Gay men as parents: Analysing resistant talk in South African mainstream media accounts of queer families

Abstract

There is increasing visibility of dissident sexualities and genders in media debates about families, including resistant discourses that challenge delegitimising claims about queer families. There remains, however, a lack of research that assesses the ways in which discourses seeking to defend queer parenthood function to challenge or, at times, reinforce hetero-gendered norms. Families formed by gay men have generally received less attention, both in the media as well as academic scholarship. In this paper, we explore resistant discourses deployed in mainstream print media, attending particularly to news reports about queer fathers and their children. Through a critical thematic analysis of South African newspapers, informed by feminist discursive psychology, we identify four themes in resistant ways of talking: de-gendering parenthood, normalising queer parents, valorising queer parenting, and challenging the heteronormative gold standard. We conclude with the political implications of such resistant talk, as part of a project of transforming restrictive hetero-gendered norms.

Smartphones, youth and moral panics: Exploring print and online media narratives in India

“…Following ECA, we drew from the literature review and research question to compile a list of primary keywords (Table 1). These keywords were searched for using the electronic databases LexisNexis and Google News which are both comprehensive archives for print and online news articles (for comparable methods see Lynch & Morrison, 2016; Moghimi & Wiktorowicz, 2019). We used search queries with the format: “India*” AND “smartphone*” AND “youth*”.…”

Performing the self: Performativity and discursive psychology.

“…In fact, Morison and Macleod's (2013a, 2013b analyses implicated class, racial, and ethnic positionings in various constructions of parenthood. Similarly, analyses of queer parenthood also emphasize positioning in relation to multiple social signifiers, such as the feminist discursive psychology study of gay parenthood by Lynch and Morison (2016), which showed how parenthood is constructed not only according to hetero-gendered norms but is also "deeply raced and classed" (p. 4). There is, therefore, certainly room to foreground intersectionality more explicitly, as some have already done (e.g., Staunaes, 2003).…”