations that are used by homeless people when representing themselves. To do this, it draws on life narrative interviews, photographic exercises and phogo-based discussions with 12 single rough sleepers from London. It documents how participants both reproduce common media storylines foregrounding their differences from housed people and emphasizes aspects of their lives that do not feature in media portrayals, but which invoke their `normality'.

text: Life in the shadow of the media: Imaging street homelessness in London Media images pervading everyday life often reproduce inequitable social relations that adversely affect the lives of vulnerable people. This article explores the influence of media representations of homelessness as a source of characterizations that are used by homeless people when representing themselves. To do this, it draws on life narrative interviews, photographic exercises and phogo-based discussions with 12 single rough sleepers from London. It documents how participants both reproduce common media storylines foregrounding their differences from housed people and emphasizes aspects of their lives that do not feature in media portrayals, but which invoke their `normality'.

year: 2006

title: Paradoxical mobilities: sharemilking with Te Raparahi Lands Trust (Wāotū)

authors: Hutcheson, Gail Yvonne

subjects: mobilities

abstract: Mobilities are important for capturing some of the combined movements of people, animals and objects in all of their complex relational dynamics. Sharemilking involves a cascade of mobilities: from the modest journies of the everyday to the upheaval of complete farm moves. Here we examine how sharemilkers are enabled and constrained in different ways by being mobile and landless, but also included are hopeful geographies. The sharemilker's mobile relationship to land, rather than ownership of it, works well with indigenous ideas of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) that is a central feature of multiply owned Māori land trust (Te Raparahi). Combining sharemilker mobility with te Raparahi, and importantly Ngāti Hūri historical and contemporary connections to Te Wāotū in South Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand, reveals paradoxical mobilities of place.

text: Paradoxical mobilities: sharemilking with Te Raparahi Lands Trust (Wāotū) Mobilities are important for capturing some of the combined movements of people, animals and objects in all of their complex relational dynamics. Sharemilking involves a cascade of mobilities: from the modest journies of the everyday to the upheaval of complete farm moves. Here we examine how sharemilkers are enabled and constrained in different ways by being mobile and landless, but also included are hopeful geographies. The sharemilker's mobile relationship to land, rather than ownership of it, works well with indigenous ideas of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) that is a central feature of multiply owned Māori land trust (Te Raparahi). Combining sharemilker mobility with te Raparahi, and importantly Ngāti Hūri historical and contemporary connections to Te Wāotū in South Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand, reveals paradoxical mobilities of place.

year: 2017