Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 3a
Connections, relationships and realities
Wednesday 8 September, 11.30 - 1pm
'Getting the story right: Lesbian love and troublesome sperm donors' - Dr Petra Nordqvist (University of Manchester)
This paper investigates narrative analysis as a way of researching definitions of reality and real life in the context of lesbian love, self-arranged donor conception and sperm donors. Lesbian self-arranged conception requires lesbian couples and sperm donors to engage in sexual and intimate practices (such as masturbation and insemination), but without there being a sexual and intimate relationship between couples and donors. The practices stand in sharp relief to conventional understandings of conception, and as a consequence issues to do with intimacy, sexuality, lesbianism and heterosexuality have to be carefully managed if the sexual and intimate boundaries and definitions implicit to these arrangements, according to lesbian couples, are to be upheld. Drawing on a qualitative interview study of 25 lesbian couples’ experiences of donor conception in England and Wales, I explore narrative analysis as a way of tracing battles over reality and intimate and sexual boundaries in accounts, and also how narrative analysis offers a way of researching multilayered levels of reality in which these couples engage as they conceive together. I argue that lesbian couples’ techniques of story telling play an important part in normalising lesbian donor conception and calling into question ‘troublesome’ sperm donors, and that the struggle over defining reality may not only take place between couples and donors, but also between the couple and the interviewer in the qualitative interview situation.
'Family lives and relational living: taking account of otherness' - Dr Jacqui Gabb (Open University)
In this paper I want to move towards a different framework for thinking about intimacy, relationships and the connections between things – oriented around a feminist appreciation of otherness and affect. Keeping a keen eye on the materiality of difference, I build on ideas of relationality and connectedness to develop an ‘ethic of otherness’, examining how everyday inter-actions create ‘otherness-in-relation’. To illustrate my argument I focus on three examples: the role and value of human-animal relations in family living; intimacy in parent–child relationships; human connections to other things – plants, animals and the world around us. Through these examples I examine experience that spans across generational, species and naturalcultural boundaries, extending ideas on human-object relations. Steering clear of epiphanies and grand realizations that typically shape social theorising on the impact and import of different forms of relationship, I reorient the research gaze onto mundane practices of relational living. Developing an interdisciplinary approach that draws on anecdotal theorizing, I use ‘scraps’ of lived experience to help me articulate, understand and describe intimate relationships. I focus on miniscule moments that have the capacity to disrupt our ways of thinking, providing new and dynamic conceptual points of departure. In looking between the theoretical cracks for illuminating fragments I want to advance a methodological approach that retains the vitality of lived lives. In so doing I aim to produce a quieter, slow and uncertain approach that tries to literarily reflect the multiplicities, fractures and connections that comprise relational living.
'Relating to Bart Simpson: interactions with and about fictional characters' - Katherine Davies (University of Manchester)
Young people’s interactions and relationships to/with fictional characters can pervade their everyday lives and relationships in significant ways. Drawing on focus group interactions about a clip from the popular cartoon series The Simpsons, I analyse the various ways young people related to the characters from the cartoon and discuss how this enriched my research project investigating the construction of the relational school self.
I look at young people’s intimacy with the characters, arguing that fictional characters in a long running series such as The Simpsons can become known others with detailed biographies – perhaps acquaintances or even friends. I also identify how young people empathised with the characters, tapping into emotional aspects of the school self that can be risky to narrate in other contexts and relating the characters and plots to living breathing others as well as themselves in different and sometimes rather limited ways. The Simpsons vignette encouraged dialogue and discussions on a highly moral level, in direct contrast to the embedded, situated relational practices discussed in other contexts (such as individual interviews). The paper concludes with a discussion of how relationships with and about fictional characters helped me to understand young people's lived, emotional, theoretical and moral understandings of how the school self works relationally.
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