Health discourse, sexual slang and ideological contradictions among Mozambican youth: implications for method

Abstract

Despite the urgency of improving an understanding of sexual cultures in the face of a globally devastating HIV epidemic, methodological reflection and innovation has been conspicuously absent from qualitative research in recent years. Findings from fieldwork on condom use among young people in Mozambique confirm the need to remain alert to the ideological and linguistic bias of applied methods. Interviewing young people about their sexuality using a conventional health discourse resulted in incorrect or socially acceptable answers rather than accurate information about their sexual behaviour. Young people's resistance to enquiry, the paper argues, is due to ideological contradictions between their sexual culture and slang, on the one hand, and Western health discourses associated with colonial and post-colonial opposition to traditional culture and languages, on the other. Mixing colloquial Portuguese and changana sexual slang is constructed around ideas of safedeza and pleasure, while dominant health discourses address sexuality as both 'risky' and 'dangerous'. In order to gain a deeper understanding of sexual cultures and to make HIV prevention efforts relevant to young people, it is suggested that researchers and policy makers approach respondents with a language that is sensitive to the local ideological and linguistic context.

Programa Geração Biz, Mozambique: how did this adolescent health initiative grow from a pilot to a national programme, and what did it achieve?

“…While this study provides several interesting insights into the users of the clinics supported by PGB, it is not possible to determine if the positive indicators, such as high condom use and low STI prevalence, were due to intervention activities or due to self-selection of service users. Groes-Green conducted ethnographic fieldwork among youth in Maputo and published several papers that comment on the peer education and school-based components of PGB [ 34 , 35 ]. He observed gender equitable discussions of sex and sexuality among male and female students and teachers [ 35 ].…”

Would you say you had unprotected sex if …? Sexual health language in emails to a reproductive health website

“…There are important implications for clinical care: when a patient tells a provider that she has had unprotected intercourse or even “sex,” it is critical for the provider to solicit more information about what those phrases mean to the patient. There are also important implications for research on sexual risk behaviour (Quirk, Rhodes, and Stimson 1998, Groes-Green 2009). …”

“…The issue that health care providers must grapple with when serving patients of varying ages is not only that young peoples may have their own sub-cultural jargon for speaking about sexuality and reproductive health, but also that they represent a group of individuals who are at the point of initiation into new sexual practices, and therefore may lack the social and cultural knowledge and language for communicating about sexuality and reproductive health that others have already acquired. Thus correlations between language use and age, culture and ethnicity, or class background may fail to capture the processual nature of learning about sexuality and reproduction as well as the processes by which individuals learn how to describe such topics with language, whether to themselves, to friends, or to ‘experts’ or medical professionals (Anderson, Santelli, and Morrow 2006, Groes-Green 2009). …”

“It is challenging… oh, nobody likes it!”: a qualitative study exploring Mozambican adolescents and young adults’ experiences with contraception

“…Few studies have focused on how young Mozambicans perceive their sexual behaviour, the protective practices they adopt, [ 32 , 36 , 37 ], or how they act upon contraception. It is argued that several factors influence adolescent behaviour and their perception of risk.…”