131: Families as a Site of Oppression and Resistance

Collection

Fatimah Turner; Lekie Dwanyen; Tracey LaPierre; Samuel Allen; Megan Haselschwerdt

2:30 PM
3:45 PM
Location
Virtual
Session #
131
Session Type
Interactive Paper Session
Session Focus
  • Research
Organized By
  • Feminism & Family Studies
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About the Session

Concurrent Sessions 3 - (NBCC CE Credit: #1 hr and Conference Attendance Credit: #1 hr)

131-01: Using Autoethnography to Explore Relationships Between Adult Children and Their Parents in an IPV Context
Fatimah Turner, Maya Autret, Kencia Mele, Lyndal Khaw, Brad van Eeden-Moorefield

Summary
This paper explores the nature of the relationships between adult children who grew up in an IPV context and their parents. Three PhD students use autoethnographic method and reflexive narrative analysis to examine their personal experiences. An important preliminary finding entails deteriorated relationships with their mothers and improved relationships with their fathers. Further themes are also explored.

Objectives
-- Explore how relationships, evolve between adult children and their parents, from childhood to the present, in the IPV context.
-- Identify themes that emerge across multiple experiences, which can be helpful for researchers and practitioners working with families in an IPV context.
-- Examine how methodology enables deeper exploration of complex family processes in the IPV context.

Subject Codes: intimate partner violence (IPV), relationship quality, family relations
Population Codes: Family Scientists, marriage and family therapists/clinicians, Family Life Education
Method and Approach Codes: ethnography, thematic analysis, Family Science

131-02: Gender, Family, and Social Change: Case Study of Liberian Mothers and Peace Activists
Lekie Dwanyen

Summary
In the face of gender-based human rights violations, hundreds of Liberian women formed a collective that ended 14 years of civil war in their country in 2003. This case study employs ethnographic principles to understand how Liberian women collaborated to advance national peace and ultimately protect the wellbeing of their children and families, using strategies that uniquely engaged culture and motherhood in context. Through repeated interviews with three Liberian peace activists and review of documents in an ethnographic record, this study explores how family values, roles, and relationships shaped activists' political resistance. In line with the conference theme, this study expands the notion of families as a social groups impacted by sociopolitical change, to social contributors to political change.

Objectives
-- Identify how elements of family life intersect with gender and social movements to position families as agents contributing to social change
-- Understand case study examples of contextually informed uses of culture and motherhood to end 14 years of civil war
-- Disentangle the politics of care as it concerns gendered demands of attending to proximal family needs and national-level peace for a warring nation

Subject Codes: human rights, gender, motherhood
Population Codes: African
Method and Approach Codes: case study

131-04: Hegemonic Ideologies of Motherhood and Reproductive Decision Making Among Women With Disabilities
Tracey LaPierre, Mary Zimmerman, Jean Hall

Summary
This study integrates feminist and disability scholarship on motherhood. Drawing on focus group data from 22 women with varied disabilities, our study provides valuable insight into the ways in which women with disabilities are both empowered and oppressed by sexist and ablest power structures embedded in hegemonic ideologies of motherhood. Reproductive decisions emerged within the social context of participant's own personal experiences, but were shaped by hegemonic ideologies of motherhood and mediated by significant others, health care authorities, and material resources. Our findings draw attention back to the structural level and demonstrate how ideologies of motherhood are complicit in stratified reproduction' by empowering some women to reproduce and disempowering others. This finding broadens our understanding of fertility barriers to include oppressive hegemonic ideologies of motherhood.

Objectives
-- To analyze the ways in which women with disabilities engage with hegemonic ideologies of motherhood in their reproductive decision making using an intersectional framework.
-- To illuminate four sites of struggle where women with disabilities experience empowerment or oppression in relation to hegemonic ideologies of motherhood: mandated motherhood, the significance of motherhood, scientific motherhood and medical gatekeepers, and the performance of motherhood.
-- To explain how ideologies of motherhood are complicit in stratified reproduction' by empowering some women to reproduce and disempowering others.

Subject Codes: motherhood, disabilities, decision making
Population Codes: differently abled, physical (dis)ability, emotional (dis)ability
Method and Approach Codes: qualitative methodology, content analysis


131-05: Redoing Gender, Redoing Family: A Qualitative Examination of Parents Negotiating Their  Child's Nonbinary Gender Identity
Samuel H. Allen (Winner of the 2019 Jessie Bernard Outstanding Research Proposal From a Feminist Perspective)

Facilitator: Megan Haselschwertz

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