Programme full

Wednesday 15 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 2
and how such online presence supports narrative identities; women’s deployment of the ‘anecdote’, both personal and
highly worked, within blogs on mothering and feeding families, to explore problematic aspects of family lives; and
mothers’ negotiation of parenting through the contested, co-constructed narratives of the Mumsnet web forum. The
panel examines how these new narrative intimacy technologies produce, in the contemporary socioeconomic context,
‘transitional’ spaces, less of regression or progress, more of uncertainty and collectivity.
This panel is linked with another which addresses new diagnostic, pharmaceutical and digital technologies now being
deployed to control the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.
Looking into the Moments of Resistance in Sexual Narratives
Esin, C.
(University of East London)
For many women in various cultural contexts, telling sexual stories is a way in which they form as subjects through
their negotiations with patriarchal power regimes, which shape women's sexuality. This paper is based on my
research in which I listened to sexual narratives of educated young women in Turkey. Having drawn on Foucault’s
conceptualisation of bio-power and disciplinary practices, my analysis in this research focuses on the complexity of
power relations surrounding women’s sexuality in modern Turkey. The analysis explores the multiple interconnections
between micro stories of sexuality and macro narratives of Turkish modernisation on gender and sexuality, following a
Foucaldian approach to narratives as an analytical path.
The analysis draws on in-depth interviews which I conducted with 18 young women with university education in
Ankara, Turkey. The participants were aged between 18 and 25, with varying middle class background. Having
adopted a narrative-feminist approach to interviewing, I asked participants to tell me about their conversations with
friends and families about sexuality, about their relationships with partners/spouses, following an introduction of
themselves.
In the interviews, the young women position themselves as subjects simultaneously escaping from and trapped within
the regulations surrounding their sexuality while constructing their individual stories. In this paper, I will discuss
narrative moments, which constitute a discursive space for the research participants-storytellers to negotiate
contradictory and precarious ethical positions regarding their sexuality. By telling their sexual stories, the research
participants constitute their technologies of resistance, and craft new forms of subjectivity.
Negotiating Parenting Identities through the Practice of Using a Popular Online Parenting Forum
Winter, J.
(Institute of Education, University of London)
Online social networks and mobile technologies continue to proliferate and embed themselves in the everyday
practices of families. Among these, parenting websites are an increasingly popular resource. My PhD project
examines how canonical narratives of ‘parenting’ operate at a macro, societal level through these parent websites and
how they are taken up (or rejected) and expressed at the micro level - in particular the ways in which popular online
spaces for parents mediate personal narratives of mothering. I have analysed narratives collected via a number of
methods and from a variety of perspectives: Multimodal discourse analysis of popular parenting website homepages;
online ethnography; interviews with website managers; online and face-to-face interviews with forum users.
In this paper I will explore the ways in which users of the popular online parenting website Mumsnet take up and / or
reject identities in narratives constructed through asynchronous email interviews and synchronous face-to-face
interviews. The main question the paper addresses concerns the ways in which women’s narratives of becoming
mothers and their identities as mothers are negotiated through the practice of using the Mumsnet online forum.
Whose Narrative is it Anyway? Online Activism and Sexual Politics in Morocco
Lounasmaa, A.
(University of East London)
Moroccan women’s NGOs are spreading their campaigns on sexual politics online. Using new media helps reach
younger constituencies. It also allows groups to circumvent the bureaucratic processes required for NGO set-up. More
than a tool in activism, new media is an important demarcation of the type of modernity groups represent.
This paper discusses online materials of two Moroccan women’s groups. The first one, Association Démocratique des
Femmes du Maroc, is an NGO that uses the internet to publicise its activities and construct an identity as a modernist,
democratic and accessible organisation. The second one, Women Shoufouch, was started as a Facebook group by
Casablanca-based students in 2011 and only exists as an online forum. The narrative identities of these groups rely
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Glasgow Caledonian University